When we hear ‘nude’, for most of us the image of a female body would immediately spring to mind.  One of Titian’s fleshy, languorous beauties perhaps, or self-possessed Olympia and her hostile black cat. This is unsurprising, considering the proliferation of female nudes dominating art in the recent centuries.  Before the 19th century, however, the male nude was considered much more important to artists.  The male body was thought more attractive and the more important of the human forms. So much so that looking at many works from the Italian Renaissance, you would be forgiven for seeing men with a couple of breasts stuck on for fun, rather than a…