I had long noticed that there was an imbalance in artistic representation of the naked human body in Modern Western Culture.  Representations of the human nude form died out after the Christian domination of Western Culture occurred in the fourth century.  They were not resurrected for almost a thousand years but made a splendid come-back during the Renaissance.  And originally there was equanimity in representations of male and female nudes.

With the rise of the Middle Class and the introduction of the masses to the world of artistic expression, the phenomenon of Victorian moral values accompanied the popularization of "art" in the nineteenth century.  By 1870 there were practically no representations of male nudity.  Females continued to be represented nude but these in the English-speaking world were increasingly associated with female prostitution.

The social stigmatization of representations of the naked human body deepened as the Twentieth Century arrived and in 1930 American Federal laws first mentioned obscene and immoral literature and photography.  States passed laws forbidding pornography and sexually explicit literature and representations from the 1960's.

In the 1980's American courts began striking down laws forbidding publication and ownership of materials which had been defined as pornographic.  As sexual mores and laws began to allow for greater decriminalization of extra-marital sexual relations, fewer and fewer depictions of nudity were deemed illegal or socially unacceptable.

As I entered a period in my life in which I expressed an appreciation of art displaying the male form in its natural form, I noticed that there was a dearth of depictions which mimicked the expressions of male nudity in the Classical World and the Renaissance.  For years I did nothing about that until I began dealing art on the web in 2003.  In addition to buying and selling such art pieces both two and three dimensional, I thought it might be helpful to educate the public about the history of the depiction of the male nude.  Thus was this site born.

I hope that the public will gain a greater appreciation for the depiction of the male nude through their experience on this site.  I hope that they will realize that man is indeed the measure of all things and that the human form as Nature made it is an expression of divinity.  I hope that they will see what the Bard meant when he wrote,

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals."