Is Mary Beard right to say classical nudes are ‘soft porn for the elite’?

The academic is not the first to suggest that nudes in art were about titillation as much as aesthetics – but is there a difference between nakedness and nudity?Mary Beard has revealed in an interview with the Radio Times that she has concerns that female nudes in western art are just “soft porn for the elite, dressed up in a classical guise”. Beard, who is promoting her BBC show The Shock of the Nude, will know this is no revolutionary proposition.John Berger’s book Ways