This provocative book - the first full-length feminist and sociohistorical study of Ingres's art - explores the meanings behind the fluid, distorted, and sensualized bodies that populate these works. Carol Ockman traces the shift in late eighteenth-century French art from the neoclassical representation of the heroic male to the sensualized, homoerotic male nude to the nineteenth-century emphasis on the female nude.

She then explores the problems posed by the increasing identification of the sensual with the female body, demonstrating that both neoclassicism and modernism sanction an ideal that conjoins the sensual and feminine with the deformed and bestial.