I’m one of the team who put together The Renaissance Nude exhibition, opening at the Royal Academy in London next March. This week we were bemused to read in the press that we had imposed a “makeshift gender quota” on the nudes we chose to display, in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In fact, a quota simply wasn’t necessary. Based on decades of research and years of planning, the exhibition shows how images of naked men in the Renaissance were just as much an object of fascination and desire as their female counterparts.
Naked bodies were common in religious art for around a century before the nude deities of Greece and Rome became all the rage – the “rebirth” of classical antiquity that gives the Renaissance its name. What this fashion for classical nudes did bring, however, was new theories of looking at and creating images. Renaissance viewers were puzzled at the popularity of nudes in the ancient world. Was it, they wondered, because people were “less vice-ridden” back then; or conversely, because of those cultures’ “libidinousness”.
One of the first people to work through this conundrum was scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. In the 1400s, he argued that even though looking at real naked bodies is “licentious and base”, viewers are not admiring the bodies themselves, but the “mind of their maker”. This idea formed the basis for Italian Renaissance art theory, which posited painting and sculpture as primarily mental activities, rather than manual ones. It is hardly surprising that, by the end of the century, the depiction of the male nude became a test of artistic ability.
Female nudes became common in Italy only in the early 16th century, when painters such as Raphael and Titian started to produce them in large numbers – Italy lagged behind northern Europe here, where naked women featured in the luxury manuscripts commissioned by the Valois rulers of France and Burgundy, in famous panels of bathing women by Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries, and in Albrecht Dürer’s tireless drawings.
The idea of the male gaze – where women are presented as sexual objects for male delectation – has often been applied to nudes, but is complicated when considered in this historical context. To take 15th-century Florence as an example, it’s been estimated that as many as 17,000 men were accused of sodomy from a total population of around 40-50,000 – that’s the majority of Florentine men incriminated for same-sex relations. Not surprisingly, the erotic qualities of the naked male body were very much part of contemporary discourse, and it was assumed that women, as well as men, could be aroused by images of naked people of either sex.
As the preacher Bernardino of Siena thundered in 1427: “If one of you women here were to strip naked, how many men and how many women do you think would fall into temptation?”
(November 15, 2017)
Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi sold for $400 million at Christie’s ($450.3m, including auction house premium)
(May 2, 2012)
One of four versions of The Scream created by Munch and the only one that is privately owned. The painting sold for $119,922,500
(April 30, 2010)
Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (1932) sold at Christie's in New York for $106,482,500
(January 12, 2010)
L’homme qui Marche I (1961) by Alberto Giacometti sold for £65,001,250 ($105,182,398) at Sotheby’s in London
(May 5, 2004)
Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe (1905) sold at Sotheby's in New York for $104,168,000
(November 8, 2006)
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912)went under the hammer at Christie’s New York and sold for $87,936,000
(April 14, 2008)
Francis Bacon’s Triptych (1976) sold for $85.9m to oligarch Roman Abramovich
(November 12, 2010)
A Chinese 18th century Qianlong dynasty porcelain vase sold for £53,100,000 ($85,921,461) at Bainbridges auction house in London
(March 22, 2006)
Dora Maar au Chat (1941) by Pablo Picasso sold for £51,560,080 ($83,429,503) at Sotheby's in London
(May 15, 1990)
Portrait of Dr Paul Gachet (1890) by Vincent van Gogh sold for $82,500,000 (£50,985,692) at Christie’s in New York
It was intellectual rigour and artistic interest that underpinned our choice of objects in the exhibition, rather than a nod to #MeToo. This does not mean that we aren’t well aware of the ideological frameworks that complicate the creation and reception of the nude. For example, the formation of a “perfect” body based on the youthful white European male came about just as the voyages of discovery led to encounters with native peoples whose much-discussed “nakedness” suggested a lack of civilisation to Europeans, and justified slavery and forced conversion to Christianity.
Moreover, European culture in the 15th and 16th centuries was characterised by ingrained misogyny. There were few female artists (though the exceptions, such as the wonderful Sofonisba Anguissola, deserve to be better known), and from the early 16th century images of naked women provided a shared pleasure for powerful men who used them to show off their controlled virility. There is a performative eroticism in correspondence between the dukes, princes and kings who held soirées in rooms adorned with nudes by Raphael, Titian or Correggio, as they praised each other for their ability to recognise a comely female body in art and in life. Indeed, the idea of the female nude being mainly about the male artistic imagination – a muse whose individuality is effaced in favour of the recording of an eternal feminine beauty – is part of the new art theory of this period.
Our aim for the exhibition is to stimulate intellectual and artistic inquiry, and its potential for controversy is hardly surprising. In the Renaissance too, the nude provoked heated debate, with artists and writers arguing with scandalised churchmen about the morality of bared bodies. The continued ability of these works to elicit strong reactions is testament to the nude’s enduring power.
• Jill Burke is a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and an international expert on Italian Renaissance art
