The Renaissance Nude

When I walked through the doors of The Renaissance Nude exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I did, however, anticipate the same old monolithic discourse as always: white female bodies painted by white men for white people to enjoy.

Of course, analysis of the male gaze and feminist theory weren’t quite a thing in 15th and 16th century Europe, as the exhibition curator Per Rumberg kindly reminds me when I broach the subject of representation. Fair enough. But it also struck me that enlisting two male lead curators to deliver a show on nudity in 2019, felt like a questionable choice.

But let’s go back to what the exhibition is about. When, four years ago, curator Thomas Kren started to work on the original iteration of the exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, he was most concerned with nudity as a challenge to Christianity and perceptions of the body. “Nudity in the Renaissance, especially in this period when it was new, was also about artists having the license to address it in the first place,” explains Rumberg.

As I looked around the room, while nudity wasn’t always flattering, much of what I could see was a fantasised ideal of womanhood. The representation of the female form then was curvy — reminiscent of a pearly, Botticelli-like body — but bigger women never seemed to make the canon and, needless to say, women of colour neither (even though the presence of black Africans in Renaissance Europe has been documented from as early as the mid-15th century.) But as one of three women of colour at the press preview, when discovering Titian’s Aphrodite in Rising From The Sea (Venus Anadyomene) — with her red-golden hair, young plump body, born ethereal and fully formed out of the water — I wondered if it was paintings like these that set the beauty standards of today, and who this enlightened period had left out?

“Italian painters tended to idolise the female form and produce only Venus-like deities,” comments Rumberg. “We can see the reclining nude across the paintings,” he continues, “but depictions of old age were rare yet present in the Renaissance, more so throughout Northern Europe.”

In paintings such as Dieric Bout’s Path To Paradise and Pietro Perugino’s Combat between Love and Chastity, naked bodies were either clothed or subtly draped depending on their verdict. In the latter, it was the duelling forces of libido and restraint, as though sexual desires meant you were a glutton for punishment. On one hand, women were naked and praised for their bodies and on the other, they were naked and punished through their bodies (“a virgin or a whore,” as comedian Hannah Gadsby suitably observed in her Netflix-special Nanette, pointing to the limited roles available to women in art history).

But this seeming openness to nudity in Western art was short-lived. By 1564, the year of Michelangelo’s death, Pope Pius IV ordered that the Italian painter’s naked bodies in his now-iconic fresco The Last Judgement be painted over with drapery — signalling a profound shift in attitudes. “The church thought this was unacceptable,” explains Rumberg. “It was another image of temptation.”

So, what can we learn from the Renaissance nude today, when nudity appears at once omnipresent and yet deeply controlled? From Kim Kardashian’s recent appearance in a revealing Thierry Mugler dress to Tumblr’s nudity ban, are our post-internet, globalised moral values in crisis?

“We can’t forget that at the time, nudity was more controversial because it was set in a very religious, prudent society where being naked was for the private, not the public realm,” says Rumberg. “But it wasn’t just seeing the images that liberated that period, the printing press was new so access to nudity across various mediums also changed.”

Indeed, technological advances often go hand-in-hand with social revolutions, and ours is the advent of the internet. But the digital era has at once reinforced existing canons while also pushing the boundaries of female representation. Body positivity movements have emerged through fourth wave feminism, self-love politics and the freedom to publish what we want for ourselves.

From Chidera Eggerue’s trending hashtag #SaggyBoobsMatter, embracing bosoms that radically contrast with those imagined by Titian, and Universal Standard’s “All of us. As we are.” campaign, reminding us that the ‘ideal body shape’ concerns very few of us. Even Samirah Raheem’s viral video reclaiming the word ‘slut’ demonstrates that although we have more nudity now, we also have a voice to accompany the picture we’re painting of ourselves. Thankfully, that picture is progressively more colourful and queer than the women and men in The Renaissance Nude.

How Renaissance art still shapes our attitude towards nudity today. By Tahmina Begum. Sleek Magazine.  March 4, 2019.

Things look different after #MeToo. And not just after #MeToo, but after several years of a surging fourth wave of feminism. There has been fury against patriarchy – with the term itself, after decades of dormancy, surging back into use to explain everything from the rise of Donald Trump to sexual violence in India to pay inequality in western Europe.

