A weirdly earnest approach to nakedness
Often it’s the smallest and most apparently unimportant works that provide the most telling detail
The Renaissance Nude
Royal Academy
The nude is such an omnipresent fixture in Western art that we tend not to wonder how and why it got like that. It all started, of course, in classical antiquity and was revived during the Renaissance, giving rise to such all-defining works as Michelangelo’s David (1504) and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538). But the specifics of how the various forms of the nudes were “invented” and how people thought about them at the time generally elude us.
Bringing together works by masters of the order of Titian, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Dürer, this exhibition at the Royal Academy promises to “trace the development of the nude at its most vital moment”. But don’t come expecting a sense of triumphant revelation, with the universal human form stepping starkers from the muggy dimness of the Middle Ages, arrayed in voluptuous flesh or rippling muscles. This earnest exhibition shrinks from generalisations and makes its points very gradually.
Contrary to received opinion, not only were there plenty of painted and sculpted nudes in the Middle Ages, but looking at Flemish painter Dirk Bouts’s The Fall of the Damned (14689), it’s clear that much Renaissance art is very medieval in character. While nakedness is shameful for his emaciated figures, as they plunge into a pit of devils, there’s a definite Men Only feel to images of the naked Bathsheba in four exquisitely painted late-15th-century calendars of hours.
Images of a beautiful naked young St Sebastian, shot with arrows for refusing to renounce Christianity, provided sensual enjoyment for Venetian women – and I dare say men – during lengthy church sermons. Three diverse images show the portrayal of the saint progressively more idealised, eroticised and classicised, an aesthetic trajectory that applied even to images of Christ himself. In Jan Gossaert’s Christ at the Cold Stone (1530) for instance, the haggard Jesus contemplates his forthcoming flagellation, while his lovingly rendered body is that of a Greek god – a notion that isn’t merely figurative. In the Neoplatonic philosophies of the early Renaissance, Christ was identified with Apollo, the son of Zeus.
The female form gets more of a look-in in a section on humanism, the absorption of ancient Greek and Roman ideas into secular society. Titian’s Venus Rising from the Waves (1520) isn’t one of the Venetian master’s most lustrous representations of the splendours of female flesh, but by this stage in the show, we’re fully aware that this show isn’t about hitting us with the most sumptuous nudes it can lay its hands on – or indeed about visual pleasure at all.
Instead, it’s more a sociological study of the Renaissance nude in which the works are used to illustrate points in the manner of a slightly dry academic textbook. Every painting, sculpture, print and drawing here has a wealth of social and cultural meaning behind it; though when the work is as dull as Dosso Dossi’s large painting A Myth of Pan (1524), in which a collection of rather wooden figures protect a sleeping woman from ravishment by Pan, you don’t feel inclined to delve further.
Often it’s the smallest and most apparently insignificant works that provide the most telling detail, which tends invariably to be about men looking at men. The Limbourg brothers’ The Procession of the Flagellants (1405-9), for example, with its half-naked young men chastising themselves through the streets, looks like a ritualistic orgy, while the atmosphere of Dürer’s The Bathhouse (1496), a marvellously gnarled-looking woodcut of all-male outdoor bathing, is, we are told, “charged with erotic tension”. A phallic tap near the groin of one of the figures, and the fact that another is holding a flower, seem to back up this assertion. Perugino’s Apollo and Daphnis (1495), in which the naked god regards his beautifully muscled protégé playing the flute, is described as conveying an “incipiently erotic languor” that was “cherished by humanist collectors in Florence and Venice”. While I wouldn’t contest this homo-erotic interpretation, the show could also have drawn on many overtly heterosexual examples of similar scenes, such as Titian’s magical 1509 painting Pastoral Concert.
When great artists looked to antique sculptures as exemplars of perfect human proportion it was, in this reading of history at least, to exclusively male images such as Laocoön or the Apollo Belvedere (then both recently exhumed). We have the figure in Michelangelo’s A Male Nude with Proportions (1515-20), who looks like an overzealous bodybuilder, while in the show’s excellent array of master drawings, only Raphael shows the slightest interest in the sensuality of the female body, in an exquisite red chalk drawing of The Three Graces (1517-18). When a man and woman do get together, in an image hidden on the back of a portrait by Jacometto Veneziano (1497), they look rather pallid and anxious, part of an allegory of the five senses in which it’s clear they’ll come to no good. But whether the era’s preoccupation with the male was an embodiment of then fashionable platonic ideals or most artists at the time just happened to be gay, the exhibition doesn’t speculate.
The show ends with Dossi’s Allegory of Fortune (1530), which compounds the show’s feeling of the Renaissance as a place far stranger than you’d ever imagine, but to unintentionally comic effect. A naked man brandishes the emblem of Isabella d’este, marquesa of Mantua – which looks like a fan, but is in fact a bundle of lottery tickets – while his naked consort sits on a large bubble that may burst at any moment.
What are we left with? Far from getting a transcendent overview of the meaning of “the nude”, this show offers a collection of quirky glimpses that feel very much locked into the peculiarities of a time. You sense the Renaissance as way weirder and more complex than you imagined.