Doing nothing for a living is not as easy as it looks. That was the militant message from Italy yesterday where
artists’ nude models climbed back into their clothes and went on strike for better pay and conditions.
The protesters — male and
female — said that they wanted “professional recognition” and full-time contracts. Only 50 of about 300
models at Italian
art schools are on fixed annual contracts, with the rest hired by the hour.
Antonella Migliorini, 42, said that it was “a tough, cold
job”
posing in the nude, often for eight hours a day. “We are not
porn stars,” she said. “If you’re lucky enough to have a full-time
job you might make 25 an hour.
However, there will always be people willing to do it, despite the poor pay. “It can be rewarding to be immortalised as great
art,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times’s chief
art critic, who
modelled for Eduardo Paolozzi and Euan Uglow. “But it can also be extremely physically demanding. Rodin used to twist his
models into painful positions and make them stay like that for hours. Lucian Freud demands that you turn up punctually day after day. It can take years and you can’t walk out halfway through.”
The professional life
model emerged with the rise of formal
art schools and
photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. The hiring of
artists’ models has a long tradition in Rome, where it caught the eye of Charles Dickens in his travel book Pictures from Italy. It took a
nude protest in the 1970s to secure full-time contracts.
Yesterday the
models kept their clothes on for a protest at a ceremony inaugurating the academic year at La Sapienza, Rome’s main university. The main speaker at the ceremony was supposed to be the Pope, but the Vatican cancelled his visit because of alarm over student protests against his conservative views on science and ethics. About 30
models posed at the university entrance in imitation of
famous art works, including Botticelli’s Venus, Degas’s ballerinas and Rodin’s The Thinker.
Rossella Lamina, a
spokeswoman for the trades union backing the protest, said that more than 60
art teachers in Rome, Florence, Venice, Carrara, Turin and Reggio Calabria had signed the life
models’ appeal.
Ivo Bomba, a professor at the Rome Academy of
Fine Arts, said that although
art schools had recently been given university status they lacked the “financial clout” of universities and sometimes had to choose between hiring
life models and paying for equipment and supplies. Ms Migliorini, from Florence, said that being a
life model required “imagination and physical resistance”. But
art schools “do not show us much consideration — our privacy is violated. Once a group of about 30 Japanese tourists turned up and started taking
photographs. I had to cover myself up quickly.” She said: “You have to be examined by a commission of teachers who are supposed to judge what sort of person you are. In the end though they usually pick the
pretty ones.”
Asked if there was an age limit, she said that “most
models are fairly
young — but that’s a big mistake, since students have to learn how to draw the elderly human
body as well as Venuses”. Ms Migliorini said that she was taking a degree in the history of theatre as a fallback.
Nando Dalla Chiesa, an education ministry official, said he had agreed to meet the protesters. “We need to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
Sketchy pasts
— The writer Quentin Crisp spent the war years as an
artist’s model at Derby
School of Art. He described the
job in his 1968 autobiography as “like being a civil servant, except that you are
naked”
— Cherie Blair sat for the painter Euan Uglow while she was a trainee barrister in her mid-twenties. When she and her husband moved into public life, Uglow judiciously decided to avoid
exhibiting Striding
Nude, Blue Dress and it reappeared only in 2006, six years after the
artist’s death. Her profile is distinguishable but the painting remains unfinished because Mrs Blair cut the sittings short to visit the United States
— Kate Moss was depicted reclining
naked on a bed in Lucien Freud’s Naked Portrait 2002, painted while she was
pregnant. The sitting was arranged after the
model revealed in an interview that
posing for Freud was one of her few remaining ambitions
— A retired art teacher was
shocked in 2003 when she found a sketch she had made decades earlier and realised it was Sean Connery, aged 22 and in a loincloth. “When he
modelled there were always lots of
girls in the
classes,” she said.
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