Splendor,

Myth and
Vision
Edited by
Thomas J. Loughman Nudes
from the
Kathleen M. Morris
Lara Yeager-Crasselt

Prado

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, Massachusetts

In collaboration with
Museo Nacional del Prado
Madrid

Distributed by Yale University Press

New Haven and London
Contents

Directors’ Foreword 6
Acknowledgments 7
Notes to the Reader and Maps 8

Introduction 10

The European Nude, 1400–1650 16

Jill Burke

Displaying the Nude in Spain, 1550–1834: The Sala Reservada 50

Javier Portús

Catalogue 67

Checklist 188
Bibliography 191
Contributors 200
Index 204
The European Nude, 1400 – 1650
Jill Burke
The Renaissance nude is one of those things that
seems almost too familiar to require explanation.
Most Westerners have grown up knowing images
such as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (fig. 7),
from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, without knowing
what the subject is, who the artist is, or when and
why it was painted. This and other similar images
have entered a kind of hazy popular conscious-
ness, something that’s both a help and a hindrance
to Renaissance art historians. It’s a help because
when we get to the Renaissance section of our art
history survey courses, we can practically hear the
sighs of relief from students, who finally recognize
some of the material they are being taught after all
FIG 7 Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564),
Creation of Adam, from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
1508–12. Fresco. Sistine Chapel, Vatican City
16
that unfamiliar medieval art; and it’s a hindrance
because there is a lot of unlearning to do to under-
stand the history of the Renaissance nude. It may
seem hard to believe but until recently, the amount
of research conducted on how the nude form was
understood in the Renaissance itself was negligi-
ble.1 In fact, it’s not unfair to say that the discussion
of the Renaissance nude in many art history books
is based on supposition and assumption, assem-
bled from knowledge of later periods. In this essay, I
argue against some of the leading claims. First, the
nude form is neither “timeless” nor a “celebration
of all mankind,” but a form invented at a specific
time, for specific reasons. Further, the nude is not
a straightforward “revival of classical art,” nor is
it due, as Kenneth Clark famously claimed, to an
“unexplained miracle.”2
In the Renaissance and early modern period the
portrayal of the naked figure was contested, laughed
at, lusted over, and admired. It was an art form that
developed against the backdrop of rapid and sweep-
ing change: a Europe fractured by religious divi-
sions, waves of deadly epidemics, and political flux.
The new technology of printing enabled the spread
of ideas across the Continent in a way previously
unknown, and cheaper paper allowed artistic devel-
opments to be disseminated over a wider area, and
experienced by a broader audience. The evolution of
the nude comprised the basis of a new understand-
ing of the role of the artist, linked to new discoveries
in anatomy and medicine, and intertwined with an
understanding of the white European male as some-
where akin to God in the potential perfection of his
body and his creative energies.
Leading Approaches to the Nude
in the Scholarly Literature
To date, the most famous book on the nude is
Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form,
first published in 1956. Clark’s volume remains
popular, perhaps because it is so easy to argue with.
Indeed, every book on nakedness and the nude
published since, name checks Clark and generally
takes him to task. His main contribution (or at
 least the portion of the text that scholars invariably
discuss) is the notion of a separation between the
“naked” and the “nude.” By this, he explains, “To
be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the
word implies some of the embarrassment most of us
feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other
hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable
overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind
is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a
balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body
re-formed.”3 As many scholars have pointed out,
this notion of a divide between the two concepts
is deeply problematic, for various reasons. 4 While
here is not the place to argue with Clark yet again,
in this context it is important to note that he omits
a key element of the nude that needs to be men-
tioned — the role of gender, of the portrayed body
as well as of the artist and viewer, both traditionally
assumed to be male. Whether the figure is male or
female plays a significant role in how we perceive its
nakedness. Traditionally, the male nude has been
taken as a kind of emblem for humanity as a whole,
whereas the female nude has been understood
as a kind of fantasy of the artist, an object of voy-
eurism and erotic pleasure. Since the inception of
the nude form in ancient Greece, the genders have
been thought of differently, and, as I discuss below,
the Renaissance revival of the nude can broadly be
divided into two, gendered, approaches.
I will discuss this in greater detail below, but,
simply put, the earliest representations of the nude
in fifteenth-century Italy sought to depict a perfect,
idealized human body. Because of Renaissance
ideas concerning the alleged biological superiority
of men to women, the perfect body had to be male.
As humans were seen to be essentially sinful and
imperfect, even the best bodies could not attain the
perfection of the original form of mankind created
by God. Depicting the most ideal human possi-
ble, then, involved repeated drawing after a naked
male model whose physique was perceived to be
as perfect as could be. These exercises were aimed
at allowing the artist to eventually dispense with
the model entirely in order to depict nudes from
17
his imagination. By the early seventeenth century,
this technique was linked to the notion of disegno
interno (internal design or drawing), analogous
to what Clark might have dubbed “ideal form.” 5
Through these techniques, the arts of painting,
sculpture, and architecture were characterized as
intellectual, as opposed to mechanical, pursuits.
This method for depicting the nude was adopted as
a working procedure particularly in Rome, Florence,
and elsewhere in central Italy, with famous pro-
ponents being Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519),
Michelangelo Buonarroti, and, subsequently, the
Rome-based French painter Nicolas Poussin. In
the pages that follow, this approach to the nude
is termed the “academic” method, as it came to be
practiced by groups of artists called “academies,”
who gathered in the later sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to promote and learn their craft.
The second approach also stressed close obser-
vation of the model, but did not regard as an end
point the artist’s independence from his model.
Rather, the focus here was on the artist’s starting
with a very beautiful model and then undergo-
ing a mental process of idealization to make the
painted nude even more beautiful than the original.
Repeated drawing was not important here — indeed,
some artists seemed to have painted directly on
the canvas or panel while observing the model,
without having first worked out a clear design on
paper. Typically in this approach, there is more of an
interest in depicting skin and the softness of flesh.
The goal here was related to the concept of mime-
sis, or the copying of nature. Ideally, the painting or
sculpture was to evoke an emotional reaction on the
part of the viewer similar to the effect of seeing a
beautiful naked woman in real life. I thus call this
technique the “erotic nude.” It was an approach that
emphasized sensuality and was especially associ-
ated with the female nude. Its proponents were art-
ists such as Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, Caravaggio
(1571–1610), and Peter Paul Rubens.
The boundaries between these methods are
not set in stone, and artists like Rubens might dip
into both approaches. Broadly speaking, though,
this bipartite division was an important feature of
Renaissance and Baroque art theory, enmeshed in
debates concerning the relative superiority of sculp-
ture to painting, disegno to colore, and idealization to
mimesis — as well as relating to the different quali-
ties of male and female bodies.

I. Meanings of Nakedness and Nudity

a) nudity, antiquity, and christianity
As noted above, it is often assumed in the art-histor-
ical literature that the Renaissance nude is a “revival”
of a classical form. In some ways, this is true. The
nude statues that survived from ancient Greek and
Roman times were undoubtedly a source of inspi-
ration for Renaissance artists, patrons, and others
of the cultural elite. Stories of ancient artists such
as Zeuxis (active late fifth–early fourth centuries
BCE), Apelles (active late fourth century BCE),
and Praxiteles inspired generations of painters and
sculptors from the fifteenth to the eighteenth cen-
turies. However, the inception of the Renaissance
nude involved the creation of new ways of looking
that separated artistic representation from every-
day life. This was a distinct innovation of the period,
one that distinguishes Renaissance nudes from
their medieval and antique precursors, despite the
visual similarities.
The nude male form was first widely used in
artistic representation in Greece in the fifth century
BCE, and gave rise to a vocabulary of forms for the
naked human body that has been hugely influential
in Western art, especially from the late fifteenth
century onward. Nakedness was an important
aspect of the identity of elite Greek men. Athletes
would exercise unclothed at the gymnasium, and
symposia (drinking parties) were conducted naked.
Nakedness was a sign of athleticism and elite sta-
tus, and a way that the Greeks separated themselves
from the barbarian foreigners who encroached on
their domain. 6 Therefore, classical sculptures of the
male nude, such as the Apollo Belvedere (a Roman
copy of a Greek prototype that was known in the
Renaissance; fig. 8), had real-life counterparts.
The most influential female nude was also cre-
ated in ancient Greece. Around the fourth century
BCE, the celebrated sculptor Praxiteles made a
statue of the goddess of love, Aphrodite (Venus), ris-
ing from her bath in the temple at Cnidia. Potentially
shocking at the time — respectable women were
expected to cover up — the nakedness of this sculp-
ture had a clear iconographical purpose in depicting
FIG 8 After Leochares (Greek, active late fourth century
BCE), Apollo Belvedere, c. 120–140 CE, Roman copy
of a Hellenistic bronze original made in c. 350–325 BCE.
Cortile del Belvedere, Vatican City
the goddess of love and sexuality. 7 This statue’s
form was familiar throughout the Middle Ages and
the Renaissance, due to the survival of many Roman
copies — among the most famous being the Venus
de’ Medici (fig. 9). 8 Known as the Venus Pudica, this
sculpture’s pose — the naked goddess’ hands simul-
taneously obscuring and drawing attention to her
breasts—was widely copied in the Renaissance, and
evoked many times by artists justifying their study
of the naked female body.
The links between the ancient Greek nude and
Greek life were only discovered in the twentieth
century. Viewers of classical art in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance had to work out the reasons
for this nudity for themselves — and it perplexed
them. Steeped in Christian culture, they had a very
different attitude toward the naked body than their
Greek predecessors. Anyone familiar with the Bible
will know that nakedness gets a bad rap. The story of
Adam and Eve (Genesis 2:4–3:24) is fundamental to
Christian notions of the sinfulness of the flesh. God
creates Adam in the Garden of Eden, then makes Eve
from his rib. God tells the couple not to eat the fruit
of the tree of knowledge. Eve, however, is tempted to

18
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

do so by the serpent, takes a bite, and then persuades

Adam to do the same. At this point, they realize they
are naked and seek to conceal their genitalia with
leaves. God duly banishes the two from Eden, dress-
ing them in rough cloth, condemning Adam to a life
of work, and Eve to childbirth and spinning cloth.
Both the power of the sense of sight, and its poten-
tial pitfalls, are central elements in this story. The
church father Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430
CE), whose writings were enormously influential
in the Renaissance, explained that when Adam saw
Eve naked it allowed lust to “move these members
without the will’s consent.” In other words, Adam’s
bodily response to the sight of the naked female body
was not under his mental control. This is why, accord-
ing to Augustine, all peoples, Christian and pagan
alike, see the need for genital covering.9 The power
and perils of looking at naked women are themes that
recur throughout the history of the female nude in
the Renaissance, as I will discuss.
In fact, the display of the naked (or near-naked)
body in European art is first widespread in the
depiction of Christ. Both the Christ Child and the
adult Christ began to be depicted fully or almost FIG 10 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Risen Christ, c. 1519–20.
naked in the fourteenth century. Leo Steinberg has Marble. Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome

shown how the nakedness of Christ, which to mod-

FIG 9 After Praxiteles (Greek, active c. 375–340 BCE),
Venus de’ Medici, first century BCE, Roman copy of a
Hellenistic original made in the fourth century BCE.
Marble, height without base: 60 ¼ in. (153 cm). Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence
ern eyes can sometimes seem inappropriately sexual,
is related to the doctrine of incarnation — the idea
that Christ was the son of God, but was also human,
and had a man’s body.10 The concentration on flesh
emphasized this doctrine, while also enabling an
identification between the viewer and Christ. This
was true as well of many holy figures, such as Saint
Sebastian (cat. nos. 26–28), whose nakedness is asso-
ciated with his status as a plague saint. Images of such
figures allowed those whose bodies were inflicted
with illness to focus on a saint whose body was like-
wise human and thus frail. They encouraged pen-
itential practices and the mortification of the flesh,
key elements of premodern Catholicism.11 However,
even in these cases, complete nudity remained taboo.
There are very few images of a fully naked Christ
hailing from the Renaissance. Indeed, the only well-
known example is Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, made
for the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in
Rome in about 1519–20 (fig. 10). This totally naked
Christ was seen as so shocking that his genitals were
attacked with an axe in 1527.12 Ever since, the sculp-
ture has been displayed with a loincloth.

19
 Not surprisingly, the focus on the body as a site
of sin proved problematic for admirers of ancient
art. Many commentators in the Renaissance simply
explained that non-Christians possessed a free-
dom to depict the body that was no longer possible.
Thus, in a 1426 debate with the ribald poet Antonio
Beccadelli (1394–1471), the Florentine humanist
Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) claimed that “the
same license is not given to us Christians as was
given to the poets of old, who did not know God.”13
It was (rightly) assumed that a different cultural
context meant that nakedness had a different signif-
icance in this earlier culture, though just what that
significance was, remained unclear. Thus, the histo-
rian Raffaele Maffei (1451–1522) blamed the predi-
lection for nude statuary among the ancient Greeks
on their wish “to show off their art and because of
their libidinousness.”14 Some of Maffei’s contem-
poraries held precisely the opposite view. His fellow
humanist Pierio Valeriano (1477–1558) asserted,
“Antiquity, being less vice-ridden, philosophized
more plainly and frankly about each and every thing;
nor was there at that time anything in the human
body that was considered disgraceful either by sight
or name.”15 Some commentators, such as Rubens,
even regarded the portrayal of perfected bodies in
classical sculpture as evidence that bodies back then
were simply better formed and less corrupted than
the physiques of more modern times.16
b) nakedness, gender, and social significance
The puzzled reaction to antique nudes is hardly
surprising, given that the naked human body in
real life was deemed shameful in the Renaissance
and early modern period. Renaissance culture was
one obsessed with appearance and the correct cloth-
ing.17 The clothes that people wore constituted a
marker of their place in society. To some extent this
remains true today, but the relationship between
attire and social status was much more codified
than it is nowadays. Certain types of clothing and
cuts and colors of cloth, for example, were restricted
by law. Thus, in fifteenth-century Florence, if you
were a member of the civic government you were
only allowed to wear a long gown called a lucco
and a curious cloth cap known as a cappuccio.18 In
many Italian city states, women were identified as
recently married by being allowed to wear sump-
tuous garb and jewelry around the time of their
betrothal, clothes that were not permitted later on
in married life;19 servants of particular noblemen
20
would be distinguished by their livery; and so on.
In sum, clothes were the protector of the social
order, such that correct attire was a cause of much
discussion and anxiety. John Florio’s (1553–1625)
Italian-English dictionary of 1611 conveys these
implications of nakedness in his translation of the
Italian word nudo as “Nude, naked, bare, discovered.
Also poore, beggarly and deprived of.”20
The meaning of nakedness differed according to
gender. In the medical literature of the early modern
period, the female body was regarded as essentially
inferior to the male. For the entire period under dis-
cussion, understanding of the body was linked to
the humoral system. It was believed that the balance
of the body was governed by four humors with dis-
tinct qualities of heat and moisture that gave rise to
distinct personality types. The humors were black
bilious (cold and dry), phlegmatic (cold and moist),
choleric (hot and dry), and sanguine (hot and moist).
To create a male fetus, it was thought that conditions
in the womb had to be relatively hot and dry. The
balance of humors could change due to aging and
illness, among other factors, but the relative “wet and
coldness” of women was seen to create intellectual
weakness. 21 Although there were many arguments
concerning the precise relationship between the
humors, gender, and the way that procreation worked,
the notion of female bodily and mental inferiority
was rarely questioned. Thus, in central Italy in 1478
the physician and philosopher Girolamo Manfredi
(c. 1430–1493) explained that, as “women have wet
and warm complexions,” coupled with smaller pores
in their heads that make purging noxious vapors
more difficult, so “there cannot be women who are
prudent and wise, or only very rarely.”22 More than
a hundred years later, and across the Continent, the
FIG 11 Pair of male underpants, late fifteenth century.
Linen. Lengberg Castle, East-Tyrol, Austria
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

Female nakedness, on the other hand, was ineluc-

tably connected with sexual shame and social exclu-
sion. A frequent punishment for adulterous women
was to run around the city streets naked, so that their
shame would be witnessed by all. 25 Renaissance
underwear for women consisted of a baggy shift
or basic chemise, usually made of linen and quite
plain, but occasionally fashioned out of cotton and
silk. They could be embroidered around the neck,
and sometimes had sleeves. Men also wore these
garments, and they were extremely common, as in
several extant examples (fig. 12). Up until the late
eighteenth century, it was not customary for women
to wear any form of underpants, drawers, or knickers.
In fact, doing so was thought of as cross-dressing and
was largely related to prostitution. This is seen in a
1563 engraving of a Venetian courtesan, in which her
men’s long johns and wooden platform shoes (zoccoli)
can be seen underneath her skirt (figs. 13, 14).
FIG 12 Smock, Italian, late sixteenth century. Linen, silk,
and metal thread, length at center back 53 in. (134.6 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers
Fund, 1910 (10.124.1)

story was much the same; in 1631, the Dutch jurist

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) observed, “the female
sex is generally colder and moister than the male sex,
and less fitted for affairs which require understand-
ing: therefore the male sex is given by nature a sort of
authority over women.”23
For both sexes, nakedness was largely associ-
ated with shame, but for different reasons. For men,
nakedness was often linked with poverty — this was
an age when poorer people could not readily afford
clothing, and therefore beggars, or the dispossessed,
could sometimes be partially naked. Men wore
underpants underneath their hose, generally tied at
the side, as in the rare, surviving example recently
found in Switzerland (fig. 11). Some occupational
groups, such as dyers and tanners, worked naked
aside from their underpants; since they mixed dye
in large vats of human urine, they would not want to
get their (rather-expensive) clothes dirty. 24 During
the summer, it was also possible to see men in simply
their underpants while swimming, fishing, or doing
building work. Although the display of genitals was
taboo for men, it was relatively common to see par- FIGS 13 & 14 Ferrando Bertelli, publisher (Italian, 1561–71,

tially naked men in public. As indicated in surviving
drawings and images of life-drawing classes, male
life-drawing models seem to have often kept their
underpants on during the process (see figs. 21, 24).
active in Venice), Venetian Woman with Moveable Skirt
(with flap lifted [13] and flap down [14]), 1563. Engraving,
sheet: 5 ½ × 7 7 ⁄ 16 in. (14 × 18.9 cm). The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey
Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1955 (55.503.30)

21

FIG 15 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli; Italian [Venetian],
c. 1488–1576), Flora, c. 1520. Oil on canvas, 31 3 ⁄ 8 × 25 in.
(79.7 × 63.5 cm). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
to strip stark naked . . . how many men and how many
women do you think would fall into temptation? I
say many, and many just by seeing her.”29 A hun-
dred years later, the Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives
(1493–1540), in his hugely influential De institutione
feminae christianae (Education of a Christian Woman),
first published in 1524 but translated into many
European languages over the course of the sixteenth
century, claimed that “the more wanton, seeing a part
of the body not usually exposed to view, are enflamed
as if they had caught fire . . . no part of the [female]
body, vile and useless servant, should be seen.”30 A
hundred years later still, the Dutch poet and jurist
Jacob Cats (1577–1660) claimed in his Houwelick
(Marriage) of 1625 that women should keep their
limbs concealed at all times, and never breastfeed in
public—otherwise awful things could happen: “How
many frivolous youngsters / Because of seeing this
were seized by an untamed fire / It is not possible to
fully express by language / To what extent lascivious
sight manages to drag down the soul / How far the
fire of lust will shoot through all limbs / when a loose
youth only sees a naked bosom.”31

The transgressive nature of total female nudity

during the Renaissance should not be understated.
Women were regarded as naked even when wearing
a chemise, as in Titian’s famous painting Flora of
about 1520 (fig. 15). In erotic literature of the early
sixteenth century, complete female nakedness is
portrayed as the ultimate taboo — and it seems
likely that having sex while wearing a shift was the
norm throughout Europe. 26 Thus, in Amsterdam
in the early sixteenth century, prostitutes received
a harsher punishment for having sex fully naked
as opposed to clothed. 27 Even husbands were
chastised for seeing their wives naked, because,
explained the Franciscan preacher Bernardino of
Siena (1380 –1444) in 1427, “What you are per-
mitted to touch, you are not permitted to see . . .
Woman . . . it is better to die than to let yourself be
seen [naked].”28
The preoccupation with keeping women covered
stemmed from their ability to provoke lust on the
part of the viewer, just as Eve did with Adam. Sight
was considered to be the most powerful of the senses,
and when wrongly employed could lead to sin. The
idea that naked women pose a danger to the viewer
FIG 16 Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577–1640), Portrait
was expressed throughout Europe during the whole of Susanna Lunden (“The Straw Hat”), c. 1622–25. Oil on
period in question. So Bernardino asked his audi- oak, 31 1 ⁄ 8 × 21 ½ in. (79 × 54.6 cm). National Gallery,
ence from the pulpit: “If one of you women here were London. Bought, 1871 (NG852)

22
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

The extent of a woman’s flesh that could be lic-

itly shown while clothed varied greatly, especially in
the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
in Northern Europe, where the amount of cover-
ing a woman wore could be a sign of her (and her
husband’s) religious and political affiliations. In
the Calvinist northern Netherlands of the early
sixteenth century, any display of cleavage would
lead to a woman’s identification as a prostitute; 32
thus, women from Calvinist settings are generally
portrayed largely covered up. By contrast, in courtly
Catholic milieux, there tended to be a somewhat
more liberal attitude toward female dress — or at
least the rulings of church figures were not taken
as seriously. It is common to see portraits of well-
to-do women from these milieux reflecting more
revealing fashions and emphasizing the soft skin
and curves of the shoulders and chest — as, for
example, in Rubens’s portrait of Susanna Lunden
(fig. 16), the daughter of an Antwerp silk merchant
and, subsequently, his sister-in-law.
Ideas about nudity in real life, of course, had a FIG 17 Giovanni Pisano (Italian, c. 1240–c. 1314),
bearing on how the depiction of naked people in Temperance and Chastity, 1302–10. Marble, Cathedral
painting was understood. The republic of Venice, pulpit, Pisa
in particular, was notorious for the amount of flesh
its women had on display, and the courtesan culture
that emerged in that city and in papal Rome from
the 1490s onward led to a more relaxed attitude
toward female nakedness, at least among some
social circles. This, as I discuss below, was bound
up with the development of the sensual nude in art.

II. Creating the Renaissance Nude

a) intellectual contexts
As indicated above, classical nudes’ incorporation
into the visual arts during the Renaissance was com-
plicated, and required a whole new way of thinking
about artistry and representation. Before around
1400, nudity in artistic representation was generally
explained through the use of allegory. In other words,
the nudity stood for some quality, generally a virtue,
which was somehow illustrated by the nakedness of
an image. Ideas of openness, truth, and lack of con-
cealment were typical. For example, when Giovanni
Pisano was commissioned in 1301 to sculpt the bap-
tistery font in Pisa with personifications of virtues,
FIG 18 Nanni di Banco (Italian, c. 1380–1421), Hercules,
he used a classicizing naked Venus as the basis for
c. 1400. Marble, door jamb of Porta della Mandorla,
the personification of Temperance, because beauty Cathedral, Florence, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
is a quality associated with that virtue (fig. 17). 33
Likewise, across Tuscany around 1400, Nanni di
Banco borrowed a classical representation of the

23

FIG 19 Antonio Pollaiuolo (Italian, 1431/32–1498), The
Battle of the Nudes, c. 1470–95. Engraving, 16 3 ⁄ 8 × 23 3 ⁄ 8 in.
(41.6 × 59.4 cm). The British Museum, London. V, 1.33
naked Hercules to signify the virtue of Justice on
the portal of Florence cathedral (fig. 18). Justice is
transparent and has nothing to hide—and therefore
a naked man is an apt visual manifestation of this con-
cept.34 We can see in both these instances—and there
are many others from the years prior to 1500 — that
classical form is borrowed, but given an entirely new
meaning and context. Before the Renaissance, then,
nudity tended to have a specific iconographical func-
tion. The way in which nudity was understood would
undergo a significant shift in the century that fol-
lowed. There are two main contexts for this shift. The
first relates to the reevaluation of the human body as
representing potential rather than sin; the second
relates to a rethinking of the artist’s role from being
merely a copyist of the nature he saw around him, to
an individual charged with deploying the body as a
vessel to express ideal physical form.
The early fifteenth century saw an increasing
enthusiasm among the intellectual elite for learn-
ing more about the classical past. Ancient texts that
had been languishing in the cellars of monasteries
were discovered, edited, and translated. Other texts
that had been familiar throughout the Middle
Ages, such as the writings of Aristotle (384–322
BCE), were read and interpreted anew. The ruins
of antique buildings were examined, inscriptions
were written down, and artists started to use new
technologies of drawing on paper to record what
they saw.
24
By the mid-fifteenth century, many intellectuals
started to think of the human body in more posi-
tive terms. This was partly due to the rediscovery or
rereading of classical texts such as Cicero’s (107–43
BCE) De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)
and the Early Christian writer Lactantius’s (240–
c. 320 CE) De opificio dei (On the Craftsmanship of
God), which presented the body as a marvel of God’s
handiwork. Around the same time, voyages of dis-
covery began to explore previously unknown parts
of sub-Saharan Africa and the New World. Tales of
the strange and marvelous peoples encountered by
explorers were lapped up by a fascinated European
public. These often included stories of encounters
with naked, barbaric, and sexually uninhibited
natives who (in Amerigo Vespucci’s [1454–1512]
words) “were not ashamed of their shameful parts.”35
Early illustrations frequently showed these newly
discovered peoples as totally or partially naked.
Historians have now pointed out that these peoples
did indeed wear clothes, which often had complex
systems of signification, but which were completely
misunderstood by the incoming Europeans, who
had sociocultural reasons for promoting the idea
that the pagan natives of these foreign lands were
savages. By the late fifteenth century, it became
customary to equate human nakedness with poten-
tial — the potential to embrace Christianity, cloth-
ing, and culture, or, conversely, to descend into an
animal-like state. It became the Europeans’ mis-
sion to convert the peoples they had encountered
to what they believed was the correct faith — and to
bring those peoples out of their allegedly barbarous
existence. In practice, this often entailed enslave-
ment. European attitudes toward the newly found
non-Christian “savages” are expressed by the many
late Quattrocento images of naked men engaged in
violent struggle, among the best known of which is
by the Florentine artist Antonio Pollaiuolo and may
depict Africans fighting (fig. 19). 36 As elsewhere,
nudity represents potential — in this case, the poten-
tial to become Christianized and civilized by means
of clothing.
At the same time, a new explanation for antique
nudes began to be set forth. It was first expressed in
an account of conversations at the court in Ferrara
recorded in the 1450s by the humanist Angelo
Decembrio (1415–after 1467). He recalls the
high-ranking figure Leonello d’Este (1407–1450)
explaining that “the best statues are either wholly or
partly nude [because] the excellent works of those
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

artists and of that time would best be judged in this

state of nakedness . . . For it is not every fashion of
clothing that pleases every subsequent genera-
tion and race: some kinds of shoes and cloaks and
belts and even armor become ridiculous even in
paintings. But the artifice of Nature is supreme, no
period fashions change it.”37
According to this line of thought, nudity was
essential for modern-day artists so that their
work could be properly compared with the figures
executed by ancient sculptors. It represented an
essential state of humanity that emphasized com-
monality between times and places. By the time
Michelangelo was creating his most famous nude
figures in the early sixteenth century, the nude fig-
ure had become a byword for artistic creativity. It
was now customary to see the nude as a test of skill
and ingenuity; metaphors of birth and procreation FIG 20 Workshop of Filippo Lippi (Italian, c. 1406–69),
Study of Three Young Men, fifteenth century. Metalpoint
likewise became prevalent as well. Through the
and white heightening on pink prepared paper,
fecundity of their imagination, male artists were 7 ½ × 10 in. (18.9 × 25.5 cm). Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille.
able to produce images of humans much more Inv. Pl. 82
perfect than the real people who inhabited the sin-
ful world. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling
became a manifesto of sorts for this new type of art.

b) the academic nude: forming the perfect body

In the late fifteenth century, the ability to draw
the nude was becoming a prerequisite for the very
definition of a successful artist. The intellectual
center for this approach to art making was the
Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492) in the FPO Image TK
1470s–1490s, and it is in this milieu that the first
life drawings after the male nude were consistently
made. Many such drawings still survive, as in these
examples from the workshops of Filippo Lippi and
Sandro Botticelli (figs. 20 and 21), showing two very
different responses to models holding the same
pose. It is clear that the ability to draw the naked fig-
ure had become an important aspect of the training
of young artists, and it is likely that young men with
FIG 21 Attributed to workshop of Sandro Botticelli
physiques deemed appropriate were paid — either (1444/45–1510), Three Studies after a Near-Naked Model,
salaried or on an ad hoc basis — to act as models. 38 fifteenth century. Metalpoint and white heightening on
The dominant practice of life drawing as it devel- buff prepared paper, dimensions. Galleria degli Uffizi,
oped in the Renaissance was not infused with the Florence. Gabinetto disegni e stampe, 222E
same goals as drawing after the figure today. Life
models at an art institution now might typically
display a wide range of physical characteristics, and
it is perfectly acceptable to depict them, warts and
all. By contrast, during the Renaissance, the idea
was to start with a model who had a body that was
understood as beautiful and tending toward the

25

Graphicom, this is two image
files, please piece together and
also silo to book edge.
FIG 22 Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528), Fols. Lii
and Lii verso from Four Books on Human Proportion
(Nuremberg: Agnes Dürer, 1532, 1534). Woodcut, folio:
13 in. (33 cm). The Morgan Library and Museum,
New York. Gift of Mr. John P. Morgan II in memory of
Mrs. Junius S. Morgan, 1981. PML 77029.2
FIG 23 Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504. Engraving,
9 7 ⁄ 8 × 7 7 ⁄ 8 in. (25.1 × 20 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York. Fletcher Fund, 1919 (19.73.1)
26
ideal; the goal was to arrive at a figure that was more
perfect and ideal than anything that could be found
in nature. This quest for an ideally beautiful figure
went hand in hand with a broader effort to both
mimic and perfect the natural world in artistic tech-
nique, an effort that characterizes the visual arts of
the Italian peninsula from the early fifteenth century.
Some artists and writers tried to approach the
notion of the ideal body in a quasi-scientific manner.
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), a humanist who
gave us the first treatise on painting and also wrote
an extraordinarily influential book on architecture,
tried to pin down the mathematical proportions of
the ideal body in De statua (On Sculpture), written
in the 1450s. Alberti’s premise is that everything in
the human body should be proportionally related
to everything else —so the measurement of the face
should be one-ninth that of the body as a whole, for
example. In his treatise, Alberti seeks to plot the ide-
ally proportioned body; he explains that to arrive at
his figures he copied an approach adopted by the clas-
sical artist Zeuxis, who was famously asked to paint a
picture of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman
of all time. Zeuxis set off to gather the most beautiful
women he could find, taking the best aspects of each
to form a composite, perfect figure. Similarly, Alberti
went in search of the most beautiful men he could
find, and measured them all; the perfect body was
the average of those measurements.39 In this, Alberti
was also inspired by the classical architect Vitruvius
(c. 80–70 BCE; died after c. 15 BCE), in particular
the list of proportions given in the latter’s famous
text De architectura (On Architecture), which became
very popular during the fifteenth century. Leonardo
da Vinci had a similar aim in formulating his ideal
human in the Vitruvian Man of 1490.
The underlying assumption of this approach is
that the human body was degraded from its origi-
nal appearance, but that by closely studying many
examples one can achieve a perfect form, the body
that God intended. In turn, the human body can
be used as a basis of measurement for everything
else. As such, in his 1435 treatise Della pittura (On
Painting), which introduced the theory of sin-
gle-point perspective, Alberti suggests that all the
objects in a painting should be proportionally based
on the height of a man. To prove his point, he cites
the phrase widely attributed to the Greek philoso-
pher Protagoras (c. 490–c. 420 BCE) — “man is a
measure of all things.”40 However, Renaissance
investigations into proportions were not merely a
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650
means of putting mankind at the center of cosmol-
ogy, but a way of reaching the divine through mea-
surement. It is worth pointing out that this godlike
human form was always presumed to be male. At the
turn of the fifteenth century, the painter Cennino
Cennini (c. 1370–c. 1440) explained that it was
impossible to give proportions for women, because
they “none of them have perfect proportions.”41
The exploration of the ideal body was also
underway around the same time in Northern
Europe. There had been at least a century-long
tradition of depicting the nude in the Netherlands.
Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) and Rogier van der
Weyden (c. 1399–1464) had depicted women at
the bath, both garnering considerable praise and
fame in Italy for these images. 42 It was not until
about 1500, however, when the artistic theory
relating to the nude form was introduced in the
North. Greatly inf luenced by the Italian artists
he had encountered during his travels, Albrecht
Dürer obsessively explored the correct proportions
of the perfect nude form, writing a treatise on the
subject that was published just after his death, Vier
Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on
Human Proportion). Like Leonardo and Alberti,
Dürer based his method on Vitruvius, but remea-
sured people himself. He recognized human diver-
sity and captured it in his book — and, unlike the
Italians, he was also interested in the proportions
of women (fig 22). However, he believed that true
beauty resided in the original human, Adam, and to
return to this form he, like his Italian predecessors,
also promoted the Zeuxian method: “If you wish to
make a beautiful human figure, it is necessary that
you probe the nature and proportions of many peo-
ple: a head from one; a breast, arm, leg from another.”
The results of his investigations can be seen in his
famous engraving Adam and Eve, of 1504 (fig. 23),
the culmination of many studies after the nude and
extensive research into ideal proportions. 43
As time went on, the notion of the ideal male
nude as comprising a key criterion for judging
artistic skill became firmly ensconced in elite cul-
ture, first in Italy, then throughout Europe. Most
artists, however, did not use a proportional system,
but a method centered on repeated drawing after
the nude male figure that allowed the artist to, as it
were, conceive a perfected nude body in his mind.
The eventual aim was to be able to create a perfected
naked figure completely from the imagination,
without recourse to a real model.
27
Repeated drawing after a nude model became
commonplace in artistic training as the sixteenth
century progressed, especially in central Italy and
then in the Netherlands by the early seventeenth
century. Master painters would hold life-drawing
sessions known in Italy as accademie del naturale,
where both young artists and their more established
counterparts would draw after a nude model. 44 This
practice spread to Northern Europe by the 1580s,
when Karel van Mander (1548–1606), Hendrick
Goltzius (1558–1617), and Cornelius van Haarlem
(1562–1638) formed an “academy for studying
from life” in Haarlem. 45 The basic structure of
these meetings remained consistent throughout
the period, and is captured in Michael Sweerts’s
Drawing School (fig. 24). Sweerts himself opened an
“academy for drawing from life” in Brussels in 1656.
During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries, life-drawing sessions would be held in the sum-
mer, when it was warmer for the model and there
was more natural light. 46 Winter could be spent
studying after the antique or on anatomical study.
Around the 1620s, life drawing started to take place
in winter as well, in small rooms heated by a coal
stove and lit by lamps (as in Sweerts’s image), con-
ditions that would enable the study of chiaroscuro
effects on the body, with much more control than
sunlight would allow. Models were chosen for the
beauty of their physiques, and sometimes salaried
FIG 24 Michael Sweerts (Flemish, 1618–1664), The
Drawing School, 1650–60. Oil on canvas, 40 ¾ × 53 ¾ in.
(103.4 × 136.5 cm). Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem
 if they were particularly favored for their beauty and
ability to hold a pose. 47
The evidence suggests that, in this academic
milieu, the models were almost always male. In
fact, the Accademia di San Luca, the painter’s acad-
emy in Rome, banned the use of female models for
life-drawing sessions in 1607 — though perhaps
the fact that they had to do so suggests that some
sessions did in fact take place. 48 There are reports
of female life models being used in this kind of acad-
emy setting later in the century in the Netherlands,
but the evidence for this practice tends to come from
criminal trials seeking to prove that the model in
question was morally dissolute. Thus, in 1658 Maria
la Motte, arrested for prostitution, is said to have
“posed publicly at the assembly of painters,” and
to have been the usual model for the painter Dirck
Bleker (c. 1622–after 1672). 49 In the same year, a
FIG 25 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Kneeling Female Nude,
Holding a Crown or Nails, c. 1498. Pen and brown ink,
black and red chalk, heightened with white, 10 ½ × 6 in.
(26.7 × 15.3 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Cabinet des
Dessins, Inv. 726 recto
28
woman named Catarina Jans reportedly sat “stark
naked before [Rembrandt’s pupils] . . . and other col-
leagues as a model and . . . they, the witnesses drew
and painted her thus.”50 It is likely, as I discuss below,
that female models generally posed in more intimate
circumstances, probably for an individual artist.
In essence, however, the search for the ideal nude
did not necessitate regular study after a female model.
The point was for artists to practice enough to enable
them to create an image of an ideal human — who
was by necessity male. Nevertheless, there are life
drawings of the female nude by some artists who
embraced the Zeuxian technique. Among these art-
ists was Michelangelo, whose c. 1498 life drawing
after a young woman for his Entombment altarpiece
(fig. 25) is among the few surviving drawings after
the female nude from the end of the fifteenth century.
However, he famously sought to give his female fig-
ures what he deemed the best qualities of humanity
in general. In this, he was following a trend in Italian
intellectual circles that praised androgyny as the
most beautiful form.51
This fashion had its detractors, however.
During his lifetime, Michelangelo was criticized
by some writers for failing to recognize the variety
of human bodies in his work. In the early 1550s, the
architect and painter Pirro Ligorio (c. 1512–1583)
complained about painters who made “women with
emotions and appearances that seem so far removed
from feminine delicacy that a painter of pumpkins
would be ashamed of them, with . . . harsh muscles
and breasts like citrons, and they are so muscular
and strangely put together.” 52 Around the same
time, the humanist Ludovico Dolce (c. 1508–1568)
wrote an art treatise, the Aretino, which compares
Michelangelo with Raphael and finds the former
wanting: “Michelangelo . . . does not recognise or
else is unwilling to take into account those distinc-
tions between the ages and the sexes . . . the man who
sees a figure by Michelangelo has seen them all.”53
Northern European critiques of Michelangelo’s
approach tended to focus on his lack of inter-
est in color and texture. So, in his history of
Netherlandish painting, Het Schilderboek (The Book
of Painting), from 1604 , the painter and author
Karel van Mander argued that while Michelangelo
perfected the nude in terms of proportion and the
form of its limbs, he was at fault in “leaving by the
wayside happy colouring, and many other delight-
ful things, which other painters pursue.” 54 This
approach could result in paintings of figures that
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

were lifeless, like marble. Thus, Rubens declared

in his notebook that the human skin should not be
depicted in a manner akin to “marble tinged with
various colours.”55 It was crucial, for these artists,
to represent the full richness and tangibility of skin.
Some painters in Northern Europe, particularly
in the rapidly expanding merchant city of Antwerp,
created entirely new pictorial genres that recontex-
tualized the nude figure, making it of equal or lesser
importance to the painting’s meaning as a whole.
From the early sixteenth century, the landscape
backdrop of religious stories started to dominate
the composition, as artists such as Joachim Patinir
(1480 –1524) placed increasingly small, central
narrative figures within a carefully depicted natu-
ral world. 56 Later in the period, mythological sto-
ries were also placed in a landscape setting. Works
like Hendrik de Clerck and Denis van Alsloot’s
Landscape with Diana and Acteon (cat. no. 10), for
example, take up Italianate subject matter, yet situ-
ate it in a distinctively Northern landscape setting,
subsuming the figures by their surroundings. 57
Nudes also appear in another painting genre that
originated in Flanders — the “gallery picture,” a
depiction of an interior packed with collections of
paintings and other objects, both real and imagi-
nary. Thus, the background of Sight and Smell (cat.
no. 7), painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder in collab- FIG 26 Giorgione (Italian, 1477–1510), Laura: Portrait
oration with other artists including his son and of a Woman (“Petrarca’s Laura”), 1506. Oil on canvas
namesake, features several images of nudes, most on old spruce wood, 16 1 ⁄ 8 × 13 ¼ in. (41 × 33.6 cm).
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Inv. 31
notably a Judgment of Paris at upper center that is
clearly an homage to Rubens. 58 Here, the nude,
rather than the central place it occupies in painting
south of the Alps, becomes one image type among is a portrait, now called Laura (fig. 26), executed in
many that had been mastered by Northern artists. 1506. It shows a dark-haired woman dressed only in
a man’s red fur-lined greatcoat that she holds open
c) the erotic nude to reveal her right breast; the rest of the background
Criticisms of the academic handling of the nude is black. The name of the painting comes from the
did not come out of nowhere, and were guided laurel leaves displayed behind her. This image has
by the goal of promoting an alternate approach provoked considerable debate among art historians,
to the human body in painting — and to art more particularly as to the reasons why a Venetian woman
generally. Just as Michelangelo was reaching his would allow herself to be portrayed naked at a time
ascendance in Rome and Florence, Venetian paint- when female nakedness was so thoroughly frowned
ers were focusing on the nude in a rather different upon. Many scholars have suggested that Laura is
way. There was a fashion for the heroicizing male a portrait of a prostitute or a courtesan — and this
nude in Venice, but the real innovation in the mari- seems likely. 59 The question of the sitter’s identity
time republic was in the development of the female is important because this painting was the first of
nude. The short-lived and still-elusive Giorgione many focused on a woman in a state of undress,
seems to have been the painter who initiated this executed in a portrait format. In such works, the
new approach to art, portraying women in new and woman tends to be more or less idealized — in fact,
influential ways. One of his most famous paintings sometimes, as in Titian’s Flora (see fig. 15), the face,

29

hair, and body are so idealized as to seem a figment
of the artist’s imagination. Often, as here, icono-
graphical props are added to the painting to indi-
cate a classical, biblical, or historical figure — as in
Guido Reni’s Cleopatra (cat. no. 21). Confusingly,
several images that are clearly portraits also contain
iconographical attributes; for this reason, they seem
to be renderings of specific women in the guise of
famous figures like the classical heroine Lucretia,
or saints such as Agatha or Lucy, as in the portrait
by the Venetian artist Cariani (fig. 27), depicting a
now-unidentified woman as Saint Agatha, squeez-
ing one of the dumpling-like breasts displayed on a
glass plate in front of her. This same elision of por-
trait and idealized archetype can be seen in Pietro
Negri’s Vanitas of 1662 (cat. no. 22). Interestingly,
this hazy relationship between an individual and
the role she plays often arises in images of women
30
FIG 27 Cariani (Giovanni Busi) (Italian, 1485/90–c. 1547),
Portrait of a Young Woman as Saint Agatha, 1516/17.
Oil on canvas, 22 ¾ × 27 ¼ in. (58 × 69 cm). National
Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. NG 2494
from the Renaissance and early modern period, but
only applies to a handful of male portraits. Given
attitudes toward female nakedness, perhaps assum-
ing a guise took women off the hook — they wear
their nakedness like a costume, rather than being
depicted naked themselves. In other images of this
type, such as Domenico Tintoretto’s Lady Revealing
Her Breast (cat. no. 5), there are convincing links to
real figures — in this case, the renowned Venetian
courtesan Veronica Franco (1546–1592), famous
for her poetry, beauty, and charm. Other portraits
of her likewise reveal her breasts, such as the 1575
image by Jacopo Tintoretto in the Worcester Art
Museum, and the portrait of her in Mores Italiae
(Italian Customs), an album of watercolor scenes of
Italian life made around the same time (fig. 28). 60
If the story of Zeuxis and the maidens of
Croton comprised a key metaphor for the process of
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650
creating an academic nude, antique texts also pro-
vided a blueprint for the creation of erotic female
nudes. The story of the great Greek painter Apelles,
Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), and his beau-
tiful courtesan, Campaspe (active after c. 336 BCE),
was most famously told by Pliny the Elder (23–79
CE) in his Natural History and illustrated in the
Renaissance by several Italian and Northern artists,
including Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) and Joos van
Winghe (fig. 29). 61 Alexander asked Apelles to paint
Campaspe’s naked portrait; the painter complied,
creating an image of such beauty that Alexander
fell in love with the portrait and awarded the art-
ist Campaspe in exchange for the painting — the
idea here being that Apelles was able to produce
an image even better than the original. Campaspe
then served as the model for Apelles’s Venus
Anadyomene; portraying Venus rising from the sea,
this image inspired many Renaissance artists, from
FIG 28 Portrait of Veronica Franco, plate 6 from Mores
Italiae (Italian Customs), 1575. Pen and ink, sheet:
11 × 8 5 ⁄ 8 in. (28 × 21.8 cm), drawing: 7 ¼ × 5 1 ⁄ 8 in.
(18.5 × 13 cm). Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven.
Beinecke MS 457
31
Botticelli in the 1480s onward.
The other highly famous maker of female nude
images from the ancient world was Praxiteles, sculp-
tor of the Cnidian Venus, an image that, as noted
above, was frequently copied, admired — and even
feared — for its beauty and sexual allure. According
to some classical sources, the work was so titillat-
ing that one man was swept away and “stained” the
statue with his semen. In the Renaissance it was
known through various copies, among the most
famous of which was the Venus de’ Medici (see
fig. 9). Pliny and other sources explain that the
model for Praxiteles’s Venus was the beautiful cour-
tesan Phryne (fourth century BCE), whose allure
was such that she succeeded in winning a hopeless
court case simply by bearing her chest.
These stories were circulating widely in Italy
starting in the latter half of the fifteenth century,
when Pliny was published and translated into Italian.
FIG 29 oos van Winghe (Netherlandish, 1544–1603, active
in Germany), Apelles Painting Campaspe, c. 1600. Oil on
canvas, 82 ¾ × 68 7 ⁄ 8 in. (210 × 175 cm). Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna. Inv. 1686
FIG 30 Titian, Young Woman with Fur, c. 1535. Oil on
canvas, 37 3 ⁄ 8 × 24 ¾ in. (95 × 63 cm). Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna. Inv. 89ns
FIG 31 Peter Paul Rubens, Helene Fourment, Second
Wife of the Artist, in a Fur Coat (Het Pelsken / The Furlet),
1638. Oil on wood, 69 ¼ × 32 ¾ in. (176 × 83 cm).
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Inv. GG 688
It is possible to trace a long line of artists depicting
their model in the guise of the Cnidian Venus, or
Venus Pudica. Famous images include Raphael’s La
Fornarina of about 1519 (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte
Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome); Titian’s Young
Woman with Fur of around 1535 (fig. 30); and Rubens’s
intimate portrait of his wife, Hélène Fourment, as
Venus in the acclaimed Het Pelsken (fig. 31). These
images clearly draw on the archetypes of Apelles
painting Campaspe and Praxiteles depicting Phryne,
and play on the notion of the artist immortalizing a
beautiful (and presumably beloved) woman, making
her into an object worthy of desire. They manifest an
understanding of the nude body quite different from
that of the academic model, one that begins with the
portrayal of a particular person and then gradually
abstracts it from the source, making the model’s
individuality less and less tangible. This process is
32
clearly at work in some of Titian’s paintings, such as
his Venus with an Organist and Cupid (cat. no. 2), one of
five extant images derived from an original painting
that depicts recognizable individuals (fig. 32). The
musician in the initial painting has been identified as
the legal expert Francesco Assonica, and the Venus is
assumed to be a courtesan. 62 Elsewhere, I discuss sev-
eral other examples of this type of abstraction from a
portrait-like image of a nude woman, a practice that
seems to have been relatively widespread, at least in
sixteenth-century Venice. 63 Titian was criticized
for this very tendency by his near-contemporary,
the sculptor Vincenzo Danti (1530–1576). In his Il
primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni (Treatise
on Perfect Proportions) of 1567, Danti complains that
Titian, unlike the central Italians, “has sometimes
depicted the most beautiful female figure, and some-
times not so beautiful . . . depending on whether he
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650
has many beautiful bodies to portray, like he who
proceeds only by way of portraying.”64 Titian is, for
Danti—a prime exponent of the academic nude—too
reliant upon the appearance of his model.
d) courtesans and models
The creation of the erotic nude in early six-
teenth-century Italy went hand in hand with the
initiation of a new role for women: the courtesan.
The Italian word cortegiana, literally the feminine
form of “courtier,” was first used to describe unmar-
ried women who accompanied clerics at the papal
court in the 1490s. The papal master of ceremo-
nies, