Nude Nuder Nudist

Review: The Renaissance Nude and Elinor Antin: Time’s Arrow, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Vol.22 No. 3, Spring, 2020, Los Angeles, pp.64-83

The Renaissance Nude

The Getty Center, Los Angeles, October 30, 2018–January 27, 2019

Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, May 12–July 28, 2019

Nude is a term that gives me the creeps. Nude were the stockings I flipped past when I started wearing them as a teenager, preferring warm bronze colors in summer and dark coppery stockings in the winter. Nude was my granny’s lipstick color that never left kiss marks when she said hello. Bold red, ghostly white, or glittery lips were what called me out of the tasteful, painfully alienated, and safely ordered Waspy world into which I was born, and from which I yearned to flee.

Nudes were what the portrait photographer showed me when I applied to be his assistant. He informed me that the soft-focus, warm-toned prints were not dirty pictures, but rather high-art testaments to the young naked women who posed in the safety of his studio. He said he kept the photos in the darkroom rather than displaying them in the reception area because the public would not understand his art; his artful nude test was his way of hazing a young woman with ambitions to break into the masculine bastion of portrait photography. He didn’t hire me. Nude women models were available to photographers at special sessions advertised at the local camera store where I bought my supplies. In my 1970s Sapphic saturnalia, I photographed my glorious girlfriends freely and for free.

The Renaissance Nude at The Getty Center did not attract me at first, but a good friend recommended it highly. Repressing the creep factor triggered in me by the title and expecting to be bored by scholarly obfuscations, I found that the exhibition frankly addressed sexual fetishism and eroticism with a sumptuous bacchanal of bodies. More than one hundred works were gathered to explore the gradual emergence of the nude over the course of 130 years in Italy, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. The show grapples with historical controversies about the representation of the naked human figure, many of which are still unresolved today. Within the European Christian painting tradition, the rhetorical defense of the nude has been that human beauty is spiritual and timeless, and the artist’s skill at depicting it is nothing less than God-like creativity. The argument against the nude has focused on the corrupting sensuality of pantheistic and classical narratives. The depiction of the naked body continues to be a site of mediation between Christianity and Paganism.

Many lesbians and feminists in the late 1970s shared a fascination with witches and goddesses. As we sought to pull ourselves up from our abject female-class status, we looked to them as models of spirituality and power during periods in history when women were empowered in ways we only dreamed possible. In her influential book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004), Silvia Federici demonstrates that the dominance of the church was not easily won in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Many different regional and proletarian sects resisted and contested this centralized ideology and authority. Hans Baldung Grien’s painting Two Witches (1523) is included in The Renaissance Nude and discussed in the catalog, in the section “From Venus to Witches: The Female Nude in Northern Europe,” by Diane Wolfthal. Two Witches depicts two voluptuous naked women, a child, and a goat on a hill. The witches are at the edge of a precipice above a fire’s billowing black smoke, which surrounds them in sulfuric light-infused amber clouds, while wind liberates their hair. The witch on the left has her back to us, and she turns her head to look directly at us over her right shoulder; the seated witch, facing us frontally, gazes lustfully at the other witch while holding a (potion?) bottle aloft. The drapery that surrounds the figures does not so much cover or reveal their bodies as connect them. These northern Renaissance superheroines appear powerful enough to light the world on fire—or save us from it. In spite of the fact that Grien’s painting may have been motivated by femme-phobia or objectification of the disappearing class of witches in Europe, the ongoing feminist interest in witches, including Federici’s scholarship, makes it possible for us to take pleasure in such historical representations of powerful pagan women. I was excited to see a place marker for this particular continuum, given my own research into and curiosity about the historical uses of the term Venus to refer to everything from classical sculptures to prehistoric stone figurines (Venus of Willendorf) to living African women exhibited as curiosities throughout nineteenth-century Europe (Saartjie Baartman, called the Hottentot Venus by her exhibitors, is the prime example).

The curators of The Renaissance Nude, from both The Getty and the Louvre, studiously avoid conventional methods of categorization, eschewing style, genre, oeuvre, geography, chronology, mastery, and symbolism. Instead, the works are arranged throughout the galleries thematically, with narrative or discursive section titles such as “Saint Sebastian and Bethsheba,” “The Nude in Nature: Italy and Germany,” “The Power of Women,” “Obscenity,” “Male Sexuality,” and “After the Antique.” These subgroups allow other ideas and insights to surface: regional specificity, fetish motifs, gender politics, and eroticism. The show generously leaves the viewer to have her way with the works and all the supplemental information the exhibition provides.

Many of the artworks on display have weathered shock, disapproval, and literal cover-ups ordered by those in power depending on prevailing ecclesiastical and secular attitudes about flesh and sin.(1) What’s remarkable about the exhibition is that, although we may have encountered these images before, in churches, museums, or art history books, we have never before been encouraged to see them as directly erotic.(2) Nor have we been encouraged to let the beauty excite us. In acknowledging the erotic, the putative neutrality of the naked figures is unmoored from its accepted symbolism. In response, I want to rely on my authority as a subject whose desire can inform the images, without tucking my vestigial pagan tail between my legs while bending to the hierophant of art historical interpretation. The show unleashes so many images that my heart quickens, my head spins, my palms sprout hair, and the fluid droning in my ears throbs with every pulse rushing beat.

At age 13, at the Portland Museum of Art, I encountered The Circumcision of Christ, a strange early sixteenth-century painting by the Netherlandish artist Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen. In the center of its lush composition, amidst figures bedazzled in brocade, red velvet, precious indigo, and gold, the naked Christ child screams in pain as the Mohel cuts the foreskin from his tiny penis. I had never seen anything like it. This was not a happy cherubic putto, but a distorted newborn with a squished head, squirming and struggling against his restraints and the piercing knife blade, while an audience of adults looks on without compassion. Neither the nativity scenes at our local Presbyterian Church nor the ones that decorated my home during the holidays were like this. Nothing in my experience could even suggest what they were doing to this poor child.

My confusion about the van Oostsanen painting, and others like it, stemmed from my attempt to explain the imagery through a realistic paradigm. Leo Steinberg’s seminal book, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983), countered centuries of repression of the obvious eroticism in the imagery of Christ’s body and restored the visibility of the holy body’s sexuality.(3) In his text, Steinberg also offers the example of a woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, entitled The Holy Family (1511), in which Saint Anne—Jesus’s grandmother and proof of his human lineage—fondles the child’s penis and scrotum. Steinberg points out that depictions of Christ in art from the Renaissance are not naturalistic representations of life situations but rather a symbolic language of gesture and pose to connect his humanity and divinity through key moments from the life-of-Christ narrative. In van Oostsanen’s circumcision painting, the child’s arms are raised in a hieratic pose and his mother’s hand is placed across his brow. Both gestures are from a playbook of coded references to the potency and incarnation of the divine in the human form. Taking guidance from Steinberg, I note that in the upper background of the painting, through a doorway or window, the adult Christ can be seen praying for forgiveness in the scene in the garden that prefigures his betrayal, death, and ascension. The suffering cut of his human newborn flesh and his ultimate sacrifice are thus both literally and symbolically tied together in the same painting.

What I did not know at the time, as an unworldly girl from the cultural wilder- ness of the lush Pacific Northwest, was that my befuddlement about The Circumcision of Christ echoed the historical ambivalence produced by Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (1536–41) in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, Italy. The painting came under persistent, but not universal, attack during the Counter Reformation for both nudity and the inclusion of pagan figures, which critics said diluted the religious message of the painting. These voices were often motivated by regional rivalries, political ambitions, and personal rancor toward the artist. The Council of Trent, held between 1545 and 1563, declared “all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust.” Patrons and artists who did not conform to the ruling of Trent made arguments that their works were speaking to a limited and educated audience that knew how to read the painting and could therefore access its spiritual meaning. These are not unlike the arguments trotted out in defense of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) and the so-called “NEA Four” in the American culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. In a 1537 letter, Pietro Arentino spoke of “the things that the figures of the Sistine Chapel suggest to those who know how to judge them, rather than merely gape at them.”(4) This proposal of a more exclusive group of viewers was criticized by Lodovico Dolce, who retorted, “It does not seem to me very praiseworthy that the eyes of children, mothers and young women should openly see the indecency which these figures display and that only men of learning should understand the profundity of the allegories they conceal.” As a young viewer, I brought a similar lack of learning to my viewing of The Circumcision of Christ. As perplexed as those who merely “gaped” at the The Last Judgment, I did not recognize the “profundity” of the concealed allegories.

The richly illustrated four-hundred-page exhibition catalog that accompanies The Renaissance Nude begins by respectfully referencing the oft-cited distinction between naked and nude that Sir Kenneth Clark proposes in his 1956 book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, which John Berger, nearly two decades later, summarized as: “Kenneth Clark maintains that to be naked is simply to be without clothes, whereas the nude is a form of art.”(5) The catalog claims that Clark’s opposition doesn’t apply to the period examined by the exhibition because the depiction of the body was more experimental and the categories were more fluid and not as easily defined as Clark argues. While Berger conceded that the nude “is always conventionalized,” hence the artfulness that Clark ascribes to it, he insists it “also relates to lived sexuality.”(6) Berger famously endorsed his feminist colleagues’ position by asserting that the female nude is always made to be seen by and to please male authority, in the form of the male viewer.(7)  Perhaps Sir Kenneth Clark, with his patrician manner as a public figure, scholar, and collector of art, deserved his public trouncing by the next generation of materialist theorists of culture, but I appreciate his goal of restoring the undeniable eroticism and beauty of images of naked bodies to the mind of the viewing public. The curators of The Renaissance Nude avoid separating the artistic from the sexual. In fact, the didactics are refreshingly expository at moments, explicitly pointing out the homoeroticism in Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut, The Bath House (c. 1496), making sure to note a special glance and flowers exchanged between two men in the foreground. In an erotic nod to the palpable desires in the scene, a faucet with a cock-adorned handle acts as both stand-in and fig leaf for the penis of the man by the water valve as he gazes lasciviously at the flute player (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

The French artist Jean Fouquet’s Virgin and Child (c. 1452–55) is the promotional image for The Renaissance Nude. Her breast is a round, weightless orb, framed by her unbuttoned blue dress and white ermine robe. In the background, behind her jeweled throne, are six cherubic red angels, who look more like devils to me, and three blue angels, who seem to have popped out of a frozen pool in winter. The breast grabs my attention with centrifugal force because of its symmetrical shape, bright grey hue, and its placement at the center of the composition. The painting is undeniably and oddly erotic, not only in its unrealistic bodily portrayal but also in its conflation of a portrait of Charles VII’s mistress, Agnes Sorel, with the Virgin Mary. The figure of the virgin thus represents both a forbidden sexually desirable object and the mother of God. The painting conforms to the virgo lactans convention, a common iconographic motif in which the Virgin sits with one breast exposed while holding the naked Christ child in her lap. The child either nurses, or doesn’t, or sometimes points to her breast while looking confrontationally out of the painting at us, always with his genitals exposed. The interpretation of this iconography varies depending on the time period and the art historian writing about it, but most agree it indicates the humanity of both virgins—the mother and the son; and the transformative power of the mother’s milk to nurture and give life is equated with the ability of the son’s penis to give life.

In Fouquet’s Virgin and Child, the skin of the mother and infant is rendered in a smooth stone-grey. The effect is that of a necrotic Madonna and child, but the work is executed in the manner of grisaille, intended to signal a painting of a marble sculpture rather than a painting from life. The cartoonish exaggeration of line and color in the monochromatic cherubim renders them more pointedly as both decorative and symbolic. The image is a titillating conflation of off-limits desire with religion, providing an acceptable cover that allows you to look. This unabashed doubling and opportunism is also true of other paintings, not least one discussed at length in the catalog, Titian’s portrait of Mary Magdalene, where there is absolutely nothing cold about the curtains of thick blond curly hair that cascade down the saint’s entire body to reveal and frame her voluptuous breasts. When Baccio Valori the Younger visited Titian’s studio in 1537, he reported, “When I told Titian that his Magdalene, so fresh and dewy in her penitence, indeed pleased too much, he having recognized that I was implying that she should appear worn out from her fasting, responded with a grin, ‘You must understand that she is depicted here as soon as she entered (the desert), and thus before she began fasting—to make the painting penitent, yes, but also as pleasurable as it could be.’ And to be sure it was that.”(8)

In The Renaissance Nude exhibition, I found myself thinking about Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits, in which the artist is, as usual, both photographer and subject. The image that comes to mind in particular is Untitled #216 (1989), Sherman’s version of the nursing Madonna. The artist has attached a prosthetic breast over her own right breast and holds an infant—clearly a doll draped in cloth—below it. The fake boob, the doll, and the image flipped as if seen in a mirror, clue us in that Sherman’s is an anti-virgo-lactans, and the satire is completed perfectly by the decidedly oversharing nature of photography’s exactitude, which reveals Sherman’s disinterested facial expression and the obviously cheap materials of the drapery and background, not to mention the work’s extreme scale. Sherman has explained that she made this work in response to looking through a book of Renaissance artworks, without see- ing the works in person or conducting research about their meaning or historical context. Describing her photograph, Sherman says, “The tit looks like a slice of half a grapefruit stuck onto someone’s chest … But in Old Master paintings a lot of these figures’ breasts don’t even look real.”9 Like Lodovico Dolce, Sherman is suspicious of art that requires a specially educated audience. Brandishing a feminist comedic sword, the work reminds me of the 1985 Guerilla Girls poster that asked “Do women have to be naked to get into U.S. museums?”10 (Sherman is rumored to have been one of the early members of the anonymous Guerilla Girls art collective.)

Shortly after seeing The Renaissance Nude, I visited Eleanor Antin’s exhibition Time’s Arrow at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Antin’s 1972 project CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture is on display along with an update of the project, CARVING: 45 Years Later (2017) and !!!, also from 2017. Antin’s work, like Sherman’s, uses both photography and performance as primary media, and both artists critique and show irreverence toward idealized and historical representations of the female body. The 1972 version of CARVING was Antin’s response to an invitation to participate in the first Whitney Biennial (in 1973), a survey of painting and sculpture. Antin has related that when she was making the work, she was thinking about the history of sculpture, in particular the Greek practice of working at a block of stone from all four sides, removing thin layers until new forms appeared. She was influenced by Michelangelo’s statement that not even the greatest sculptor can make anything that isn’t already inside the marble. Following the subtractive technique of Western classical sculpture, Antin dieted to lose ten pounds. She documented the process by taking photos from the front, back, and both sides throughout. The work was famously rejected from the Whitney show, and the curators dodged the entire problem of photography’s literalism by saying they considered the piece conceptual art rather than sculpture, even though Antin employed a traditional sculptural method, as highlighted by her title. Undertaking the same regimen to create CARVING: 45 Years Later, Antin added a fifth view to this now ongoing photography project. In this installment, Antin faces the camera wearing a bra because, as she explains, her breasts had grown larger and heavier and, without the bra, they obscured a clear view of her torso. Going back and forth between the two CARVING series provoked many ideas, not only formal concerns of volume, surface, and proportion, but also ideological ones—the dynamics of power and the hierarchy of (art) institutions, the valuation of the original versus the copy, youth versus age, perceptions of health and the medicalization of the female body, and the idealization of the human form as compared to a living, lived-in body.

Antin’s attention to the politics of form prefigures Jill Burke’s 2019 contribution to the exhibition catalog for The Renaissance Nude. Titled “The Body in Artistic Theory,” Burke’s essay traces a history of life drawing and an idealized representation of the body’s architecture. In the Renaissance, Italian artists returned to the classical ideals pro- posed by Vitruvius in the first century BCE, in his treatise De Architectura (On Architecture), which was rediscovered in 1416. Vitruvius maintained that temple proportions should be based on the “well formed” human (male) body. He argued that this ideal form should fit, with limbs extended, into a circle and an overlap- ping square, with the navel at the center. Responding to this, the Italian Leon Alberti published his influential text De Pictura (On Painting) (1435), in which he describes the use of an exempeda, or ruler, to divide the length of the body into six equal parts. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1490), returned to Vitruvius’s square within a circle and took a man’s height as one unit, dividing the body horizontally into four “cubits”—at the knees, genitals, and armpits, all in the service of revealing God’s perfect hand in creation. The Italian Renaissance considered man God’s perfect architectural achievement, made in his own image. God was undeniably a human male—women and animals need not apply. Michelangelo’s super-butch female figures in the The Last Judgment seem to reflect this figurative hierarchy, as well as perhaps accommodating his own libidinal and aesthetic preferences.

Antin “occupies” this history in both CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture and CARVING: 45 Years Later. Architecture, and its relationship to a specific body as an external measure, is an important factor in both editions of the piece. In each work, the artist poses in front of a wall with a closed door, baseboard, and floor. The viewer’s knowledge of the standard door height in the United States gives some guide to the size of her body, and in her accompanying text, Antin mentions her height and weight. A woman’s body, whether youthful or aging, does not con- form to the classical male ideal embraced by Alberti and da Vinci. Nor is the door in Antin’s photos the entrance to a grand Vitruvian temple. Rather, its scale evokes a more intimate domestic sphere. The door behind Antin is shut, causing me to wonder if it is also there to indicate how women’s bodies, especially older women’s bodies, are most often unseen, kept behind closed doors.

I too have experienced hostile reactions to photographs of naked women. For the 2010 Bucharest Biennale, my project Tit for Twat (1992–ongoing), a lesbianized creation story that includes photographs of my characters Madam and Eve, was installed and then removed and censored. I was told that the director of the Geology Institute, the venue of the exhibition, objected to the fleshy images of the large-bodied, hirsute, afro and anglo main characters. In order to prevent the entire show being closed, the organizers agreed to remove my work. They told me that his reaction was due to his racism and normative ideas about women’s bodies. As nudes of women were abundant at the National Art Museum next door, they speculated that it was the photographic referent to the real that caused problems for this official.(11)

When making CARVING: 45 Years Later, the weight loss revealed a hernia in Antin’s abdomen, and she declares love for this abnormality along with self- respect and admiration for her aging body: “After all I made it!” For Antin, as artist and author, the temple is the body, and its own measurements are ideal because they are real.

Meanwhile, back at The Renaissance Nude, Northern European art was constructing the body differently, and although equally concerned with proportional systems, the female nude occurs much earlier and with much more detail. Albrecht Dürer’s early proportional studies focused on the female body and idealized forms. While he abandoned the working out of idealized proportions, his Four Books on Human Proportions (published posthumously in 1528) proposed methods for drawing different bodies—from fat to skinny and from young to old. Four centuries earlier than Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of the movements of humans and animals, Dürer’s Figure of a Woman in Motion (1528), which appears in both The Getty exhibition and catalog, shows the proportional relationships of different parts of her body to each other. To determine these, Dürer uses a maßstab (a stick or scale) cut into smaller measurements. Each unit of his scale was denoted by different symbols marked on the illustrated figure. Unlike the classically inspired scales of Vitruvius, Alberti, and da Vinci, Dürer’s measurements are not fixed lengths but rather refer to the internal relationship of one part to another for each individual depicted. This allows him to replicate the individual body’s proportions without resorting to a standardizing geometry. The particularity and the untranslatable originality of this system shows how Dürer’s evidence- based analysis of form allowed him to construct unique bodies in his works.(12)

Feminism was my gateway drug to queer self-identification and exploration of desire. In the 1970s, I attended several annual Midwest Women’s Festivals, which consisted of workshops on journal writing, dreaming, massage, feminist theory and history, crafts, photography, and Wicca. Most attendees were in some state of undress: topless, bottomless, or completely naked, with not one bra to be seen. As a young woman, it was transformative to see so many different unbridled tits at play, and the eroticism of free-floating flesh liberated my desire for my own body and those of others. Years later, my friend Dhyanna and I took a road trip throughout the Southwest. We called it our “spiritual journey,” and we made our directional decisions by reading the Tarot, throwing the I-Ching, tossing coins, following each other’s leads, or sometimes being led by chance encounters in between our LSD-, psilocybin-, and marijuana-augmented visions. In a desert town, we joined retirees at the famous municipal hot springs, which dedicated separate areas for men and women. At the entrance, a sign stated that the wearing of clothes was strictly prohibited by the city code. Once settled into the water, I realized that we were surrounded by old women both in the water and cooling off on the cement decks encircling the pools. Their bodies, submitting to gravity and generously marked by fat and scars, were not a source of shame or embarrassment. These mature naked women were decorously and immodestly spread out on towels or with their breasts bobbing in the water while they discussed their daughter’s divorces and grandchildren’s achievements. In this steaming fleshpot of hagocracy, Dhyanna and I found this both revealing and comforting about the future of our bodies.

By looking at the particular and multifaceted histories of place, production, and desires, both sexual and spiritual, in nudes from both Christian and classical imagery, The Renaissance Nude reanimates bodies in their erotic and deviant possibilities. The wall text and accompanying exhibition catalog chart the geography of looking, including the influences on the makers at the time of the production and those mechanisms of discourse that direct us as we look across time and space to interpret these works.13 Dispiritingly, LACMA placed a sign at the entrance of Antin’s Time’s Arrow warning that the exhibition contains nudity and subject matter that may be objectionable or not suitable for all museum visitors. The paintings and sculptures of The Renaissance Nude required no such warning.

Antin’s large-scale photograph !!! unabashedly celebrates the triple-exclamation-point sculpture that is her body at this stage in her life. Although not connected to the subject matter of Fouquet’s Virgin and Child, Antin’s !!! shares some of its compositional elements and color schemes. Antin stands with arms akimbo, facing the camera and wearing high-waist black underpants and a lacy black bra. She gazes directly at the camera with an ambiguous smile playing across her visage. Her body is framed by a red full-length cape, just as Fouquet’s Virgin’s body is framed by the folds of her blue dress, ermine robe, and entourage of cherubim. But rather than looking modestly to her lap as Fouquet’s Virgin does (allowing us to gaze unchallenged at the Madonna’s breast and her child’s exposed genitalia), Antin confronts the lens and invites a comparison to a superheroine. The three exclamation points that form the title emphasize the feat of being alive on her own terms and having the autonomy to present the evidence of her survival as a woman and as an artist. (“I made it!”) Like the women at my 1970s desert hot springs, Antin reveals the depth and breadth of her body as alive and sexually desirable. This work questions the feminist polemic (also upheld by Berger) that the naked or nude female body can only be objectified by and subjugated to the male gaze. Like many of the works in The Renaissance Nude, Antin’s work opens up the possibility that it might be empowering to be looked at, and that women can enjoy looking too. In stark contrast to the stony rigidity of Fouquet’s memento mori Virgin painting and without the satire that Sherman employs in her revision of the same work, the curtain or cape has been drawn open, and what is revealed is exactly what the artist and the woman herself wants us to see.

