Nude Models Cover Up in Labor Dispute

The protesters — male and female — said that they wanted “professional recognition” and full-time contracts. Only 50 of about 300 models at Italian art schools are on fixed annual contracts, with the rest hired by the hour.

Antonella Migliorini, 42, said that it was “a tough, cold job” posing in the nude, often for eight hours a day. “We are not porn stars,” she said. “If you’re lucky enough to have a full-time job you might make ¤25 an hour.

However, there will always be people willing to do it, despite the poor pay. “It can be rewarding to be immortalised as great art,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times’s chief art critic, who modelled for Eduardo Paolozzi and Euan Uglow. “But it can also be extremely physically demanding. Rodin used to twist his models into painful positions and make them stay like that for hours. Lucian Freud demands that you turn up punctually day after day. It can take years and you can’t walk out halfway through.”

Ivo Bomba, a professor at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts, said that although art schools had recently been given university status they lacked the “financial clout” of universities and sometimes had to choose between hiring life models and paying for equipment and supplies. Ms Migliorini, from Florence, said that being a life model required “imagination and physical resistance”. But art schools “do not show us much consideration — our privacy is violated. Once a group of about 30 Japanese tourists turned up and started taking photographs. I had to cover myself up quickly.” She said: “You have to be examined by a commission of teachers who are supposed to judge what sort of person you are. In the end though they usually pick the pretty ones.”

Asked if there was an age limit, she said that “most models are fairly young — but that’s a big mistake, since students have to learn how to draw the elderly human body as well as Venuses”.

Education ministry official Nando Dalla Chiesa confirmed he'd agreed to meet the striking models, concluding: "We need to get to the bottom of this."

— A retired art teacher was shocked in 2003 when she found a sketch she had made decades earlier and realised it was Sean Connery, aged 22 and in a loincloth. “When he modelled there were always lots of girls in the classes,” she said