The Renaissance Nude

Inspired by a renewed interest in classical sculpture and closer study of nature, Renaissance artists made the nude body ever more vibrant, lifelike, and central to their practice. Yet, pious European Renaissance society was troubled by the nude and its new sensuality—a conflicted response echoed in the world today, where images of nudity have become ubiquitous. 

This exhibition, with more than 100 objects by Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Dürer, and others, traces the nude’s controversial emergence and its transformative effect on European art and culture.

The nude—the unclothed or partially clothed human body—has been featured in European art for millennia. After 1400, with the waning of the Middle Ages, artists depicted nudes as increasingly three-dimensional, vibrant, and lifelike— in short, more immediate and real. They employed diverse means: in Italy through a return to the models of ancient Greek and Roman art, and in northern Europe through refinements to the technique of painting in oils that enabled painters to capture textures—of flesh, of hair, of the sparkle in an eye—with unprecedented truth to nature. In concert with new scientific approaches, artists across Europe studied nature—including the human body—with increasing specificity and deliberation. 

The meaningful depiction of the human form became the highest aspiration for artists, and their efforts often resulted in figures of notable sensuality. For Christians, however—who represented most of European society at the time—the nude body could be disturbing, arousing personal desire. Their conflicted responses are mirrored in our own body-obsessed era, filled with imagery of nudity.

The Renaissance Nude examines the developments that elevated the nude to a pivotal role in art making between 1400 and 1530. Organized thematically, the exhibition juxtaposes works in different media and from different regions of Europe to demonstrate that depictions of the nude expressed a range of formal ideals while also embodying a wide range of body types, physical conditions, and meanings.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image: Allegory of Fortune, c.1530, Dosso Dossi (Giovanni di Niccolò de Lutero), oil on canvas. The J. Paul Getty Museum

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, The Renaissance Nude, reflects an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future.  This volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance.  Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective.  The book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south;  it also introduces names that deserve to be known better.  From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

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