Never mind if art is ‘woke’ – look at the brushwork and the beauty

‘Venetian painting of the 16th century: art or pornography?” That was one of the essay titles I found when looking through old exam papers as a history of art undergraduate. It’s the sort of question you can imagine Professor Mary Beard setting her Classics students at Cambridge: open, provocative, spoiling for a fight. Come on, finalists, give us your best shot.

Professor Beard’s new BBC Two series Shock of the Nude hasn’t even started yet, but already she’s throwing fig leaves to the wind. Professor Beard has told the Radio Times that far too many of the nudes we see on Western gallery walls are simply “soft porn for the elite”. She asks how a modern woman should look at such paintings. Faced with a come-hither Titian or hello-boys Boucher, the female gallery visitor must ask herself: “On what terms can I enjoy looking at a naked woman whose image was drawn and painted, let’s imagine, for the pleasure of the male customer?” What you are absolutely not supposed to think is: I wish my Watteaus were as perky as hers.

I joke. But I am troubled by the tendency to impose modern sensibilities on the classical and Renaissance past. Rather than stand in front of every shy Venus and brazen Bathsheba and purse our lips and sigh “problematic”, should we not try to see with 16th-century eyes?

The art of looking demands a great imaginative leap. Leave the present. Think, see, read yourself into Urbino, Ferrara or Rome. I remember hearing a historical novelist admit to spending his weekends at costumed re-enactment festivals. It was only by wearing the soft-soled shoes of a medieval peasant, he explained, that he realised his hero couldn’t possibly run for his life over muddy fields. He’d have sunk. Understanding the past, down to the last bootlace, made every plot move more convincing. As gallery goers, we have to do something similar.

Think like a Greek sculptor, a Florentine master, a Pre-raphaelite. Be the Duke, the Cardinal, the patron with money and power. Then, by all means be the wife, the model, the mistress. Play all the parts. Each is already more interesting than the modern me, me, me.

I was amazed the first time I was told that the lovers in Rodin’s The Kiss were Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, caught in flagrante, and soon to be murdered by Francesca’s furious husband. Coming into the gallery, you become the husband and villain of the piece. A better role by far than Outraged Feminist of London, W2. The really radical thing is to learn enough to get truly under the skins of patron, painter and the girl who posed for Aphrodite.

We’re in danger, too, of neglecting beauty. Take three of the current London blockbusters: Gauguin at the National Gallery, Picasso and Freud at the Royal Academy. Of course one should understand context, of course we feel uneasy about child brides and bullied mistresses, but all the same: colour, light, line, style!

While worrying if Rubens’ Graces were sufficiently enfranchised, it would be a shame if we forgot to notice that the landscape is glorious, the brushstrokes divine and the flesh so pink and peachy that, man or woman, woke or an irredeemable bloke, you feel if you were to reach out and stroke the canvas, the lovely bodies would still be warm. read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion