Getty exhibition shows how the naked body became a subject for art

By Philip Kennicott

The Washington Post

LOS ANGELES — Good exhibitions complicate things without confusing them. By that standard, the Getty Museum’s “The Renaissance Nude” is a very fine show, adding layers of complexity to the general understanding of how the naked body became a subject for art in the 15th century.

It focuses not just on the heroic nude in Italy, the idealized body inspired by the rediscovery of ancient art, but also on the nude throughout Europe. It surveys the various forces in play at the time — including changes in religious practice and new, more rigorous powers of observation — and how those forces created an appetite for depiction of the unclothed body. And it acknowledges the obvious: that desire was always a part of the pleasure of the naked figure, no matter how pious or allegorical or mythological the supporting narrative.

The exhibition, curated by Thomas Krens, looks at a period of about 120 years, beginning in 1400, and includes more than 100 works, many of them significant loans from major European collections. It features work by Giovanni Bellini, Donatello, Albrecht Durer, Jan Gossaert and Titian, and includes paintings, sculpture, drawings (including anatomical renderings by Leonardo) and prints. It also places a particular focus on French artists, who produced a kind of hidden history of the nude in illustrated devotional books, images meant for private contemplation and delectation, and images that aren’t always incorporated into the broader understanding of the nude during this period.

Two broad trends drove the emergence of the nude as subject. There was the Renaissance, as commonly understood, a reawakening of intellectual energies that spurred artists to a closer observation of the world, including the human body. But there also was a religious impulse.

Throughout the show, one sees desire and sexuality operating in surprisingly overt ways. One chapter of the exhibition focuses on the use of real people as the models for religious figures, including a mid-15th-century painting by the French artist Jean Fouquet of the Virgin with a bare breast. The inspiration for the Virgin’s face was probably a renowned beauty, Agnes Sorel, who also was King Charles’s mistress. Another section looks at supposedly illicit desire, including homosexuality, which is seen in a delightfully frank woodcut of a male bath scene by Durer, in which the men are looking at each other with more than common interest, and in an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi of Apollo and Admetus, a trope of same-sex desire borrowed from Greek mythology. A discussion on depictions of the suffering or mutilated body underscores not only an important exception to the tendency to idealize perfect bodies, but also emphasizes the degree to which sadism, masochism and other sexual variations were interwoven with common religious narratives.

Among the more gratifying images in the exhibition are those that suggest the variety of body types that were considered beautiful. An image by Durer of a woman praying, seen from behind, shows a more full and fleshy ideal of beauty, while several of the early Saint Sebastians depict male beauty as androgynous and even feminine. A powerful drawing by Hans Baldung shows “The Ecstatic Christ,” who has the powerful body of a classical figure but is seen twisting on the ground, with the wounds of the crucifixion clearly visible on one hand. Caught between death and resurrection, he slides one hand under a drapery that hides his genitals, a perplexing but powerful erotic gesture.