Fig Leaves and the Dirty Ground:The Nude in Renaissance Art.

"In the nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene" - Robert Bresson.

"What is the body? The shadow of a shadow of your love that somehow contains the whole universe" - Rumi.

"The nude does not simply represent the body but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience" - Sir Kenneth Clark.

"Tits, bum, fanny, THE LOT" - Andy, Gregory's Girl.

Jacometto Veneziano or close follower - Lovers in an Interior (before 1497)

If, like Andy in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, you'd come along to the Royal Academy's The Renaissance Nude exhibition for a little perv or a touch of titillation you were more than likely to leave disappointed. There are a handful of paintings that explore the naked body in a sexual way but, equally, there's plenty of work that focus on the martyrdom of saints, the decaying of our flesh, or even its mutilation. 

Strangely enough, your best bet for smut is Jacometto Veneziano (or, perhaps, one of his close followers) and his 15c Lovers in an Interior. Strangely, because it also happens to be one of the very best paintings in the entire exhibition (and there are a lot of pretty good ones). We're rendered prurient observers of this undoubtedly tender and erotic moment by dint of the artist positioning a masterfully captured glass of water in the foreground telling us for certain that our viewpoint is that of the voyeur. "If I don't see you through the week, I'll see you through the window" to borrow another line from Gregory's Girl.

A door ajar allows light in to the opulent room but also adds a certain frisson to the clinch. Are these illicit lovers excited by the chance of being caught in flagrante delicto? That's just one of many questions that come to mind when viewing Lovers of an Interior. What's she got in her hand? Is she taking some kind of selfie? Was the Hollywood (or is it a Brazilian) wax already in vogue during the Renaissance? Have I been looking at this so long now that the invigilators are getting concerned? 

 

Martin Schongauer - Saint Sebastian (c.1480-90)

It's also a good painting to start my assessment off with because it features both a naked woman and a naked man and this show is, roughly - I didn't count - I'm not that mad, made up of as many unclothed men as it is unclothed women. 

Which, a few years ago, would have been highly unlikely. The Guerrilla Girls didn't just ask "do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" but also took measures to change this, to move things forward at a the time when we still seemed to be stuck in a era of unreconstructed attitudes to women's bodies. An era that still seemed to hold as absolute truths William Blake's assertion that "the nakedness of woman is the work of God" and didn't wonder what Renoir was thinking when he proclaimed his 'concern' had "always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit".

In the dim distant past the main issues with curating and hosting an exhibition of nudes would have been with pious observers demanding censorship or closure of the show. Now, curators tread on eggshells fearing they'll offend any number of groups should what they offer up be seen in any way as tokenistic or condescending and worries are based more on the likelihood of accusations of cultural appropriation and speaking from a place of privilege.

That may make the work a bit harder but that's a good thing. Things don't stay as they are. They move on. New ways of thinking and new (previously silenced) voices create new ideas and hopefully provide us with a route forward. I'd have been interested to see a show that takes us beyond the Renaissance into representations of nudity up to and including the present day. Maybe that's an idea for a sequel (obviously, the RA curators never miss one of my art blogs so no doubt they'll be planning one first thing Monday morning).

The exhibition begins with the story of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, a monumental wall painting for the Sistine Chapel that had a vast array of nudes, being completed in 1541 and then, soon after, having concealing draperies painted over them on the order of Pope Pius IV. Nudes had, before then, been central to the development of art and to the development of individual artists. Training involved careful study of human anatomy and the classical worlds of Greece and Rome seemed to have no hang ups about the naked human form.

The Renaissance came at a time when art was finding new ways of rendering the nude more realistically and, in some quarters, civilisation (if religious fundamentalism can be called that) was demanding a bit more 'modesty'. Netherlandish artist Dirk Bouts makes feelings, at least those north of the Alps, of the time absolutely clear with two paintings regarding the Last Judgement and designed to be viewed side by side.

The good people, the 'saved' people, of The Way to Paradise are dressed in modesty preserving loin cloths, highly decorative shawls, and, in one instance, a pair of wings as they head out into a heavenly paradise of sunshine, worship, and, it's assumed, eternal bliss. The Fall of the Damned, however, is much more interesting. The bad people, the 'unsaved', are all naked and, not only that, they're succumbing to all manner of death, degradation, and defilement.

No doubt it's what they deserved (if only Adam and Eve had not eaten that apple). Terrifying looking bats and dragons drop people to their deaths from the sky, one poor soul is being eaten alive, there's a pit of pitiful paupers slowly burning to death, and a crazed demonic red creature with eyes as nipples prepares to bring a pitchfork down into some sinner's skull. You'll probably not be surprised to learn that Dirk Bouts was a contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch.

Dirk Bouts - The Way to Paradise (1468-69)

Dirk Bouts - The Fall of the Damned (1468-69)

This level of horror is rarely found outside the realms of religious, specifically Christian, art (even if the Chapman Brothers do their best to copy it), but there are scenes of private devotion to balance out the torture, self-flagellation, and heavy handed didacticism. There's a lovely Donatello bronze and a painting, by the Italian Cima da Conegliano, of Saint Sebastian at a thankfully early stage of his martyrdom where he still retains his dignity.

There's also Durer's iconic, and rather heartwarming, engraving of Adam and Eve. Capturing the moment, so we're informed, just before Eve succumbed to temptation and ate the forbidden fruit ("thus condemning humanity to labour, physical frailty and, ultimately death" a sign tells us - so it's all her fault). She doesn't look like somebody who's just about to do something that will commit everyone living, and everyone who ever has or ever will, to a life of suffering and a death sentence. In fact, both her and Adam look like any other pair of young lovers both excited by, and nervous about, each other's, and their own, bodies.

Cima da Conegliano - Saint Sebastian (1500-02)

Albrecht Durer - Adam and Eve (1504)

Jean Bourdichon - Bathsheba Bathing (1498-99)

Once the original sin had been committed it wasn't all bad though, at least people were free to enjoy sex. Men more than women it seems. Rich men more than poor men it still seems. Witness that 'crazy babe' Bathsheba bathing and arousing poor King David who of course, 'summoned' her. Because that's what you do if you see someone you fancy. You 'summon' them!

We shouldn't get hung up on the veracity of these tales though. Most of them are either meant as fables or to instruct in some way and others are quite open about the debt they owe to classical mythology, and where we find classical mythology we find classical beauty. In the form of Venus and, on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, Titian's Venus.

Pliny the Elder had described a painting by the most famous painter of antiquity, Apelles, of Venus being birthed by the sea and it caught on in Renaissance times with works by both Botticelli and Titian. Titian's gone for the old wet hair look that so many of us like.

Titian - Venus Rising from the Sea ('Venus Anadyomene') (c.1520)

Giulio Campagnola - Nude Reclining in a Landscape (c.1482 - after 1515)



Pisanello - Luxuria (c.1426)

Pisanello's pen and ink Luxuria predates Titian by the best part of a century but it's equally sensuous. Where Venus appears coy, averting her gaze, Luxuria confidently stares out at us rocking a fairly impressive afro that must have been even more eye catching in 15c Pisa than it is 21c London. 

Women were, even back then, being blamed for distracting men from work and academia. Hans Baldung Grien's woodcut Aristotle and Phyllis tells the story of how, after her lover Alexander the Great was castigated by his teacher Aristotle for spending too much time with Phyllis, she sought her revenge by demanding a jaunt around the philosopher's garden while perched naked atop his back. Aristotle's humiliation was guaranteed by arranging for Alexander to witness the entire, very bonkers, spectacle.

Hans Baldung Grien - Aristotle and Phyllis (1513)

It's one of several quite out there tales that pepper The Renaissance Nude exhibition. There's Piero di Cosimo's oil painting, inspired by the poetry of Ovid and Boccaccio, of a satyr mourning a nymph, Cranach the Elder weighs in with a picture of a faun and his family looking remarkably at ease after they've somehow managed to slay a lion, Marco Dente ramps up the sexual tension between a nymph and a satyr to an uncomfortable degree, and there's Andrea Mantegna's fantastical battling sea gods.

Piero di Cosimo - A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph (c.1495-1500)

Lucas Cranach the Elder - A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion (c.1526)

Marco Dente - Nymph and Satyr (Pan and Syrinx) (c.1516)

Attributed to Jan Wellens de Cock - The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c.1520)

Andrea Mantegna - Battle of the Sea Gods (before 1481)

If you think Mantegna's warring deities look like something out of Ray Harryhausen then take a look at Pollaiuolo's Battle of the Nudes. The Florentine engraver has created a vicious, yet striking, ensemble piece in which the muscalature of his warriors has become so idealised it's moved almost into parody.

There's a homoerotic charge to it but it's one that could easily have been denied by any red blooded fully signed up heterosexual Tuscan of the time. It's hard to imagine, even in the late fifteenth century, it would have been so easy to misread Durer's 'Bathhouse'. The woodcut shows drinking, music, nudity, and the two men at the forefront of the image catching each other's eyes. This is how I imagine it was at Chariots sauna in Vauxhall on a Saturday night before Grindr changed everything.

Antonio Pollaiuolo - Battle of the Nudes (1470s)

Albrecht Durer - The Bathhouse (c.1496)

Durer is just one of many very big name artists on show at The Renaissance Nude. We've seen works by Titian and Mantegna but there are also contributions from Bellini, Raphael, and even some absolutely stunning pen and inks by Leonardo da Vinci, inspired by the dissection of human bodies he carried out himself. Jan Gossaert's not such a household name but the Flemish artist is as well represented at the RA as anyone.

Artists of the Renaissance closely studied Classical sculpture like the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere. Both nowadays on show in the Vatican but, at that time, recently excavated. They combined this with the study of actual human bodies (both alive and, as we've read with Leonardo, dead) and reading the recently rediscovered De Architectura by Vitruvius (which was first published around the time of Christ) to create works of that managed to show off both their exquisite craftsmanship, their artistic chops, and their tender, passionate piety all at the same time.

Vitruvius had posited a theory that linked the proportions of temple architecture with the human body and suggested there was a symmetry between the two. It seems a bit far fetched now but you can, not least in the work of Fra Bartolomeo (or in Leonardo's Vitruvian Man - not on show, you've got to go to Venice to see it but you've seen World in Action so you get the idea), how that was put into action by the artists of the Renaissance.

Fra Bartolomeo - Study for the Central Group of a Lamentation (Pieta) (1511-13)

Parmigianino - Reclining Male Figure (c.1526-27)



Donatello - Saint Jerome (1460s)



Michelangelo Buonarroti - A Male Nude with Proportions Indicated (c.1515-20)

Parmigianino's wonderful Reclining Male Figure and Donatello's penitent Saint Jerome (this wooden sculpture shows Jerome "scourging  himself with a rock to quell carnal desire") are both freer and more expressive whilst Michelangelo (who, let's not forget Vasari described as a "perfect exemplar in life, work, and behaviour and in every endeavour") somehow manages to find an unforced balance between the architecturally inspired works of Fra Bartolomeo and the less academic style of Parmigianino.

This particular Michelangelo is owned by the Queen but it seems unlikely that The Torture of Saint Barbara by Knife and Scourge would ever end up in any royal collection (it's normally in the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki). So shocking is it nobody's even owned up to painting it. It's been 'attributed' to the German artist Konrad von Vechta who is so obscure he doesn't even has his own Wikipedia page. That's how I judge somebody's worth these days. Do they have their own Wikipedia page?

Barbara has been caught after running away from her father who disapproved of her Christianity. Her punishment appears to be a whipping and having her left breast hacked off with a knife. I don't know what the temperature of the blood was like in those old times but I'm willing to wager it was somewhere below tepid.

Attributed to Konrad von Vechta - The Torture of Saint Barbara by Knife and Scourge (c.1430-35)

Hans Baldung Grien - The Witches' Sabbath (1510)



Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio - Fury (c.1524-25)

No other image is quite so gruesome but in Baldung Grien's Witches' Sabbath (a woodcut) and Giovannia Jacopo Caraglio's Fury (an engraving) we're treated to some pretty phantasmagorical stuff. Baldung Grien's playing on 15c Germany's irrational fear of witchcraft (there are potions being mixed, a horse flies through the air, and a topless hag displays a salver of unsavoury looking comestibles) and Caraglio shows us a howling, and emaciated, figure (maybe human, maybe not) riding some kind of dragon whilst waving a snake and a skull in the air. Your average heavy metal fan could spend hours choosing the right tattoo from this artwork.

Often these grotesque, demonic images aren't viewed as 'nudes' as such so it's testament to those behind this show that they've opened our minds to a more fuller appreciation of what a nude is. It's not something to be scared of (though it can be), it's not something to laugh at (though it can be), and it's not necessarily to something to get aroused by (though it can be). In that respect much like actual naked human bodies.

With that in mind, it initially appears a little odd that the experience should end with more idealised representations of the naked body. But, given time to ponder the intentions of the curators, it seems clear that these belong here just as much as the witches, the martyred saints, the bathhouse cruisers, the satyrs, and the fauns. This is not an exhibition that seeks to show us what human bodies look like (we've all got our own so we could just look at them if that's we wanted) but to show us what artists have done with them, how they've portrayed them, and why they've chosen to portray them in such a way.

Simone Bianco's Bust of a Young Woman is an example of a belle donne (beautiful woman), a style that was popular in early 16c Venice, and Agnolo Bronzino has painted Saint Sebastian looking more like a matinee idol than a man who's soon to be beaten to death with cudgels and thrown into a sewer (after he had survived the arrows of a troop of Mauritanian archers)

Simone Bianco - Bust of a Young Woman (c.1520)

Agnolo Bronzino - Saint Sebastian (c.1533)

Why these works were made in such a conservative style at a time when the God fearing people of Europe were clearly not averse to being presented with horrific images of punishments feted out to sinners and heathens it's not sure. Perhaps these were for private devotion. Christianity needed to have all bases covered as any lie that big always needs to.

It's unlikely that Dosso Dossi was suggesting that Christianity rested on a bubble of belief as easily poppable as the one that Fortuna sits on in his Allegory of Fortune. It's unlikely but it works for me. The painting shows Chance clasping a bundle of lottery tickets as if to remind us all that even the powerful are reliant on good fortune.

We're as reliant on good fortune in financial matters as we are with our bodies. Since I've turned fifty I've noticed how many of mine and my friend's conversations have turned towards our health, looking inwards at our failing bodies, and, in some cases, I am seeing people close to (and much loved by) me suffering great illness. 

Our body is the vessel we come into this life in, the one that carries us through it, and the one, eventually, that we depart in. It seems appropriate that so much art relating to our bodies should focus on sex, death and the other big issues because our bodies are the one thing we can never shed, the one thing we are always with (even our minds go into 'flight mode' when we sleep), and, they're something we all share. Sometimes with each other. We shouldn't be ashamed of them. We should celebrate them. I'd say that, for the most part, the Royal Academy's Renaissance Nudes did just that. Don't fancy yours much, mind!

Dosso Dossi - Allegory of Fortune (c.1530)