Everywhere, dams of silence and fear are bursting, as women speak out about wrongs committed by men whose powerful positions once rendered them unassailable. Women have also rewritten the private stories they have told themselves (or buried) about their lives, from family relationships to workplace troubles to sexual encounters. In this atmosphere of revisionism, new stories have been needed. Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person, published at the end of 2017 in the New Yorker, owed its viral success to a wave of recognition from female readers. It told a story about dating and sex that seemed intensely true but, till then, barely told.

This new feminism has also affected the way people look. Museums and galleries – especially those representing a canonical European art tradition – burst with images of women disrobed and displayed for the delectation of men. Of course, there is nothing new about recognising the extent to which the spectacularisation of the female body has been part of a structure of oppression of women by men. The “male gaze” has been discussed by feminist critics for decades. It became part of popular culture when John Berger’s groundbreaking TV series Ways of Seeing invited a group of women to sit around a coffee table with cigarettes and glasses of wine to discuss the portrayal of the female body in art. “Men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at,” Berger intones gloomily at the start of the episode.

Nevertheless, in the last few years, the borderlines of acceptable looking have become blurred. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York received a petition to remove Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming, a painting of a young girl reclining on a chair, one leg up on a stool to reveal her underwear. In Britain, John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs – which shows the seduction of Heracles’s lover by bare-breasted water nymphs – was temporarily taken down from Manchester Art Gallery, in a move that was at the time widely regarded as censorship (wrongly, the museum argued).

Other reassessments of works made in the past include the “Rhodes must fall” campaign to remove statues of arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the universities of Oxford and Cape Town, as well as the recently announced move by Notre Dame University in Indiana to cover its 1880s murals depicting stereotypical images of Native Americans.

Last autumn, there was a flurry of a different kind, as the Royal Academy of Arts in London announced a new exhibition: The Renaissance Nude, an 80-work examination of the naked body in European art of the 15th and 16th centuries. The show was greeted as a post-#MeToo event, since it is to feature broadly equal numbers of male and female bodies. There was even talk of a “makeshift gender quota”.

The curators have been quick to refute this: it has nothing to do with #MeToo, they say, having been in the planning for many years. Curator Per Rumberg told me that the broad equality of numbers was simply a reflection of the period: during the 15th century, the male body was scrutinised and portrayed just as much as the female form.

The exhibition might be seen as an attempt to complicate rather than simplify the story of representations of the naked body. Concentrating on a narrow, if culturally dominant, slice of art history, it looks at work from Italy, Germany, France and the Low Countries created during the long 15th century, just before the depiction of the naked body became the fundamental mark of an artist’s prowess – before Michelangelo covered the walls of the pope’s chapel in naked men (only for the genitals to be overpainted several decades later); and before Titian and Giorgione set the fashion for reclining female nudes, emulated down the centuries by artists from Velázquez to Picasso.

What radiates from all this is the sheer variety of reasons for portraying the human body naked, and the complexity of the visual traditions artists were drawing on. The dominance of the nude in the Renaissance, the exhibition argues, cannot entirely be ascribed to the rediscovery of the art of classical antiquity. Attitudes to the human body were just as complex, various and messy in the 15th century as they are now, and much more localised – with Germany and Italy, say, working within different moral and rhetorical traditions.

The naked body might be, for example, a locus of scholarly humanist enquiry, its depiction requiring a mastery of anatomy and an examination of real naked models. Studies by Leonardo of the shoulder and neck will make the point in the RA show, as do Dürer’s remarkable self-portraits, illustrated in the catalogue, in which his face and genitals are drawn with loving care.

There are the private, solitary pleasures implied by the act of looking at books of hours – tiny, exquisitely decorated volumes popular at the medieval French courts. In such books, the bathing Bathsheba is a popular subject, and her naked limbs – to the male commissioner of such a volume – might deliver both a frisson of desire and a warning against the dangers of female sexual power.

There is the reminder of mortal frailty implied in an extraordinary elmwood carving, from Ulm in Germany, of an elderly woman, who echoes the pose of classical sculptures of Venus, her hands across her genitals. The work is now known as Elderly Bather but, in a weird foreshadowing of Trump’s famous taunt of Hillary Clinton, was traditionally called Nasty Old Woman – though, as with all such Old Master titles, it was not given by its maker, but became attached to it later.

Scholar Jill Burke speculates that some depictions of male nakedness, such as Pollaiuolo’s famous large-scale Battle of the Nudes, may owe as much to Europeans’ encounters with the “barbarous” people of sub-Saharan Africa as to the more obvious example of Roman sarcophagi, which were frequently decorated with battle scenes in the second century AD.

As for the male body, most frequently it is Christ’s, of course, his skin and bones and muscle and torn flesh a reminder of his humanity and, very occasionally, of his mortal sensuality. Hans Baldung’s startling drawing The Ecstatic Christ sees him writhing on the ground, his left hand reaching beneath his loin cloth.

The exhibition will contain several depictions of Saint Sebastian, the iconoclastic martyr who was, according to Christian legend, tied up and shot with arrows. It is hard not to see some of these depictions as tinged with sensuality even when they are ostensibly devotional: Cima da Conegliano’s portrayal has the skimpily loin-clothed saint gazing soulfully into the middle distance, a single arrow piercing his thigh, his flesh otherwise creamy and unblemished.

The book Seen from Behind, Patricia Lee Rubin’s survey of the male bum in Renaissance art, is a revealing reminder of the complexities of past sexuality. Rubin notes that more than half the male population of Florence had what we would now call homosexual experiences at one time or another during this period. And one image of Saint Sebastian, according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, was removed from a church for provoking “light and evil thoughts” among female parishioners.

In her forthcoming book The Italian Renaissance Nude, Jill Burke argues that because of the nude’s dominance in European art history, it has come to seem somehow natural, inevitable and universal. Some critics, such as Kenneth Clark, even regarded it as a great summation of human creative endeavour. Burke, who worked on the exhibition, argues that we might in fact see the dominance of the nude as strange: non-European artistic traditions, such as those of China and Japan, never developed a taste for the naked body in the same way.

It seems especially important, just now, not to remove nudes from walls, but to look critically, and to resist the universalising power of the familiar. Those sensuous reclining nudes of Titian – his gorgeous Danaës, raped by golden coins, his drowsing woodland nymphs, his Venuses – have an important precursor: a woodcut in an exquisitely decorated book, printed by the Venetian Aldine Press in the late 15th century. Called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, it shows a female figure, naked and recumbent. Over her looms a satyr – half goat, half man – his penis erect. The satyr disappears from the many subsequent depictions of similar sleeping, vulnerable women. But you could say he has never gone away.

Skin in the game: do we need to take down nudes – or look at them harder? By Charlotte Higgins.  The Guardian , February 27, 2019.

Renaissance artists transformed the course of Western art history by making the nude central to artistic practice. The revival of interest in classical antiquity and a new focus on the role of the image in Christian worship encouraged artists to draw from life, resulting in the development of newly vibrant representations of the human body.

The ability to represent the naked body would become the standard for measuring artistic genius but its portrayal was not without controversy, particularly in religious art. Although many artists argued that athletic, finely proportioned bodies communicated virtue, others feared their potential to incite lust, often with good reason.

The Renaissance Nude at the Royal Academy in London explores the development of the nude across Europe in its religious, classical and secular forms – revealing not only how it reached its dominant position, but also the often surprising attitudes to nudity and sexuality that existed at the time.

Nudity had appeared regularly in Christian art throughout the 13th and 14th Centuries. As Jill Burke, co-editor of the exhibition catalogue, says: “The first figure that is nude repeatedly is the figure of Christ.” But from the 14th Century, there was a major shift in people’s attitudes to Christian art and the way it could be used in private devotion and worship. “They were interested in the idea of empathy and using images as a way of really feeling the pain of Christ and the saints,” says Burke.

As a result, artists strove to make images more truthful, with the figure of Christ, the Saints and other religious figures gradually becoming more tangible. This development is evident in the figures of Adam and Eve, painted by Jan van Eyck for his masterful Ghent altarpiece (completed 1432). Thought to be among the first drawn from life, they are astonishingly rich in observed detail. Adam is shown to have sunburned hands while the linea nigra running over Eve’s gently protruding abdomen clearly reveals her to be pregnant.

In their portrayals of the nude, Van Eyck and other northern artists were drawing on a rich, complex native tradition that incorporated not only religious art but also secular themes, including bathing and brothel scenes, produced in media ranging from manuscripts to ivory reliefs. Their development of the rich, lustrous oil painting technique would allow for a far greater level of naturalism.

Northern artists also benefitted from a generally relaxed attitude to nudity. “There’s a lot of nakedness in things like pageants in the North,” says Burke. This was in marked contrast to Italy, where “they had really prescriptive ideas about seeing women’s bodies, even in marriage. The husband shouldn’t see his wife naked for example,” says Burke.

Italians also believed the female body was fundamentally inferior, as according to Aristotle they were not formed properly in the womb, lacking the heat to push out genitalia. Although Italian patrons enthusiastically collected Northern female nudes, perhaps unsurprisingly most 15th-Century Italian artists chose to focus on the male body, although there were notable exceptions such as Botticelli.

Drawing on humanist culture and readily available examples of classical statuary, artists began to produce idealised images modelled on the antique. Ghiberti’s panel for the Baptistery doors of Florence cathedral (c 1401-3), which many scholars see as the inception of the Renaissance nude, shows a heroically posed Isaac, the rippling muscles of his chest exquisitely defined in bronze.

Also in Florence, Donatello created an unashamedly sensual sculpture of David (1430-40), his lithe body and languid pose designed for a culture which readily accepted that “men will find the body of a beautiful young man erotic”, explains Burke. Indeed, despite being illegal, same-sex relations appear to have been very much the norm. “More than half of all Florentine men were indicted for having sex with other men in the 15th Century,” says Burke.

Saint Sebastian was a favourite subject – but it was not only men who were inflamed by his form. An example by Fra Bartolommeo in the Church of Saint Marco in Florence “had to be moved because they thought the female congregation were looking at it too eagerly and having evil thoughts about it”, says Burke.

Despite the unfortunate outcome, there can be no doubting Fra Bartolommeo’s sincere intentions. The same cannot be said for the early 15th-Century illuminated Books of Hours, created for the Duke of Berry by the Limbourg brothers. Ostensibly for private devotion, they included images of figures such as Saint Catherine with a pinched-in waist, high-set breasts and delicate pale flesh, which bordered on the erotic.

Works such as this set the stage for the ongoing fusion of the spiritual with the sensual in religious art in France. Jean Fouquet’s arrival at the court of Charles VII only heightened this propensity. His portrayal of the king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel, as the Virgin Mary (1452-55), her perfectly circular left breast bared to a distinctly uninterested Christ child, was one of the most bizarre examples.

These developments did not go unnoticed by the Church and, after the Reformation of 1517, religious imagery was banned from places of worship. Artists in Protestant nations responded by turning to secular and mythological themes of nudity, with Lucas Cranach the Elder producing some 76 depictions of Venus. It gave artists the “option to explore these themes outside of the religious sphere which allowed for a huge amount of freedom”, says the Royal Academy’s Assistant Curator, Lucy Chiswell.

The portrayal of nude woman as witches also became popular. In highlighting their supposed sexual power over men and the need for this to be controlled, it fed into the growing witch craze that saw thousands of women executed. “It’s not making the nude grotesque in any way, but it’s associating them with these demonic, very strong controlled figures,” says Chiswell.

aly, too, was increasingly adapting classical themes spurred by the expanding interest in humanist literature and poetry. The Venetian artists Giorgione and Titian produced gloriously voluptuous nudes. But despite their evident eroticism, these paintings were often based on descriptions of classical nudes, allowing their owners to claim their interest was intellectual rather than sexual.

In any case, as Burke points out, “one of the testaments of the skill of the artist is to produce a bodily reaction in the viewer – so if you felt erotically aroused by, say, Titian’s Venus of Urbino that was a testament to the skill of Titian.”

Having purely classical nudes was one thing but the influence of the antique in Catholic religious art was becoming increasingly contentious. Michelangelo, along with the Christian humanists and clerics within his circle, believed a beautiful body to be the emblem of human virtue and perfection. But his attempts to reinvigorate Christian art by embracing ancient pagan models in his depictions of Biblical figures for the Sistine Chapel, particularly in The Last Judgement (1536-41), proved too much for the Church. After his death, the genitalia of the figures were covered in drapery.

But despite the Church’s prudery, Michelangelo’s genius was instrumental in the nude coming to be seen as the highest form of artistic expression. After the Sistine Chapel, “everyone wanted their artists to paint nudes”, says Burke.

Over time, the nude may have become predominantly female: but for two centuries, the beauty of both sexes was celebrated by some of the greatest artists who have ever lived.

Is the Renaissance nude religious or erotic?  By Cath Pound.  BBC , February 14,  2019

The Renaissance Nude.    3 March — 2 June 2019. Royal Academy of Arts, London