The Female Nude in Italian Renaissance Art

FIRST THINGS FIRST . . . .

How and why do we assign meaning to the nude female body? From antiquity to today, images of the female nude have provoked a wide array of responses across time and place ranging from erotic fascination, moralistic disgust, pornographic voyeurism, and artistic appreciation. This lesson details the development of the female nude in the art of the Italian Renaissance from the late fourteenth century through the sixteenth century. We will consider the specificity of the female nude in Renaissance Italy but also connect this artistic movement to the similarities and differences of how we view the naked female body in the contemporary world. By moving chronologically through the most significant examples of the female nude, this lesson demonstrates how the artistic interest in depicting the nude female body coincided with the “rebirth” of Classical art and culture. Students should be prompted to think critically about how the nude female body functioned differently in Renaissance culture and how religious decorum impacted the permissibility of depicting the nude. Most importantly, students should be able to understand how images of the female nude both produced and reinforced beliefs about gender and sexuality in Renaissance Italy.

Themes

    • 1.  Religious vs. Secular Nudes: Before the re-emergence of Classical art in the late fourteenth century, female nudity was typically only depicted in religious scenes that necessarily called for images of the unclothed body including depictions of Adam and Eve and the Virgin breastfeeding the infant Christ. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the female nude became a hallmark of secular art where eroticism could be more readily embraced by artists. However, an important characteristic of the Renaissance female nude is the intentional blurring of lines between sacred and erotic, allegorical and pornographic. 
    • 2. The Female Nude and Marriage Paintings: Throughout the Renaissance, the female nude was often depicted on objects commissioned for or associated with the marriage of two individuals. Renaissance artists and philosophers recast the ancient goddess Venus as a deity of marriage and procreative rather than carnal sexuality, so it became permissible and appropriate for her nude figure to be included in nuptial art. The demographic devastation of the Black Death in Italy resulted in a societal transformation where reproduction carried out by the female body became a primary cultural preoccupation. Therefore, the beauty and fertility of the nude Venus served as an apt exemplum for Renaissance brides who could emulate her sexuality only for the socially acceptable end of bearing children. 
    • 3. Classical Inspiration and Renaissance Innovation: Renaissance artists were undoubtedly inspired by the nude sculptures unearthed from antiquity and studied through drawing and copying. Yet rather than merely emulating their ancient predecessors, fifteenth and sixteenth artists were constantly innovating depictions of the female nude that diverged from Classical prototypes and served specific purposes in Renaissance culture. Key to the innovation of the female nude in the Renaissance are the ways in which painters created less sculptural and more flesh-like nudes in the oil medium beginning in the sixteenth century. 
    • 4. The Female Nude and Renaissance Ideologies of Gender and Sexuality: Given the marital and sociocultural connotations of many Renaissance female nudes, these images can be understood to express and produce Renaissance ideologies about female gender and sexuality. The artistic idealization of the female figure and the belief in the imperfection of the nude female body certainly impacted the gendered hierarchy of Renaissance society, in which women, like their painted counterparts, were controlled and shaped by men. Due in part to the legacy of Eve, women were believed to possess an insatiable lust, ruled by the body, and the capability to seduce men to sin, thereby justifying men’s control of women’s chastity through marriage. As inheritors of Eve’s original sin, women were often taught to view their own nudity with shame yet at the same time could celebrate the nude body’s capacity for reproduction. The eroticization of the nude female body in Renaissance art reflects a cultural contradiction by which women’s bodies were simultaneously feared and desired, controlled and aestheticized, denigrated and idealized. Instructors could prompt students to think more broadly about these contradictions and how they manifest in our own lives and contemporary culture and media. 
  • 5. Florentine vs. Venetian Approaches to the Female Nude: The two rival schools of painting in the sixteenth century in Florence and Venice differed stylistically and philosophically in the depiction of the female nude. Important for our study of the female nude is the fact that women in Renaissance Venice enjoyed many more legal freedoms than their counterparts in Florence, and so students should consider how this might have affected the depiction of the female body in the art of both cities. Women in Venice had the right to control property and write wills, whereas Florentine women required a male guardian or agent to engage in legal matters on their behalf. Florentine art was shaped by a tradition of disegno, or design and draftsmanship, and so artists emphasized the idealized, sculptural form of the human body rooted in the study of antiquity. Florentine painters were primarily concerned with proportion and geometry, and artists typically used the female body as a vehicle for allegorical or intellectual meaning. The Venetian School was influenced by its embrace of colore, or color and painterly effects, and artists worked in a much more impressionistic manner than the Florentines. Venetian painters employed luminous colors, diffused light, and loose brushwork to convey the sensuous and tactile qualities of the female body. Venetian nudes were typically more erotic and seductive as artists sought to evoke the beholder’s sexual desire as testament to their mimetic skill.   

Background Readings

Anderson, Jaynie. “Giorgione, Titian, and the Sleeping Venus.” In Tiziano e Venezia: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, edited by Massimo Gemin and Giannantonio Paladini, 334-342. Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1981. 

Bernstein, Joanne G. “The Female Model and the Renaissance Nude: Durer, Giorgione, and Raphael,” Artibus et Historiae vol. 13, no. 26 (1992): 49-63. 

Burke, Jill. The Italian Renaissance Nude. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

Burke, Jill. “Sex and Spirituality in 1500s Rome: Sebastiano Del Piombo’s Martyrdom of Saint Agatha.” The Art Bulletin 88, no. 3, 2006: 482–95. 

Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Cranston, Jodi. “The Disordered Bed in The Sleeping Venus.” In Das haptische Bild: Körperhafte Bilderfahrung in der Neuzeit, edited by Markus Rath, Jörg Trempler, and Iris Wenderholm, 31-49. Munich: Akademie Verlag, 2013.

Dunlop, Anne. “Flesh and the Feminine: Early-Renaissance Images of the Madonna with Eve at Her Feet.” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2002): 127-147. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600481. 

Goffen, Rona. “Bellini’s Nude with Mirror,” Venezia Cinquecento 1/2 (1991): 185-199. 

Goffen, Rona. “Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love: Individuality and Sexuality in a Renaissance Marriage Picture.” Studies in the History of Art 45 (1993): 120–144.

Goffen, Rona. “Sex, Space, and Social History in Titian’s Venus of Urbino.” In Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” edited by Rona Goffen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Miles, Margaret R. “The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: Nudity, Gender, and Religious Meaning in Tuscan Early Renaissance Culture.” In The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard 26-37. New York: Icon Editions, 1992.

Nuttall, Paula. “Reconsidering the Nude: Northern Tradition and Venetian Innovation.” In The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, edited by Sherry M. Lindquist, 299-318. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. 

Rosand, David. “Venereal Hermeneutics: Reading Titian’s Venus of Urbino.” In Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr, edited by John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto, 263-279. New York: Italica Press, 1991. 

Tinagli, Paola. “Female Nudes in Renaissance Art” In Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, and Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Glossary

Cinquecento- Italian term for the sixteenth century; literally “five hundred”

Eroticism- the artistic representation of the human body in ways that evoke sexual desire or arousal 

Humanism– cultural and intellectual movement during the Renaissance that saw the revival of Greco-Roman literature, art, and philosophy and placed the human being rather than God at the center of inquiry and artistic representation 

Idealization- the artistic practice of representing subjects not as they appear in nature but as perfected and beautiful according to cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic ideals

Male Gaze- refers to the ways in which women are often sexually objectified in the visual arts for the pleasure of the masculine viewer, thereby reproducing the gendered hierarchy of power; originally coined by film theorist Laura Mulvey in her feminist study of narrative cinema  

Naked/Nude- a binary theorized by art historian Kenneth Clark to describe the depiction of the unclothed body in Western art. Clark defines the nude as idealized, aestheticized, and shaped by artistic conventions, whereas the naked is simply an unclothed body that is often shameful, vulnerable, and imperfect. The nude was often associated with a goddess or mythological/literary figure and not a known individual. Clark would consider most unclothed female figures of the Italian Renaissance to be nudes given that most are heavily stylized and represent a sophisticated interest of the artist and viewer. However, the differentiation is largely arbitrary and has been contested by most later art historians 

Naturalism- styles and forms drawn from close observation of the natural world by artists 

Neoplatonism– revival of philosophical framework of Plato during the Renaissance by thinkers like Marsilio Ficino that sought to express how physical beauty, especially that of the human body, could serve as a means to access divine beauty and divine truths

Quattrocento- Italian term for the fifteenth century; literally “four hundred” 

Recumbent Nude– the depiction of a naked figure reclining in a horizontal pose, often in a sensuous or erotic mode

Venus Pudica– meaning “modest Venus” in Latin; a pose originating in Greco-Roman art in which a nude female figure covers her her breasts with one hand and her vulva with the other in a gesture of modesty. Paradoxically, this gesture draws attention to the very areas being concealed and creates visual tension between modesty and erotic display

Zeuxian Gaze- refers to the ancient Greek artist Zeuxis who was tasked with depicting the beautiful Helen of Troy and created a composite of body parts from many different women to produce the perfect female figure. In Renaissance art, the legend of Zeuxis informed how artists approached the depiction of the female nude and how men subsequently viewed real Renaissance women as a body in beautiful parts. Coined by art historian Jill Burke, the term highlights another way in which the development of the female nude championed male creativity at the expense of female objectification.

CONTENT SUGGESTIONS

A slide show of the works to be discussed in the lesson plan. 

Key questions for the lecture: 

  1. Compare the cultural contradictions regarding the representation of the female body during the Renaissance to our own historical moment.
  2. Apply your knowledge of the Renaissance female nude to current debates over the censorship of nude art on social media and in college classrooms. 
  3. Why do you think images of the female nude became permissible in different settings during the Renaissance?
  4. Analyze how images of the female nude express Renaissance beliefs about gender and sexuality.  
  5. Assess the differences between the male and female viewer experience of Renaissance images of the female nude.                                                                                                                                                  

In one hour and fifteen-minute lecture you should be able to cover the following:                               

  • 1. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Madonna del Latte, c. 1330 tempera on panel. Saint Bernardino Oratory and Diocesan Museum of Holy Art, Siena. 
  • 2. Olivuccio di Ciccarello, The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve, c. 1400, tempera and gold on wood panel. The Cleveland Museum of Art. 
  • 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, “Effects of Good Government in the Countryside” from Allegory of Good and Bad Government, c. 1338-1340, fresco. Sala dei Nove, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.  
  • 4. Masaccio, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, c. 1425, fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. 
  • 5. Masolino, The Temptation of Adam and Eve, c. 1425, fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. 
  • 6. Giovanni di Ser Giovanni (Lo Scheggia), Nuptual Chest with Episodes from the Reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines and Nude Female Figure, c. 1450-1475, tempera on panel. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
  • 7. Giovanni di Ser Giovanni (Lo Scheggia), Nuptual Chest with Episodes from the Reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines and Nude Male Figure, c. 1450-1475, tempera on panel. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.
  • 8. Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, c. 1484-86, oil on canvas. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. 
  • 9. Medici Venus, late 2nd to early 1st century BCE, marble. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. 
  • 10. Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, c. 1484-86, oil on canvas. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.
  • 11. Giovanni Bellini, Young Woman at her Toilette, 1515, oil on wood. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 
  • 12. Raphael, La Fornarina, 1518-19, oil on panel. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome.
  • 13. Giorgione (finished by Titian), Sleeping Venus, c. 1507-10, oil on canvas. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
  • 14. Titian, Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1514, oil on canvas. Borghese Gallery, Rome.
  • 15. Lorenzo Lotto, Venus and Cupid, 1520s, oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
  • 16. Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. 
  • 17. Sebastiano del Piombo, The Martyrdom of St. Agatha, 1520, oil on wood. Palazzo Pitti, Florence. 
  • 18. Michelangelo Buonarotti, Allegory of Night, 1524-31, marble. Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, Medici Chapel, New Sacristy, San Lorenzo, Florence 
  • 19. Pontormo after Michelangelo, Venus and Cupid, 1532-34, oil on canvas. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence
  • 20. Titian, Danaë, 1544-46, oil on canvas. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. 
  • 21. Titian, Mars, Venus, and Amor, c. 1530, oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
  • 22. Lavinia Fontana, Mars and Venus, ca. 1559, oil on canvas. Fundación Casa De Alba, Madrid.

For images click: here 

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538, oil on canvas. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.

 

Introduction to the topic

The story of the Renaissance nude begins in the fourteenth century when Italian artist studying the remnants of Greco-Roman art began to emulate ancient visual culture in which depictions of the nude body were commonplace. Prior to the “rebirth” of Classical art and culture, medieval artists typically did not represent the naked female body in secular contexts due to its association with eroticism, which was condemned by the Catholic Church. When necessary to depict in medieval religious art, the female nude was often used to disparage female sexuality according to Catholic doctrine. Therefore, the reemergence of the female nude in both secular and sacred art of the Renaissance represented a syncretism of Catholic beliefs about the body and the emulation of Classical art and philosophy. The female nude would later come to play a key role in the flourishing humanistic discourse surrounding the beauty of art and the capabilities of the male genius. 

Lesson

During the earliest period of the Renaissance, most of the permissible depictions of the female nude were works of religious art where female nudity was doctrinally necessary. The breastfeeding Madonna, or the Madonna Lactans, is an important example of an early female nude type accepted by the Church. Though an exposed breast might seem sexualized or erotic to modern-day viewers, during the fourteenth century, viewers of devotional images like Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte likely understood the bared breast as a source of sustenance for the Christ Child. The Virgin’s breast appears almost dislocated from the rest of her body, and the lack of anatomical accuracy makes the nudity even less accessible to the viewer. Similarly, The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve is an altarpiece from the beginning of the fifteenth century that depicts the breastfeeding Madonna as the savior of the nude Eve lying recumbent at her feet, whose Original Sin would be redeemed with the coming of Christ. Beyond the theological meaning of the work, the inclusion of a nude female body alongside the Virgin anticipates the Renaissance interest in integrating the Classical and the sacred. Additionally, the juxtaposition of the Virgin and Eve can be seen through the lens of contemporary gender roles in which women who did not conform to the ideal chastity of the Madonna were ostracized by patriarchal society. We can also see the female nude becoming a key part of the painting’s structure rather than a marginal feature, and this aligns with the Renaissance project of granting the human figure greater narrative and symbolic weight. The iconography of the recumbent female nude that we see here will become especially significant in the sixteenth century, and we can see The Madonna of Humility with the Temptation of Eve as a transitional work bridging the worlds of medieval and Renaissance Italy. 

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the female nude could embody an allegory such as justice, thereby using Classical forms to convey new virtues for a Renaissance audience. Ambrogio Lorenzetti includes the nude virtue of Securitas in his Allegory of Good and Bad Government fresco cycle for the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, which was the seat of governance for the city. The practice of allegorizing virtues or abstract concepts as nude female figures dates back to the art of Classical antiquity and Lorenzetti’s adoption of this format indicates a desire to link the Republic of Siena to its Classical predecessors. The female figure’s nudity fits within the narrative of the larger fresco cycle because her lack of clothing symbolizes the transparency that good governments must practice when enacting justice. In this example, female nudity could be read as a sign of virtue if the meaning was allegorical, thereby dispelling any accusations of mere eroticism. 

Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine represents one of the first significant examples of Florentine artists honing a new form of naturalism in the first half of the fifteenth century. Unlike Cicarello’s rather two-dimensional Eve, Masaccio’s figures are granted weight and lifelikeness, as the artist uses shading to create dimension. Masaccio’s Eve is represented in a cry of agony during her expulsion and provides an early illustration of how Renaissance artists drew upon the expressive potential of the nude female body. However, Masaccio depicts Eve covering her breasts and genitalia in a gesture of shameful modesty, which aligns with the narrative of the Expulsion. The allusion to Eve’s shame could also be read as emblematic of the social stigma surrounding the nude female body. Though painted around the same time as Masaccio’s Expulsion in 1426, Masolino’s Temptation of Adam and Eve nearby in the Brancacci Chapel suggests that the early Quattrocento was a period in which artistic conceptions of the nude body were constantly in flux. Without the shame and grief of Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, Masolino’s figures are unaware of their nudity, in part due to the Edenic narrative, yet the attention to naturalism suggests the artist’s interest in the nude human body beyond its ecclesiastical purposes. This shifting attitude towards Adam and Eve’s nudity speaks to the ways in which the spread of Renaissance humanism altered how the nude human body was perceived and represented in works of art.

Live figure studies, though more often done of the male nude in the fifteenth century, offered Renaissance artists the ability to study the human body through the act of drawing. In his manual on the art of painting, fourteenth-century artist Cennino Cennini recommended that contemporary artists “leave out women because none of them have perfect proportions,” unlike the masculine body, which possessed ideal geometry. During this early period of the Renaissance, artists were concerned with perfecting the human form based on Classical prototypes that favored the nude male body. This bias against the female body rooted in Aristotelian thought impacted the comparative scarcity of female nudes in fifteenth century art. 

In his writings on human reproduction, Aristotle believed that the male provided the form of life through semen that contained the active, determining principles and rational order. Women, on the other hand, provided matter, which Aristotle defined as the passive substrate that contained no purpose without the masculine form. The Renaissance saw a significant revival of Aristotelian philosophy through the belief that men shaped culture, while women functioned as inert vessels,

which would prove influential in the representation of the female body. Pisanello’s Four Studies of a Female Nude is one of the first examples of a figure study of a nude female figure and demonstrates the growing interest in depicting the human body in art as it was seen in nature, which would progressively transform the style of Renaissance art. 

Other than religious art and figure studies, the fifteenth-century female nude also appeared on decorative arts in a domestic context. Around mid-century, artists began including recumbent male and female nude figures inside the lids of Florentine marriage chests like the Nuptual Chests with Episodes from the Reconciliation of the Romans and Sabines. Historically, painted cassoni were commissioned in pairs for the husband and wife as wedding gifts and decorated with moralizing imagery meant to serve as exempla for virtuous behavior within the marriage. Both the male and female figures are depicted in an erotic mode, and the recumbent pose of the nude figures would become highly influential to artists of the sixteenth century. While the male figure is clothed in a small undergarment, the female figure appears entirely nude with only her arms to cover her. Scholars largely agree that the nude figures functioned as talismans to enhance the fertility of the bride during consummation and represent a form of sympathetic magic intended to mediate women’s sexuality. The erotic depiction of the nude figures in the cassoni therefore speaks to the role of art in the Renaissance culture of licit sexuality within a marriage for the purpose of conceiving children. 

By the late Quattrocento, the nude became present not only in cassoni, where their contents could be concealed, but in large-scale history painting, to be hung in the semi-private space of the camera. Most notably, artists such as Sandro Botticelli of Florence began to consciously emulate Classical forms of the female body in mythological painting. Botticelli and his contemporaries practiced drawing after both Classical sculpture and live models in order to hone their skills at representing the most idealized bodies in the style of the ancients. Much like the story of the ancient artist Zeuxis, who depicted parts from many different women to create the perfect representation of Helen of Troy, the goal of artists in the late fifteenth century was to portray the nude female body as an idealized form, which simultaneously announced the artist’s intellectual talent. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is a Quattrocento quotation of the Classical Venus de’ Medici sculpture in which Venus is represented in the pudica pose, attempting to hide her nakedness with her arms. Most likely commissioned as marriage pictures for a member of the Medici family, the Birth of Venus and its pendant Primavera incorporate figures from Greco-Roman mythology to construct an elaborate allegory about love and beauty. Ernst Gombrich has famously interpreted The Birth of Venus as a reference to secular, humanistic discourse prevalent at the Medici court of Florence and theorizes that the nude Venus evokes the idea of Neoplatonic divine beauty through pagan forms.

Painters of the sixteenth century began distancing themselves from Greco-Roman art of antiquity by depicting female nudes as more naturalistic and less sculptural. Artists omitted clear attributes of Venus, such as Cupid or the seashell, in order to create nudes more ambiguous in nature. Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini painted one of the first examples of such secular nudes at the end of his life around 1515 in his Young Woman at Her Toilette. Bellini depicts the nude woman in the act of dressing as she gazes at her reflection in a mirror. Divorced from any mythological content and set within a domestic interior, this painting represents a wholly original and novel way of representing the female nude. Unlike Botticelli’s sculptural Venus, Bellini’s nude woman is painted in a softer mode that emphasizes the tactility and lifelikeness of her bare skin. These differences would come to define the divergent traditions of painting the nude in Florence and Venice throughout the sixteenth century. Especially erotic is the fact that the nude woman could be any contemporary Venetian lady, given that her headdress was only worn by married women of the time. On the surface of the Turkish carpet, Bellini signs his name on a small piece of paper, and by doing so, claims ownership of his creation that would come to be seen as a metaphor for the beauty of painting.  

Around the same time as the creation of Bellini’s Young Woman at Her Toilette, Raphael also began painting secular female nudes devoid of mythological attributes. As a painter of the High Renaissance working in Rome, Raphael was principally concerned with depicting idealized beauty rooted in the Classical tradition. His female nude La Fornarina is an enigmatic painting that has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Some believe she is a depiction of Raphael’s mistress, a baker’s daughter, who served as Raphael’s muse. The tendency in art history to cast an unknown yet beautiful female subject as the artist’s mistress/muse is an important development in the discourse of Renaissance art. Art historians often impose a biographic reading onto paintings of unknown beautiful women as a way to explain their anonymity, but this can overstate the agency of the male artist and inaccurately accentuate the muse/genius trope. Seated in a Venus pudica pose, the nude woman holds drapery against her bare skin in a gesture of modesty, yet the transparency of the fabric exposes her further and heightens the erotic appeal of the painting. Unlike Bellini’s nude, La Fornarina meets the gaze of the viewer, which invites us to question whether she is a subject with agency or an object of erotic display. Does female portraiture of this type memorialize the subject or transform her into an object? Raphael has inscribed his name in the nude woman’s arm band much like Bellini’s cartellino in Young Woman at Her Toilette, which has been interpreted as his profession of love—or even possession of the unknown subject. How might Raphael’s inscription on the subject’s arm band change how we see her as an object or a subject?  Whether La Fornarina is a depiction of Raphael’s beloved or the artist’s fantasy of a beautiful woman, the painting signals a shift in depictions of the female nude in which the artist’s identity and demonstration of creative genius become as significant as the subject represented.  

Back in Venice, two of Giovanni Bellini’s students became some of the most innovative painters of the female nude in the sixteenth century. Giorgione and Titian were part of a new generation of Venetian artists working in a more impressionistic, sensual style concerned with conveying the optical effects of light and atmosphere often through the application of rich colors. Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, which was finished by Titian after he died tragically young from the plague, represented a novel approach to the female nude when it was completed around 1510. Originally commissioned by the Venetian official Girolamo Marcello, the painting was likely a kind of marriage picture intended to be hung above the marital bed much like the recumbent nudes we saw earlier inside Florentine marriage chests. In the sixteenth century, the identity of the sleeping Venus would have been easier to discern, as a depiction of cupid alongside her was painted over at some point in the nineteenth century. The painting is one of the first autonomous nudes of the Renaissance in which the naked female body is the principal subject of the work. The ways in which the curves of Venus’s body echo the rolling hills of the landscape behind her invite the viewer to contemplate the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world. By depicting Venus asleep, Giorgione places the viewer in the role of a voyeur, which heightens the erotic appeal of the highly sexualized painting. 

After Giorgione’s death, Titian became one of the primary painters of the female nude in the Venetian ambit. His Sacred and Profane Love, another marriage picture, demonstrates how the female nude could be used to advertise the fertility and sexuality of married couples. This painting was originally commissioned in 1514 to honor the wedding of a Paduan noblewoman, Laura Bagarotto, to the future grand chancellor of Venice, Nicolò Aurelio. Inspired by the philosophies of Neoplatonism, the clothed figure in the guise of the bride, Laura, represents profane or mortal love and the nude figure of Venus represents sacred or divine love. The idealized nude serves as a body double for Laura and functions as an allusion to the bride’s sexuality and fertility, which was intrinsic to her identity as a wife in Renaissance Italy. Further supporting this interpretation is the putto plunging his hand into the sarcophagus and forcing water to flow out of the spout, thereby signifying the fertility of the marriage. Laura’s knowing glance out at the viewer could express love for her husband, the purported viewer, yet it also affirms Laura’s awareness of how her own sexuality contributes to her social status as a wife. 

The female nude as Venus continued to function as a symbol of female fertility throughout the sixteenth century. The marital realm provided a permissible arena for the display of such nudes given that the ultimate goal of Renaissance marriage was reproduction, which required both fertility and sexual activity between the married couple. Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto’s Venus and Cupid is a painting like the Sacred and Profane Love that employs the female nude to convey a desire for fertility but does so in a much more erotic way. The recumbent Venus, aware of her nudity, makes eye contact with the viewer as her hand lightly touches her breast. Symbols of fertility abound throughout the scene including the urinating cupid and the conch shell that resembles female genitalia. Venus’s crown and veil have been identified as adornments worn by contemporary Venetian brides, which perhaps speaks to the reason for the painting’s commission. Lotto draws on Classical mythology to create a highly sexualized nude that both serves a specific social function and reinforces the ideals of femininity in the sixteenth century. 

In the same vein as Lotto’s Venus and Cupid is Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which was likely also a marriage picture commissioned by Guidobaldo della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino. However, unlike Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus and Lotto’s Venus and Cupid, the Venus of Urbino is not immediately identifiable as the goddess and lacks her common attributes, which has led to a variety of interpretations of the painting. Some have seen the painting as merely a pornographic image of a nude woman for the private viewing of the Duke. Others see the nude figure as a portrait of a specific courtesan or mistress offering up her body for visual consumption. Yet these interpretations ignore the complex function of these kinds of pictures of recumbent female nudes within the culture of marital sexuality during the Renaissance. The Venus of Urbino is certainly inspired by the composition of Giorgione and Titian’s Sleeping Venus, which was a known marriage commission. The marriage chests opened by the servant in the background of the painting alludes to the circumstances surrounding the commission. The combination of the marriage chests and a recumbent nude can even be argued to draw inspiration from the nude figures painted inside fifteenth-century cassoni. Further, while the recumbent Venus is covering herself in a pudica gesture, Titian emphasizes rather than conceals the woman’s nudity. The caressing motion of her hand has been identified as a specifically sexual gesture that lends an erotic charge to the painting but could also refer to sexual practices encouraged by women hoping to conceive. 

Within the same room of Guidobaldo della Rovere’s palazzo, Sebastiano del Piombo’s painting of The Martyrdom of St. Agatha was hung alongside the Venus of Urbino. The coexistence of a sacred nude and a secular nude within the same collection demonstrates how the line between the religious and the erotic female nude was continuously blurred in the sixteenth century. Della Rovere’s ownership of both paintings additionally tells us about his tastes as a collector and patron of art. The figure of Saint Agatha is inspired by ancient statuary of Venus, and del Piombo gives her beautiful, idealized features. Art historians have read this painting as intentionally sexualized to evoke erotic desire from the viewer. The eroticism of a female saint might be considered blasphemous by today’s standards, yet The Martyrdom of St. Agatha serves as a testament to the ambivalence and subversion surrounding the decorum of sexuality in Renaissance painting. 

