I can’t help smiling at the Royal Academy’s avowedly radical announcement that its exhibition The Renaissance Nude next spring will aim for “parity” of naked men and women in response to #MeToo. It is nice PR, but all the curators are doing is reflecting the history of the nude in art. From the classical era to the Renaissance and beyond, the male body was disrobed as enthusiastically as the female – if not more so. It is a fact that has never escaped souvenir sellers in Florence, who plaster the cock and balls of Michelangelo’s David on everything from calendars to kitchen aprons.
This makes The Renaissance Nude a timely exhibition, but not because it will “correct” the Renaissance view of the human body to today’s standards. On the contrary, the Renaissance can correct us. Imagine if the RA had made a similar announcement about an exhibition called The Modern Nude. For the period from 1900 to the 1960s, it would have had to falsify the extremely unequal facts. Picasso and Matisse were among the most patriarchal possessors of the female form in the history of art and Klimt, Schiele, Dalí and Magritte all shared that focus. Only in more recent times have the male nudes of Bacon, Hockney, Mapplethorpe and Freud moved us towards parity.
Significantly, when Freud painted Leigh Bowery letting it all hang out in his studio, he got the performance artist to pose like the ancient statue the Farnese Hercules, a colossal marble nude. Freud saw that classical Greek and Roman art operated outside modern sexual criteria and was more diverse in its images of bodies. He also based a portrait of his assistant, David Dawson, on an ancient statue of a sprawling drunken nude called the Barberini Faun.
Renaissance artists revived the nude after about 1,000 years in which sexualised naked images had been banned from art by the medieval Roman Catholic church. Like their classical inspirations, they started with the male form. Donatello’s eroticised bronze statue of David was created about four decades before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. In the 16th century, it was the openly gay Michelangelo who defined the High Renaissance with his heroically tortured male nudes, including a full-frontal Christ whose loins the church still sees fit to cover with bronze underpants.
For centuries, the example of Renaissance artists who drew their nudes from life made the sketching of naked models central to artistic training. Yet the conventions of the 18th and 19th centuries made male models more respectable than female. In a 1770s painting by Zoffany, all the male academicians of the RA are shown studying a naked man. The two female academicians of the time, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, are shown as portraits on the wall because it was thought indecdent for them to draw a nude man.
We have a natural tendency to think the past was more oppressive than the present, but when it comes to artistic images of sex and gender the modern world is cruder. Renaissance art is full of what we would call queer male images – and its images of women are pretty glorious, too.
