Venice’s Accademia owns the most enigmatic and poetic of all Renaissance paintings, Giorgione’s “The Tempest”, and the most famous Renaissance drawing, Leonardo’s fragile, rarely displayed “Vitruvian Man”, archetypal image of rationalist humanism and the quest for knowledge. They are the anchors for Corpi moderni (“Modern Bodies”), a remarkable, original exhibition exploring first how the body took centre stage in Renaissance art, and then how it was seen, understood and presented according to social forces, from fashion and marriage rites to changing ideals of masculinity and a new freedom in depicting the female nude.
The first part unfolds through the starriest names: Michelangelo, Dürer, Piero della Francesca, and the revelation of “Vitruvian Man” seen live. From reproductions, we remember a diagram of proportions and measurements: the nude in superimposed positions, arms and legs doubled, within a square and circle — symbolising earth and heaven, man central in both. Here it excites as a work of art: energetic yet delicate pen and ink lines, soft watercolour touches, individual characteristics of expressive face, steady gaze, tangled curls, the sheer survival of this single sheet representing Leonardo’s search for perfection.
In the show’s muddled though high-spirited second part, Bellini, Titian, Giorgione, Carpaccio, are set in flourishing mercantile, erudite 16th-century Venice, their paintings crammed among costumes, pornography, poetry and cosmetics manuals. Overlapping with the Venice Architecture Biennale Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., the theme here is one we recognise: natural bodies versus social bodies, the self a “performed act” in urban space. In the Renaissance, Corpi moderni argues, “pressing questions of today first began to stir.”
Under Antonio Rizzo’s towering, vigorously naturalistic statue “Adam”, created for Palazzo Ducale in 1472, the exhibition opens with small, epochal works on paper, beginning with Piero della Francesca’s geometric exploration “Projection of the Human Head” (c1474) from De prospectiva pingendi, the earliest Renaissance treatise on perspective, and “Vitruvian Man” (c1490), inspired by Vitruvius’s treatise on parallels between harmony and order in the body and architecture, but forged from Leonardo’s own research measuring men’s bodies — and also horses.
Soon afterwards comes art’s first nude self-depiction: Dürer’s frank, full frontal “Self-portrait Nude” (1509), in brush and ink on green paper, almost glowing, a secular Ecce Homo meticulously observed, light and dark contrasts emphasising skin texture and contours. Dürer’s “An African Man” (1508) is another first, the earliest Black portrait in European art, made in Venice: bushy hair, bristly beard, dignified bearing, a pose suggesting “an ancient poet”, the Accademia says — the self-fashioning of a new arrival in the city.
There is a chasm between tough German realism and the Italian idealising conception of the exhibition’s coup loan, Michelangelo’s “Libyan Sibyl” (1510-11), a red chalk study for an enthroned figure in the Sistine Chapel. Returning to Italy after 101 years — the Metropolitan Museum bought it, in a sale negotiated by John Singer Sargent, in 1924 — it is Michelangelo’s most beautiful anatomical drawing, spontaneous, forceful, grandly eloquent. The model, a seated youth, twists in contrapposto to show a mighty, muscular back; Michelangelo then transformed the image to a female figure for the Sistine fresco. Like Leonardo, he sought perfection, and achieved it by taking different parts from different bodies, transcending nature. Author Pietro Aretino praised the “elegant vivacity of artifice” in Michelangelo’s gender-blended figures.
Androgyny is a trope throughout the show: from Liberale da Verona’s dreamy gentle “St Sebastian” — a St Sebastian had to be removed from a church because its sexual charge disturbed worship, Vasari recounted — and Jacopo Colonna’s feminised svelte “Cristo Redentore” (1530), based on a Roman sculpture of Hadrian’s adolescent lover Antinous, to exhibits of braghesse, “breeches like those of men”, worn by courtesans, paired with calcagnini, high platform shoes which transformed them into giantesses, challenging gender conventions.
A delightful pairing is Giovanni Bellini’s contemplative “Portrait of a Humanist”, probably poet Raffaele Zovenzoni, depicted with a wreath and toga-like drapery to signify classical learning, and Vittore Carpaccio’s portrait of another strong-featured poet, Cassandra Fedele, who arranges her hair with a prominent fringe like Zovenzoni’s, a masculine style prohibited for women by Venetian sumptuary law, and here a badge of transgressive identity. “The effeminate male and the manly female are graceful in almost every aspect,” wrote humanist Mario Equicola.
Astonishing visitors for its luxury and licentiousness — 11,000 sex workers! — Venice nevertheless had strict codes for presenting the body. Dürer painted his most sensual portrait here, “Venetian Woman” (1505), expensive décolleté robe, jewels and corkscrew curls so precise that Bellini asked what kind of brush he used. But it hangs here with Titian’s depiction of regulated eroticism “The Lovers” (1510): the man slips his hand under the woman’s green satin dress to touch her bare breast, watched by a male witness, in an official betrothal. In the early 16th century the intimate/public gesture of stroking a breast sealed a couple’s legal bond.
The glory of the show’s second half is the voluptuousness Giorgione and Titian brought to female bodies, exploiting oil paint to depict soft flesh, lustrous hair. Female nudes represented only religious figures (mostly Eve) until Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” in the 1480s, but in “The Tempest” (1508) Giorgione dispenses with classical myth too. The nude mother breastfeeding her baby and the clothed young man, the figures melded within a strange atmosphere of thundery light, even though they seem detached and self-contained, remains mesmerisingly impossible to decipher as narrative, but as a celebration of the female body autonomous in nature it is a thrilling landmark.
Titian’s painting of love and death “Venus and Adonis”, the nude goddess portrayed from the back, half sitting, her bottom provocatively squashed, embracing her lover as he leaves for a fatal hunting trip, was so popular that the artist and his workshop produced 30 versions. “There is no man so sharp of sight and discernment that he does not believe when he sees her that she is alive; no one so chilled by age or so hard in his make-up that he does not feel himself growing warm and tender, and the whole of his blood stirring in his veins,” wrote Venetian critic Lodovico Dolce.
Of Titian’s Venetian successors, Bernardino Licinio’s “The Nude” (1540) stands out: bizarrely modern in its flattened, simplified style, refusing symbolic allusions, a monumental contemporary woman, proudly naked.
This empathetic exhibition concludes with bodies wounded and old: the artifice of metal prosthetic arms, with mechanical hands, such as three bombardiers demanded in 1498 after mutilation fighting for La Serenissima, and gazing over them Giorgione’s “The Old Woman” (1506) wrinkled, toothless, wispy grey hair — and indomitable. Holding a scroll inscribed “With Time”, she points to herself, but really she’s pointing to the future for us all in this most unsparing realism, so naturalistic and immediate that you walk out of the Accademia and see her still among today’s “corpi moderni” thronging the city.
To July 27, gallerieaccademia.it
