Lynda Nead wrote in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality that “more than any other subject, the female nude connotes ‘art’”.

The nude has a long-standing tradition in Western art. It was glorified in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, and the nude returned to favour in the Renaissance, and exploited to limitless heights beyond that.

As Kenneth Clark eloquently remarked in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: “It is only in countries touching the Mediterranean that the nude has been at home.”

The way in which the female form has historically been portrayed in Western art makes an intriguing study, one that has profound implications on the study of the female gender in history.

Women in the nude that recline, as are the many famous Venus paintings of the High Renaissance, such as those by Giorgione (Sleeping Venus, c.1508), Titian (Venus of Urbino, 1538) and Lorenzo Lotto (Venus and Cupid, c.1540) and, in the Baroque period, by Velázquez (Rokeby Venus, c.1614-15), indicate female subordination.

One would rarely (or never) find the male nude portrayed in a reclined position, because such a pose was one of subservience, whereas a man was represented in full control.

Themes such as that of Venus, the goddess of love, taken from mythology, of course, served as an excuse for artists to portray the ideal and sensual nude.

Mythology provided artists with a vast array of subjects in which they could incorporate the nude, although some Christian themes – such as Susanna with the Elders (which was similarly eroticised by male artists) – also allowed for the portrayal of the nude.

Although it is not always clear who these female models were, they were often the same females who served as domestic servants, who often also had to provide sex to complement their other ‘talents’.

This is known through Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, for instance.

In fact, English art historian and writer Timothy James Clark wrote that: “A nude... is a picture for men to look at, in which woman is constructed as an object of somebody else’s desire.”

This is thankfully not the case with Patrick Dalli’s female nudes.

Their pose is often raw and direct, making the viewer feel as though he is the one being viewed and not the other way round

The female form – whether draped or wholly in the nude – constitutes the largest part of Dalli’s repertoire.

Fifty-five of his paintings were exhibited as part of the spring 2015 shows at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto. This transpired through Gianluca Marziani, artistic director of Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive, whom Dalli met while on a trip to Rome.

Marziani also acted as curator of the exhibition, travelling to Malta to select the paintings from Dalli’s studio. Dalli’s Demografie exhibition is now open at the Palazzo Arzilli in San Marino.

Dermografie is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue published here by Midsea Books, and edited by Marziani himself.

The title evokes the sense of Dalli’s exploring of the flesh of the human body, the “geography of the pictorial body”, as Marziani stated in the catalogue essay.

Dalli’s first artistic medium of choice is oil, but he has also mastered the art of painting in watercolours and drawing with charcoal.

These methods are used to achieve considerably different results, with oils being used for large works that require meditation and long hours of work, while watercolour and charcoal are used for quick poses and sketches that impress the artist’s first ideas onto paper.

Oil paint allows Dalli to study and paint human flesh, whether that of the face and neck in his portraits, to that of the nude skin of his nude figures.

Throughout the exhibition, the large oil paintings are juxtaposed with watercolours studies of the same pose; often the charcoal drawing is presented as well.

The exhibition is almost a retrospective of Dalli’s evolution in the last 15 years of his artistic activity.

There is no hard edge in sight in these images, that are a glorification of the female form in this new century.

Their pose is often raw and direct, making the viewer feel as though he is the one being viewed and not the other way round.

Dalli’s paintings of the female form are embedded in a centuries-old Mediterranean tradition, but they evoke a completely different, modern, spirit.

The exhibition progresses with portraits of women Dalli knows, including his wife, Helen, and his mother.

In fact, no male is portrayed, bar one exception. Among the exhibits is a self-portrait given the title of Untitled 38. It is a 2015 work that depicts Dalli himself seated with three paintbrushes in hand. He appears in a three-quarter profile view, but his face is frontally posed as he looks out directly at the viewer.

Situating himself against a white background, the emphasis is placed upon the artist’s self-assured pose and the resulting self-confidence that is exuded not only from his stern glance, but also from every brushstroke that the painting was executed with.