Why did the male nude dominate French art through the French Revolution and then largely disappear? In this pioneering book which challenges received ideas about masculinity and neoclassical visual culture, Abigail Solomon-Godeau shows how the masculine ideal, whether in the guise of virile hero or passive youths, then or now, raises important questions about the fashioning of masculinity itself. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytical and critical theory, as well as cultural and art history, this volume completely recasts the gender question, not only for 18th-century history and art history, but for the entire history of western culture, as the eminent historian Professor Lynn Hunt has written.