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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: An Informal History of the Male Nude

The Essay: An Informal History of the Male Nude: Episode 4: Matthew Sweet

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Factual: History

An Informal History of the Male Nude

Episode 4

Episode 4: Matthew Sweet

Matthew Sweet

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Matthew Sweet reflects on the male nude in Renaissance and Victorian art.

Writer and broadcaster Matthew Sweet reflects on the male nude in Renaissance and Victorian art.

One of the weighty and apparently immovable pieces of our mental furniture is the notion that Queen Victoria was a prude. Another is that the Italian Renaissance was a sunny dream where man was always the unapologetic measure of all things. In the fourth part of Men Only: An informal History of the Male Nude, the author and broadcaster, Matthew Sweet, confounds both of these notions. He focusses on a cultural exchange between Queen Victoria and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II as well as examining a sixteen inch fig leaf, penectomies and Crystal Palace. Stay tuned!

Producer: Zahid Warley

First broadcast in February 2012.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series of essays exploring the meaning of the male nude in the visual arts

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An Informal History of the Male Nude

Episode 4: Matthew Sweet

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