Exhibitions like The Renaissance Nude and Eleanor Antin: Time’s Arrow demonstrate the potential of naked bodies to disturb and unsettle viewers, even today. They also affirm how artworks may provide powerful forms of mediation between spirituality, desire, and sexuality. The Renaissance sowed the seeds of the ubiquity of the artistic nude, but also the trouble it brings. However libidinally loosened or honest, The Renaissance Nude is completely silent on any discourse regarding the representation of bodies of color. Given recent scholarship such as Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2005) and Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (2012), this exclusion is significant. Global trade routes and the slave market resulted in the presence of many nonwhite people in urban and royal courts throughout southern and northern Europe. Images of Africans were commonplace. Notably, the exhibition does not include artwork from Spain, Portugal, or England— countries that participated directly in the slave trade—for reasons that are never addressed. Although we can’t expect one exhibition to take on every- thing, what is clear is that even with exhaustive research and documentation, there is more to discover about the representation of the body in all aspects. Returning to the ecumenical exhibition title, “The Renaissance” is a phrase that raises my suspicions.

Kaucyila Brooke is an artist who lives and works in Tujunga, CA. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts.

Footnotes

1. In the case of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment (1536–41), the bodies were literally painted over to suit the taste of the Counter Reformation. Sidney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (New Haven, CT: Penguin/Yale University Press, 1993), 485.↵

2. In reviewing the show for The Guardian, Adrian Searle says, “Naked men cruise, fight and flagellate, nude nymphs brandish whips, and creatures ambush sleeping maidens. What an astonishing show—I could look all day.” Searle, “The Renaissance Nude Review—a Sexy, Sacred Riot of Flesh,” The Guardian, February 28, 2019, https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2019/feb/28/royal-academy-renaissance-nude-review-a-sexy-sacred-riot-of-flesh.↵

3. Originally published as a book-length essay that took up the entire issue of October 25 (1983), the book is currently available in its second edition: Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).↵

4. Letter from Pietro Arentino, quoted in Robert Williams, “The Facade of the Palazzo dei ‘Visacci,’” I Tatti: Studies in the Italian Renaissance 5 (1993), 213, quoted in Thomas Depasquale, “Epilogue Two: Michelangelo’s Last Judgement and the Reception of the Nude in Counter-Reformation Italy,” in The Renaissance Nude, ed. Thomas Kren (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 371.↵

5. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC Press, 1972), 53.↵

6. Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47.↵

7. Ironically, visual art students are often first introduced to the feminist theory of objectification and oppression of women through Berger’s text, long before picking up a book by a woman feminist writer.↵

8. 8. Depasquale, “Epilogue Two,” 371.↵

9. “It Began with Madame de Pompadour: Cindy Sherman,” interview, Art 21, https://art21.org/read/cindy-sherman-it-began-with-madame-de-pompadour/.↵

10. The full text on the poster is: “Do women have to be naked to get into U.S. museums? Less than 3% of the artists in the Met. Museum are women, but 83% of the nudes are female.”↵

11. No doubt, my reinterpretation of the biblical narrative in a country where 81% of the population belongs to the Eastern Orthodox Church also played a part.↵

12. I was impressed to discover that the catalog refused to translate Dürer’s handwritten symbols into the general font used throughout the massive tome. In a critical graphic design decision, these symbols from Dürer’s drawing are copied directly in the catalog and overlaid onto facing pages of critical text, maintaining the integrity of the Dürer’s original system without interpolation. Through this type of attention to detail, The Renaissance Nude introduces viewers to multiple perspectives on human proportion without synthesis or generalization, and reinforces the curators’ point that the representation of human form in the period was being developed through various methods both subjective and objective. The curators make the case that it is more useful to examine the differences than to seek unification. As a viewer, I agree.↵

13. Scholarly texts in the catalog trace the differing interpretations that have dominated art historical and critical discourses and outline differences in artistic developments in northern and southern Europe. The catalog allows readers to examine evidence and texts from regions where works were created and displayed, providing access to the crisscrossed narratives that have been lost over time.↵