How did Victorian painters get to be erotic and risqué and STILL get Queen Victoria's blessing?

With Queen Victoria's famous era of covering up the female body, with its huge hoop skirts and suffocating corsets, it seems a miracle that painters of her era managed to get so many nipples and dimpled bums into their paintings.

Venus Equilina by Alma Tadema 

So what did Victorian painters do to get around the rules of Victorian straightjacket morality and allow their voluptuous female nudes full reign to run a mock?  

In order to slip by Victoria's tight dress code, the painters of the day went out of their way to ground their work in an historical context.  Alma Tadema visited Pompeii, and while the Victorians were digging up its treasures, he was sketching away, inspired by Greek and Roman antiquity, and setting the ball rolling by cleverly placing his delightful and desirable nudes in acceptable mythical contexts, making it proper and learned.  And Frederic Leighton picked up from where Ingres left off.  He was inspired by Ingres' very classical nudes, he continued this tradition, as did Waterhouse, Talbort Hughs, Strudwick and Emma Sandys with their paintings and studies set in historical and mythical contexts.

The painters took pleasure in illustrating traditional literature.  Greek and Roman mythology, Medieval legends, Shakespearian poetry were some of the more acceptable settings in which to place their sexy nudes and desirable ladies.

But perhaps it was the romantic poet John Keats who paved the way for their them, arguing that beauty indeed be in the 'eye of the beholder'.  In Endymion  he wrote

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 
Its loveliness increases; 

it will never 
Pass into nothingness"

With such an insight as Keats, painters could show that inner appreciation could be expressed in outer form.  This was perhaps what painters were inspired by the most.  The naked nude became a symbol of all that they wished to reach for, strive for, fight for and desire.  Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites such as Rossetti, Millais and Hunt, the nude is a Femme Fatal, alluring, beautiful, cruel and enchanting.  The nude is a muse, motivating a painter to strive with love and joy for this inward sense of beauty.  The nude is the metaphor for beauty, something which inside feels unseen, unknown, yet when presented externally can be touched, viewed, loved in physical form.  Shakespeare best describes this when he writes in 'Alls Well that Ends Well':

"What power is it which mounts my love so high

That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye?"

Like a mirage the Victorian nudes hovver, just out of grasp, desirable, unattainable, visible.  They are pulpy, soft, with longing eyes, tempting lashes and 'come-to-bed' eyes.  They are Venus or Persephone, Siren or Cordelia.  They are an internal striving for love, pole stars to strive for, metaphors representing the inner, unquenched desires.

They are a prize, everything to work for and desire for, the reward for courtly love, the reward of hard work, of respect, of love, of creativity; they cause the flourishing of high mindedness and the attainment of deep desire.  

Which are, of course, all things Queen Victoria believed in.  And her era flourished.  Architecture, industry, literature flowered.  There was the construction of the Victoria and Albert museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the railways an viaducts, the composing of Wagner and Gilbert and Sullivan, the work of Dickens, Wilde, Trollop and Hardy, the poetry of Swinburne, Tennyson and Meredith (although it must be noted that Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality, showing that love had still not had chance to dissolve much of the corseted, cruel mind of Victorian society)

but at least the nude had its liberty there, and who better to host the exhibition but art collectors Edouard André and Nélie Jacquemart, whose home on the boulevard Haussmann was later turned into the Musée Jacquemart-André.  The couple's love of art resulted in a fantastic collection which you can visit and see in the many boudoirs and banquet rooms, and where upstairs you can see the exhibition of Victorian painters entitled 'Désirs et Volupté' (running until 20th January 2014 )