Explain how the portrayal of women by European oil painters is a contradiction to their own work theory, as explained by the authors.

European oil painters are assumed to present an example of humanism; their individual expression of women as either an object or an abstraction is a contradiction. If they are truly committed to the humanity of the individual, then so too ought the naked female that they paint be treated similarly. They ought not to turn her naked body into an object for display, the nude.