As primarily a sculptor rather than painter, Michelangelo was developing a very different kind of female nude in Florence separate from those we have seen in the Venetian circle. Michelangelo’s approach to the female nude can be explained, in part, by his belief that the perfect body was male and that ideal beauty granted by God resided in the male form. In 1520, Cardinel Giulio de’ Medici and the future Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to sculpt two tombs for his relatives in the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo in Florence. The tombs for Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici contain portraits of the deceased and four allegorical nude figures of Day, Dawn, Night, and Dusk. The female nude figure of Night is particularly significant for the ways in which it expressed Michelangelo’s artistic ideals and beliefs about women. Night is often characterized as androgynous and would appear as an athletic male nude if not for the two breasts that appear as an afterthought. Even when tasked with depicting the female nude, Michelangelo defaulted to the male ideal, which harkens back to Cennino Cennini’s artist’s manual rooted in Aristotelian beliefs about gender inequality. Unlike the sensual nudes by Titian and Giorgione, Night is hardened, cold, muscular and not heavily eroticized. 

Further, even Michelangelo’s painted female nudes have a sculptural quality to them that demonstrates the Florentine reliance on idealized ancient statuary. Michelangelo’s Venus and Cupid, now lost and only known to us through a contemporary copy by Pontormo, shares many formal qualities with his Night. The body of Venus is muscular, athletic, and robust like the marble body of Night. Venus appears hardened and sculptural, and her female anatomy is not emphasized. Other than her breasts, the androgynous body of Venus could belong to a heroic male nude rather than the goddess of divine love and sexuality. We can see how even in his depiction of Venus Michelangelo viewed the female nude through the lens of masculine superiority and the perfection of the male form. Art historians have even noted the phallic appearance of Cupid’s foot between Venus’s thighs. Though the hint of a kiss between Venus and Cupid lends the painting a slight erotic charge, the overall effect is not nearly as sensual as Venetian paintings like Titian’s Venus of Urbino. This can be explained by distinct artistic styles and beliefs about the artistic representation of the human body that differed in Florence and Venice. 

In 1545, Titian went to Rome and worked on a commission for the grandson of the Pope, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. His Danaë depicts a typically Venetian soft, sensual female nude as the figure from mythology who was impregnated by Zeus in the guise of a shower of golden coins. The Danaë is a Venetian response to the style of painting in the Roman milieu and a nod to Michelangelo, given that Titian based her pose on Michelangelo’s painting of Leda, which was the inspiration for Night. By using Michelangelo’s forms to create an erotic, painterly representation of the female nude, Titian was engaging in artistic competition and rivalry with Michelangelo and the Florentine School of painting. At this stage of the Renaissance, the depiction of the female nude became an important statement of artistic skill and innovation, and the identity of the male artist was intertwined with the nude subject. In the sixteenth century, the Florentine and the Venetian schools of painting continued an ongoing dispute between the artistic values colore favored by the Venetians and disegno favored by Florentines. This important artistic debate in the history of art is exemplified by the divergence between the impressionistic, seductive nudes of Titian and the athletic, sculptural nudes by Michelangelo. 

The ways in which the female nude could express ideas about artistic identity and skill were further developed by Lavinia Fontana, who was one of the first female artists to paint the female nude during the Renaissance. Prior to Lavinia Fontana’s career in the second half of the sixteenth century, women were generally barred from painting the nude due to misogynistic beliefs about decorum. Women were also not typically permitted to paint history paintings, as it was believed that this highest genre of painting could not be adequately served by a woman artist. Coming from a liberal background in Bologna, Lavinia Fontana challenged these barriers to women artists, and her Mars and Venus is a self-conscious statement of artistic skill. Fontana depicts Mars, enraptured by the sight of the nude Venus, placing his hand on her bare bottom. Venus, who is only seen from behind, glances knowingly over her shoulder at the viewer. The way that Venus has assumed complete control over Mars with her beauty has been interpreted as a testament to the seductive powers of painting to captivate the male viewer. A comparison with Titian’s treatment of the same subject reveals how Fontana imbued her Venus with much more agency over Mars, as she was pressed to think through how her female identity as the artist might impact the painting’s reception. By drawing on the expressive and allegorical valence of the female nude, Fontana demonstrates that the power of her art and the height of her skill would not be undermined by her gender. In this case, Venus’s conquest of Mars can be read as an empowering example of the female nude painted by a determined female artist.

DELIVERY SUGGESTIONS

  • When introducing the first type of female nudes (the Madonna Lactans) the instructor could ask students whether they would consider this a true “nude.” In order to connect this material to contemporary issues, students could be asked about the tendency to censor images of breastfeeding on social media and internet websites. How does the history of this kind of depiction in a religious context clash with our contemporary reception of images of the breastfeeding mother? 
  • The instructor could provide students with an excerpt from Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals as an exercise in engaging with primary sources. The sections from Book II Chapters 1-3 will deal with Aristotle’s belief that the male provided the generative matter while the female served as a passive vessel for the growth of the matter into a human. Students could also be given the section of Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’arte in which the artist states that no women have perfect proportions (Chapter 70) to compare with the passage in On the Generation of Animals in which the female is described as a “deformed male” (Aristotle, Book II, Chapter 3, 737). Students could be asked how Aristotle conflates the biological roles of reproduction with gender roles and what effect this philosophy might have on society. In order to connect these ideas to the visual material for the course, students should consider the idea that art itself was a form of generation during the Renaissance. How might this impact the artist’s rendering of the subject of the female nude? How did Aristotle’s ideas about gender transfer to the Renaissance practice of painting?
  • Some group activities in class could center around the comparison of Titian’s Danäe and Michelangelo’s Night, by asking the students to consider why these approaches to the female nude look so different from an artistic and cultural perspective. Before explaining Titian’s Venus of Urbino, students could be asked to split up into groups and use visual analysis skills to come up with a function or meaning for the painting. Regardless of the work of art, I think it’s always productive to ask the students how they think the original viewer was intended to look at an image of the female nude, especially since many Renaissance paintings are dependent on the viewer’s response. 
  • Before introducing Lavinia Fontana, I have found it productive to have the students compare her painting of Venus and Mars with the same subject by Titian and ask them what they notice about the differences between the two approaches to an erotic painting. Then, I reveal that the artist of Venus and Mars was a woman and ask them to consider how Fontana’s gender and position in society may have impacted her artistic choices. 
  • Depending on the familiarity of the class with Classical art, it might be helpful to provide a few slides about Greco-Roman sculpture and the most important examples of nude female sculpture from antiquity. This could include a brief discussion about the form and function of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos and its derivatives.
  • Each time I have taught the Renaissance nude, students have become more and more interested in the ways in which the female nude reflected (often misogynistic) beliefs about the female gender. When teaching problematic paintings like Titian’s Rape of Europa or Tintoretto’s Susanna and the Elders, I’ve found that many students were interested in addressing the question of consent and how these paintings relate to the larger culture of sexuality in the Renaissance. Given the rise of Fourth Wave Feminism and the popularization of feminist theory through digital media, I think a lot of students filter these images of the nude female body through their often-sophisticated understanding of gender inequality, which has enriched our classroom discussions surrounding the material.

AT THE END OF CLASS…

Summarize the take-aways from the lesson. Include points of further discussion. 

  • The re-emergence of the female nude in the fifteenth century was due, in part, to the revival of Classical art and literature and the development of Renaissance Humanism 
  • Though Renaissance artists often emulated ancient female nudes, they also contributed significant innovations in the representation of the naked female body 
  • One of the key developments of the Renaissance was the idea of the male artistic genius, whose paintings of the beautiful female nude could be read as a metaphor for the beauty of his art 
  • The female nude could express certain allegories in the style of Classical art yet also virtues specific to Renaissance society such as marriage and fertility
  • Through the development of the idealized female nude, Renaissance artists both produced and reinforced ideologies of gender and sexuality
  • Whether sacred or secular, the female nude could be intentionally created to evoke erotic desire from the viewer, who is often cast in the role of the voyeur
  • While Florentine painters were more concerned with the idealized geometry and proportions of the nude female body, Venetian painters emphasized the nude female body’s sensuous and seductive qualities. Further lessons could focus on how other genres of Renaissance art were involved in the rivalry between disegno and colore 
  • Many examples of the female nude from the Renaissance lead us to question of the role of the male gaze, which can be further explored in other time periods or geographies of art history   
  • The ways in which representations of the female nude developed in the Renaissance is quite different from the male nude, which could be a point of further discussion 

FURTHER RESOURCES

  • Rachel Kline is a sixth year PhD candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Boston University studying the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance. Prior to attending BU, Rachel earned a dual B.A. in the history of art and anthropology with a minor in Italian from Haverford College. Rachel’s primary area of research is the female nude and its relationship to Renaissance ideologies of gender and sexuality. Rachel is especially interested in the secular domestic arts of fifteenth-century Italy and the role of the female viewer in determining their meaning. Currently, Rachel is writing her dissertation entitled, “Undressing the Renaissance Woman: The Female Nude in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” which will center female viewership by exploring representations of the female nude inside marriage chests and on objects of domestic material culture from Florence to Venice. Rachel’s work on Renaissance and Baroque art has been published in SEQUITUR and Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies.