Bringing Renaissance masters down to Earth
FLORENCE, ITALY» When Botticelli and Luca della Robbia created masterpieces about motherhood, they honored Renaissance idealism with reverential depictions of a serene Madonna and child. When painter Jenny Saville created “The Mothers,” in 2011, her Leonardo-inspired composition countered that 500-year-old sanctity with a firsthand reflection of her own experience: Two unwieldy babies exhaust the forlornlooking artist, in a selfportrait that is also an every-mother story.
Those divergent representations are now facing each other on display at the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence, as part of Saville’s biggest solo exhibition to date. Running through Feb. 20 and spread across five Florence museums, the show pits 100 paintings and drawings by Saville, a 51-year-old British artist against works by Renaissance masters, on their home turf.
Hanging beside Michelangelo’s marble Pietà in the Museo dell’opera del Duomo, a larger-than-life drawing by Saville called “Pietà 1” depicts her own family in the same entwined pose. In Palazzo Vecchio, amid Giorgio Vasari’s grandiose 16thcentury murals of men in battle, Saville’s immense painting “Fulcrum” introduces a mountain of naked women.
Saville’s work embraces techniques from across the centuries, blending the realism of traditional painting styles with expressionist abstraction, as she casts her own gaze on subjects long portrayed by male painters: the nude, the fertile mother, the female face.
Her work reflects the grand ambitions of Renaissance masters, yet against their sensual, divine nudes, Saville presents images of fleshy, earthly women, sometimes with bruised or ruptured skin — not the body beautiful, but the suffering, anxious and impermanent body.
Those fearless canvases ignited her career in the 1990s and established her place as a trailblazer of figurative painting’s renewed relevance. By 2018, when “Propped,” a seething, distorted naked selfportrait, came up for sale at Sotheby’s, it fetched $12.4 million, an auction high for a work by a living female artist.
Sergio Risaliti, the curator of the Florence exhibition and the director of the Museo Novecento, one of the museums taking part, said the city was “the cradle of Renaissance culture,” but that it was “a culture dominated by men.” Now, he added, Florence was “receiving a major female artist on equal footing.”
“The Renaissance reprehas sented the avant-garde, and with Jenny, we’re sending a message of the importance of the avantgarde today,” he said.
Q : How does it feel to see your own works side by side with Renaissance masterpieces?
A: Italy is a country of figuration, so I feel very at home here — but it was intimidating. I got through by really looking at Michelangelo: I was doing Pietà setups for my own piece, but I couldn’t work out why mine lacked his level of potency. Then I started to do direct studies of the sculpture, and I saw how the internal torque of the bodies worked.
Right through the spine of the work, there’s this incredible twist, which he in everything he does. Then he uses all the possible elements of a body, whether it’s the tilt of a head, the way a hand rests on somebody else’s flesh, the way material folds — all of them are used to heighten emotion, without sentimentality.
Q : But as well as old masters like Michelangelo, you have modern influences, too.
A: I look at artists like Twombly, Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning — all the New York School that used paint as a poetic language in itself — and try to channel some of those things into figurative work. I love to start by dripping a lot of acrylic, and you see through the drips, so you get this kind of inner light. I think all the time about how to use this language of paint to get as much emotion as I can.
Q : The vulnerability of the body is a theme you returned to again and again.
A: Yeah, I’m not afraid of that — I was never really afraid of it. I find that very powerful. We’re always aware of death. That’s our only certainty in life — we don’t know which twists and turns our journeys will take us on, but the certainty is that we will die. So I always work with that in mind.
Q. Yet then when the pandemic was making all of us face up to how vulnerable we are to death,
you were making really colorful paintings, some of which are included in this show.
A: Yeah, I was using color like never before. I think it was a sort of resistance to the disease. I just thought, “My gosh, people I love could die.” I just worked harder and faster, like a kind of mania almost. I was making marks with this sort of urgency because I thought, “What’s going to happen to the art world? What’s going to happen to everybody?”
Q : You investigated the female nude through your own eyes, and then, with the birth of your two children, you explored another theme of classical painting: motherhood.
A: I spent my life painting flesh, and then suddenly I was making flesh in my body. That’s very profound. And giving birth was like a Francis Bacon painting, you know.
All of these really poignant things were happening to me, and at the same time, I took on the social categorization of “mother,” when I had spent my life trying to be taken seriously as a painter. I had a debate with myself about whether I should reveal motherhood as a subject in my work. And then I thought, “Why wouldn’t I do that? I do that about every other subject. Why would I feel hesitant? Is it because I think it could affect my career?”