History's Most Erotic Art Works

Gustave Courbet "L'Origine du monde" (The Origin of the World) 1866 

Need I say more!

Jules Joseph Lefebvre "La Cigale" 1872

Despite winning the Prix de Rome in 1861 and exhibiting 72 portraits in the Paris Salon between 1855 and 1898, Jules Joseph Lefebvre is a second-tier artist. Still, the French figure painter, theorist, and educator had a proclivity for painting beautiful naked women. La Cigale resides in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. While the woman’s smooth, milky white skin and idealized proportions (as well as her Barbie doll lack of vagina) are in keeping with the classical figure painting trends of the day, the expression on her face isn’t. Call it a sexualized pout. Call it the look of the girl-next-door playing shy. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a coy, contemporary, Lolita-like expression that not only and heightens the sexual charge of the painting, but drives men crazy.

Francisco de Goya "La Maja Desnuda" (The Nude Maja) 1797

This painting will go down in history as "the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art", thought to be at least one of the first explicit depictions of female pubic hair. At the time of its creation, the Catholic Church banned the display of artistic nudes, so Goya's nude woman and its more modest counterpart, "The Clothed Maja," were never exhibited publicly during the artist's lifetime.

The Venus of Willendorf made between 24,000 and 22,000 BC

Egon Schiele "Woman With Black Stockings" 1913
Egon Schiele, Austria’s most famous artist provocateur, left behind a treasure trove of erotic art. Influenced by Klimt and Mahler, Schiele led the second generation of Viennese modernists, and his eroticized, animalistic representation of the human body resulted in some of the most liberating artworks of the 20th century. There’s a dirty-minded frankness to Schiele’s nudes and semi-nudes, and looking at his works, viewers have the uneasy feeling they’re discovering secrets and trespassing on private lives. Combining high art and sexuality, Egon Schiele viewed the erotic as a heroic subject. In 1912, the artist was accused of the abduction and sexual abuse of a minor; the charge was dropped, but Schiele’s reputation as being morally depraved stuck. “I’m going to be unforgettable,” said a young Schiele, and indeed his drawings and paintings of women, with their twisted limbs and provocative poses, remain vital and unforgettable today.

Hieronymus Bosch "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Ok, so you may associate "The Garden of Earthly Delights" with its array of terrifying, otherworldly creatures, but the painting has its fair share of sensual details. Dating from between 1490 and 1510, the work plays host to a whole carnival of sins, including the acts in the image above, in which nude men and women are seen frolicking with each other, horses, birds, mermaids, plants... you name it. Writer Laurinda S. Dixon described it as teeming with "a certain adolescent sexual curiosity."

Balthus "The Guitar Player" 1934

At its debut in 1934, The Guitar Player was show for 15 days, covered, in the back room of a gallery. In 1977, the painting appeared for a month at Pierre Matisse’s 57th Street gallery, and disappeared again. The Guitar Player wasn’t even shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2013 show: Balthus: Cats and Girls. Paintings of young girls have a tendency to shock and scandalize, therefore a work of art portraying an older woman erotically positioning a young girl like a guitar is the type of painting banished for eternity to Pandora’s box. Is it a surrealist work, a practical joke, or a commentary on puberty and adolescence? Who knows? Balthus rejected art world conventions and believed his paintings should be seen and not read about. Nevertheless, The Guitar Player is one of the few paintings by a major artist that’s still considered taboo.

Paul Cezanne "Seven Bathers"

Cezanne is well known for his various images of nude bathers, many of whom were women. "Seven bathers," however, portrays the figures of nude men -- though some are rather androgynously rendered. This scene of beautifully crafted male bodies is surely not the most erotic of subject matter, but the ways in which the artist toyed with classical representations of the body and the relationship between the viewer's gaze and nakedness makes for a borderline erotic aesthetic. It is assumed that Cezanne, due to a lack of available models, painted this from memory or imagination.

Titian "Venus of Urbino"

Mark Twain once called Titian's Venus "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses." With her unabashed nudity and strong gaze into the viewers' eyes, the nude female in this 1538 work of art is undeniably erotic.

Gustav Klimt "Frau bei der Selbstbefriedigung"

Klimt, the Austrian symbolist painter with a penchant for gilded canvases, brought you uber-famous works like "The Kiss" and his portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. While those images, not to mention the many nude figures that populate his other paintings, exude sensuality, there's nothing quite as erotic as "Frau bei der Selbstbefriedigung."

Pablo Picasso "La Douceur" (Erotic Scene) 1903

While the subject of this canvas is unique in his painted oeuvre, Picasso made dozens of explicitly sexual watercolors and drawings in his early years, especially between 1902 and 1903. As a young man he did not hide his promiscuity and he frequently depicted himself in the company of showgirls and prostitutes. This painting, however, remains unusual for its patent lack of erotic intensity, which is surprising coming from a young man of such extensive sexual experience. Even Picasso himself-for that is indeed the artist on the bed-does not look at the woman; instead he lifts his head with both hands to see himself reflected in a mirror across the room, adopting the pose of Goya's paintings of majas at the Museo del Prado, Madrid.
When shown a photograph of this painting in the 1960s, Picasso denied that he had made it and dismissed it as a "bad joke by friends." Recent research has shown, to the contrary, that it was one of two paintings purchased in Barcelona in 1912 by Picasso's dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, from Benet Soler, whose clothing shop Picasso frequented. Hence it is quite likely that Picasso had exchanged the painting for clothes about 1903. After it was sold in the 1923 Kahnweiler auction in Paris, it was purchased by the American publisher and collector Scofield Thayer for his collection of erotica.

Peter Paul Ruben “Copy of Michelangelo's Leda and the Swan"

For early 17th century audiences, it was likely more acceptable for a woman to be shown engaging in explicit acts with a bird than with an actual human being. Hence, "Leda and the Swan," based on the Greek myth in which Zeus takes the form of a swan and "seduces" a woman named Leda. Artists like Cesare da Sesto and Paul Cezanna also chose the crude story as inspiration for paintings.

Meret Oppenheim “Object” 1936

Meret Oppenheim’s “furry cup,” a surrealistic celebration of cunnilingus, is probably the most famous erotic artwork of the 20th century. Supposedly, the creation of the object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and Picasso in a Parisian cafe. Picasso complimented Oppenheim’s fur-covered bracelet, a conversation took place about how “anything” could be covered with fur, including the café’s cup and saucer. When Andre Brenton held a Surrealist exhibition devoted to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon, items traditionally associated with feminine decorum, covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle and turned them into a sexual pun, creating one of the most recognizable pieces of erotic art.

Correggio “Jupiter and Io” circa 1530

A naked woman is embraced by a blue mist in Correggio's fantastically explicit rendering of Greek myth. Apparently the god Jupiter was the original Velvet Fog. In the ancient story he takes this form to evade his wife's suspicions. Correggio, however, turns it into an erotic fantasy and literally imagines what it would look like if a mist enveloped a nude. She melts in delight as the cloud caresses her.

Pablo Picasso "Nude In A Black Armchair" 1932

The female nude has always inspired, enraptured, and enraged. From Titian and Correggio’s Greek fantasy nudes to John Currin’s busty, satirically sexualized pin-ups, how can one begin to sort through the annals of art history in an attempt to find the epitome of female perfection? There are too many masterpieces to choose from. Nevertheless, while art is subjective, money is not, so in order to include a female nude on this list it makes sense to pay homage to the most expensive female nude painting ever sold. Painted in 1932 and described by the former director of the Museum of Modern Art as “a squishy, sexual toy,” Nude in a Black Armchair sold for $45.1 million in 1999. The curvy, colorful painting is of Picasso’s mistress –Marie-Therese Walter. The voluptuous lines and juxtaposing colors (black and pink) are reminiscent of Henri Matisse, and the plant, a symbol of fertility, heightens the painting’s sexual theme.

Miyagawa Isshō's "Spring Pastimes"

Created in 1750, this shunga scroll depicts a tryst between two men, one likely a samurai and the other a kabuki actor taking on a sexualized female role.

Pan Copulating With Goat

Roman art is filled with disreputable objects of pagan licentiousness. There are ancient artifacts displaying everything from marital sex to men with men, women with women, threesomes, prostitution, and bestiality. In fact, there are sections of the Naples and British Museums that are similar to the browser categories found on pornographic websites. Though not thought to be freely practiced in Rome, there’s no shortage of sex between men and animals in Roman mythology. Pan Copulating with Goat is one of the best-known art objects in the Naples Museum.

Édouard Manet "Olympia"

Manet's 1863 painting is based roughly on Titian's "Venus" and Goya's "Nude Maja." According to accounts from writer Antonin Proust, the painting of a prostitute was so scandalous that "only the precautions taken by the administration prevented the painting being punctured and torn" at its debut exhibition.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard "The Swing"

This Rococo masterpiece from 1767 is full of symbolism, all of which centers on a young woman's extramarital affair. See that man hidden in the bushes on the left side of the canvas? He's not only on the receiving end of that kicked-off shoe, he's also getting quite a peek up the woman's dress. Erotic? Maybe. We'd settle for 18th century creepy

Pablo Picasso "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (The Young Ladies of Avignon)

Picasso's famous Primitivist painting portrays five nude prostitutes allegedly from a brothel in Barcelona. With their unconventional female forms and relentless gazes, the image is a proto-Cubist version of erotica.

Egon Schiele "Friendship"
Despite the title, there's a underlying sense of sexuality in Schiele's depiction of two naked individuals, embracing in a twist of line and form reminiscent of the great Austrian painter's intense figurative works.

Diego Velázquez "Rokeby Venus" (The Toilet of Venus)
Call it "The Toilet of Venus," "Venus at her Mirror," "Venus and Cupid," or "La Venus del Espejo," Velázquez's nude painting shows a woman deriving pleasure from the site of her own naked self. For a painting made between 1647 and 1651 -- a time period marked by the Spanish public's disdain for naked bodies in art -- the work was on the salacious side. 

Titian "Danae" 1544

A woman prepares to make love to a God in this heavenly painting. Jupiter comes to Danae in the form of a shower of gold – a joke with an edge. The model may have been a courtesan and the lover of the cardinal who commissioned this painting, so money was changing hands in their love life. Yet there's something overwhelmingly spiritual about this scene. Titian here raises sex into a religion.

Antonio Canova "Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss"The power of love revives the dead in this great artistic hymn to desire. Canova is perhaps the only artist who has ever made marble sexy. His statues are tremendously erotic, as he carves cold stone into smooth tender images of naked flesh. Here, both Cupid and Psyche are nudes of intense beauty and their embrace is proof that love conquers all.

Pompeian Erotic Wall Paintings "Priapus"Many of the erotic wall paintings (frescoes) and other art in the ancient town of Pompeii were intended to depict sacred images representing abundance and good fortune, for example, the god Priapus, sporting an extremely large phallus.

Michelangelo “Fig Leaf for David”1857

Rembrandt van Rijn "Jupiter and Antiope" 1659

Luca Giordano "Venus, Mars, and the Forge of Vulcan" circa 1660's

Japanese watercolour "Woman and Man with Oysters"

John AS Coutts, aka John Willie "SDM BNDG GAG" 1938
(Sadomasochism Female, Bondage Gagged) 

"Erotic scene on the rim of an Attic red-figure kylix" circa 510 BC

Roman oil lamp depicting coitus more ferarum (doggy style sex)

Peter Johann "A Man and Woman engaged in a Doggy style position"

Édouard-Henri Avril "Anal Sex Detail" (Two men engaged in a doggy style position)

Ancient Roman oil lamp (circa 1st Century AD) depicting a Roman Threesome  
(woman having sexual intercourse with two men simultaneously) 

Roman Spintria (Brothel token) 

"Sunga Love Scene" Shunga Empire sculpture (India), 1st century BC 

Pederastic Courtship scene on an Athenian black-figure Amphora from the 5 BC

The Warren Cup (Julio-Claudian dynasty, Year 10, 1st century AD)One side of the Warren Cup depicts a "bearded man" and a "beardless youth" engaging in anal sex in a reclining position, with the youth lowering himself using a strap or sash to be penetrated. A boy watches from behind a door. The two figures do not appear to be a great difference in age and are of a similar size. The apparent weight of the upper figure, as he lowers himself onto his lover's penis using the support, makes this a non-traditional passive role.

The Warren CupThe other side depicts another scene of anal sex, between a "beardless" and clean-shaven "young man" and a smaller figure with long hair indicating he is a "boy" or "adolescent" (now the "eromenos"). The boy's hairstyle is typical of the puer delicatus, a servant-boy or cup or armour bearer. Roman same-sex practice differed from that of the Greeks, among whom pederasty was a socially acknowledged relationship between freeborn males of equal social status. Roman men, however, were free to engage in same-sex relations without a perceived loss of masculinity only as long as they took the penetrative role and their partner was a social inferior such as a slave or male prostitute: the paradigm of "correct" male sexuality was one of conquest and domination. There are significant differences to pederastic scenes found on classical Greek vases. The sex act is presented in graphic detail, and the boy appears to encourage the penetration, grasping his lover's arm. In Roman artwork there is an assumption that the penetrated youth is a slave or prostitute and on the Warren Cup, a mutual tenderness is represented.

Both scenes show draped textiles in the background, as well as a cithara (appearing as an eleven stringed lyre, often symbolic of pleasure and drinking parties) in the former scene and tibiae (reeded pipes) with finger holes being depicted in the latter. These, along with the careful delineation of ages and status and the wreaths worn by the youths, all suggest a cultured, elite, Hellenized setting with music and entertainment.

The active partners in the two sexual depictions are wearing leaf crowns, likely to be symbolically made from myrtle. Myrtle is an evergreen shrub, grown in the Roman period for medical and ritual purposes, such as weddings, and dedicated to Venus, the Roman goddess of sexuality and love. It has a smaller leaf than the more commonly depicted laurel. Myrtle was used to create the corona ovalis, a military crown awarded as an ovation but a far lesser award than the insignis corona triumphalis, one interpretation of the use of myrtle crowns on the Warren Cup, being a visual pun of homosexual penetration as an easy victory.

Hoby Silver Skyphoi (dated to AD 10–20)
showing nude male figures in relief

Caravaggio "Amor Vincit Omnia" (Love Conquers All)

often interpreted as an idealized expression of pederastic love

"Attic" (red-figure plate 530–430 BC)At the palaestra (ancient Greek wrestling school) a youth, holding a net shopping bag filled with walnuts, a love gift, draws close to a man who reaches out to fondle him.

Jupiter abducting Ganymede (1st-century AD Roman statue)

An Indian Prince and his attendant (Mughal pederasty painting)

Hua Ying Chin Chen The Way of the Academicians (1368–1644) China, Ming Dynasty (Variegated Positions of the Flower Battle) Chinese homoerotic print

Henry Scott Tuke "Noonday Heat" (1911) Many of Tuke's most well-known works are nudes of young men and boys

Ganymede rolling a hoop and bearing aloft a cockerel – a love gift from Zeus
In ancient Greece, a cockerel was a conventional gift from an erastes (adult male) to an eromenos (adolescent boy) in  a socially acknowledged erotic relationship 

Achille Devéria "Libertine" (watercolour)
The explicit erotic scene is taking place clandestinely against the background of a 'respectable' party seen at the back

Erotic Netsuke (miniature sculptures)
made of mammoth ivory sculptured in Japan

"Fellatio" Moche (ancient Peru) ceramic (circa 200AD)

Jan Ciągliński "Symbolic Dance" subtle lesbian erotica late 19th-century 

Oinochoe by the Shuvalov Painter, circa 430-420 BC

Peter Fendi "Erotic art"

Peter Fendi "Erotic Scene"

Katsushika Hokusai "The Adonis Plant" (Fukujusô) 1815

Édouard-Henri Avril

Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger

Sheela na Gig

Agostino Carracci "Jupiter et Junon" (1557 - 1602)

"Khajuraho Temple" Erotic wall sculpture

"Tuhfet Ul-Mulk" Turkish Erotic Manuscript

"A man enjoying an erotic dalliance with two boys seated" Chinese Erotic Art

John Singer Sargent "A Nude Boy on a Beach" (1878) 

George Wesley Bellows The Barricade (1918)
A painting inspired by an incident in August 1914 in which German soldiers used Belgian townspeople as human shields

Polykleitos "Doryphoros"

Praxiteles "The Marathon Youth" 4th century BC

Lysippos "

Hermes"

Praxiteles "Venus Braschi" (Knidian Aphrodite)

Sandro Botticelli "The Birth of Venus"

Titian "Venus and the Lute Player" 

Albrecht Dürer "Adam and Eve" 1507

Michelangelo "Creation of Adam" 1512

Lucas Cranach the Elder "Reclining Nymph"

Titian "Venus of Urbino" 1538

Hugo van der Goes "The Fall"

Peter Paul Rubens "The Three Graces"

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn "Bathsheba at Her Bath" 1654

 Francisco Goya "Horrors of War" 1810s (No 37 of 80)

François Auguste René Rodin "The Age of Bronze" 1877
modeled after a Belgian soldier

Pierre-Auguste Renoir "The Large Bathers" 1884-1887

William-Adolphe Bouguereau "The Wave" 1896

Amedeo Modigliani "Nu Couché" (Red Nude) 1917

Gaston Lachaise "Standing Woman" 1932

Lilith Periodo de Isin Larsa y Babilonia (The Burney Relief, Old Babylonia)
around 1800 BC

Khajuraho Vishvanath Kandariya Mahadev Temple Temple 1050
erotic detail

Kitagawa Utamaro "Woman Bathing In Cold Water" circa 1753

"Indian Woman Putting On Her Clothes" 1775

Hashiguchi Goyô "Yuami" Woodcut 1915

Michelangelo "Study of a Kneeling Nude Girl for The Entombment"