How Renaissance art still shapes our attitude towards nudity today

When I walked through the doors of The Renaissance Nude exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I did, however, anticipate the same old monolithic discourse as always: white female bodies painted by white men for white people to enjoy.

Of course, analysis of the male gaze and feminist theory weren’t quite a thing in 15th and 16th century Europe, as the exhibition curator Per Rumberg kindly reminds me when I broach the subject of representation. Fair enough. But it also struck me that enlisting two male lead curators to deliver a show on nudity in 2019, felt like a questionable choice.

But let’s go back to what the exhibition is about. When, four years ago, curator Thomas Kren started to work on the original iteration of the exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, he was most concerned with nudity as a challenge to Christianity and perceptions of the body. “Nudity in the Renaissance, especially in this period when it was new, was also about artists having the license to address it in the first place,” explains Rumberg.

As I looked around the room, while nudity wasn’t always flattering, much of what I could see was a fantasised ideal of womanhood. The representation of the female form then was curvy — reminiscent of a pearly, Botticelli-like body — but bigger women never seemed to make the canon and, needless to say, women of colour neither (even though the presence of black Africans in Renaissance Europe has been documented from as early as the mid-15th century.) But as one of three women of colour at the press preview, when discovering Titian’s Aphrodite in Rising From The Sea (Venus Anadyomene) — with her red-golden hair, young plump body, born ethereal and fully formed out of the water — I wondered if it was paintings like these that set the beauty standards of today, and who this enlightened period had left out?

“Italian painters tended to idolise the female form and produce only Venus-like deities,” comments Rumberg. “We can see the reclining nude across the paintings,” he continues, “but depictions of old age were rare yet present in the Renaissance, more so throughout Northern Europe.”

In paintings such as Dieric Bout’s Path To Paradise and Pietro Perugino’s Combat between Love and Chastity, naked bodies were either clothed or subtly draped depending on their verdict. In the latter, it was the duelling forces of libido and restraint, as though sexual desires meant you were a glutton for punishment. On one hand, women were naked and praised for their bodies and on the other, they were naked and punished through their bodies (“a virgin or a whore,” as comedian Hannah Gadsby suitably observed in her Netflix-special Nanette, pointing to the limited roles available to women in art history).

But this seeming openness to nudity in Western art was short-lived. By 1564, the year of Michelangelo’s death, Pope Pius IV ordered that the Italian painter’s naked bodies in his now-iconic fresco The Last Judgement be painted over with drapery — signalling a profound shift in attitudes. “The church thought this was unacceptable,” explains Rumberg. “It was another image of temptation.”

So, what can we learn from the Renaissance nude today, when nudity appears at once omnipresent and yet deeply controlled? From Kim Kardashian’s recent appearance in a revealing Thierry Mugler dress to Tumblr’s nudity ban, are our post-internet, globalised moral values in crisis?

“We can’t forget that at the time, nudity was more controversial because it was set in a very religious, prudent society where being naked was for the private, not the public realm,” says Rumberg. “But it wasn’t just seeing the images that liberated that period, the printing press was new so access to nudity across various mediums also changed.”

Indeed, technological advances often go hand-in-hand with social revolutions, and ours is the advent of the internet. But the digital era has at once reinforced existing canons while also pushing the boundaries of female representation. Body positivity movements have emerged through fourth wave feminism, self-love politics and the freedom to publish what we want for ourselves.

From Chidera Eggerue’s trending hashtag #SaggyBoobsMatter, embracing bosoms that radically contrast with those imagined by Titian, and Universal Standard’s “All of us. As we are.” campaign, reminding us that the ‘ideal body shape’ concerns very few of us. Even Samirah Raheem’s viral video reclaiming the word ‘slut’ demonstrates that although we have more nudity now, we also have a voice to accompany the picture we’re painting of ourselves. Thankfully, that picture is progressively more colourful and queer than the women and men in The Renaissance Nude.

The Renaissance Nude runs through to 2 June 2019 at The Royal Academy.