The Nude [antikvár]

The Nude Ever since man began to paint, the representation of the nude figure has held a special place in the world of art. It is always an exciting subject for spectator and artist alike, for a variety of reasons. The artist can create a magical world related to his gods by representing ideal figures and ignoring all imperfections, so that, for example, the supreme female beauty becomes Venus, the goddess of love. The human body, however, can also be seen as something loathsome, to be covered and hidden. When this happens the painting of nudes goes into abeyance and there has to be a revolutionary change in taste before they become once again acceptable. In this book the examples chosen are all from the Renaissance and later, that is to say, from a time when the painting of the nude had long been established and frequent classical precedents could be found. Nevertheless, the nude was not immediately acceptable and we can trace during the Renaissance an increasing awareness of the potentialities of the nude figure, from being merely a crude attempt to imitate the ancient tradition to something capable of intense and dramatic expression. Masaccio, in his Adam and Eve (Plate 1), quickly realized the emotional potential of the nude human figure. During the early Renaissance the increasing awareness of the Antique, and the example it could provide, can be felt, for instance, in Ghiberti's enthusiasm for the classical statues and objects which he had seen excavated and which he describes in his Commentaries. In Rome he had seen a hermaphrodite, 'a work of marvellous skill', and in Florence an engraved gem of Diomedes stealing the Palladium. It was 'a marvellous thing observing all the measure and proportion necessary in a sculpture or carving.' From the desire to see what made classical figures ideal, there arose a system of measurement, proportion and selection which culminated in Alberti's treatise on sculpture De Statua of c. 1464: 'We have chosen a number of bodies considered by the skilful to be the most beautiful and have taken the dimensions of each of these. These we compared together, and leaving aside the extreme measurements which were below or above certain limits we chose those which the agreement of many cases showed to be the average.' The measuring of human figures for their ideal proportions, like the measuring of Roman architecture, was to become something of an obsession during the Renaissance and, indeed, was eventually embodied in an academic ideal which lasted for at least three centuries and survived in old-fashioned art schools until fairly recently. Briefly, the ideal human figure was to be nine face-lengths long, the 'Apollo' type, or, exceptionally, ten face-lengths long, the 'Jupiter' type. Occasionally the proportions were changed to a little over eight face-lengths, or measured in terms of nose-lengths, which would result in about twenty-seven units to a figure. This approach may nowadays seem dry and excessively formal, but to the artists of the Renaissance it was an exciting and necessary task to lay down the rules from which the study of the nude could proceed. In the examples chosen here, we can see Leonardo concerned with relating his practical knowledge of the human figure to a theoretical framework in his ' Vitruvian Man' (Plate 14), and thereby linking him with the noble and ideal proportions of classical architecture. The image, incidentally, was later to be used by Blake in his Glad Day (Plate 60) for a very different purpose. North of the Alps, Dürer, with his Apollo and Diana (Plate 3 bottom), shows an interest in the same problems, as well as an indebtedness to Italian ideas. A drawing of the nude with a scale of proportions shows that Michelangelo, too. was interested in this intellectual approach. From such ^eat heights, the art-school precept to make the figures about eight face-lengths long can be seen as the ill-remembered echo of a once startling philosophical idea: that perfect man could be represented in art by diligent study. Not all artists of the Renaissance, however, approached the classical past or the nude figure in such a theoretical manner. The richness and variety ofthe nude in art come from the differences in treatment which the subject allows, even within the work of one artist. It is, perhaps a commonplace which needs repeating, that artists do not fit neatly into prearranged schemes, producing only one sort of picture or one sort of nude, whether the type of 'Venus' or 'Apollo' is represented, or whether a mood of pathos or ecstasy is created in the painting. They may be concerned with all of these things together or at various times, as we can see. for example, in the works of Pnmat.cc.o (see Plate 29) and. above all. in those of Michelangelo. The subjective qualities of nude painting obviously could not be ignored. During the Middle Ages the erotic aspects had been suppressed. With the Renaissance the revival of interest in the human figure brought with it the opportunity to exploit those subjects from Greek and Roman mythology where such figures can occur. Ovid's Metamorphoses and the loves ofthe gods and mortals provided endless subject-matter. In time the elusive flavour of a classical allegory could be answered by the poetical treatment of the nude in a pastoral setting. Botticelli's Venus and Mars (Plate 8) is one such example ofthe erotic languor which the combination of classical legend and the nude could convey.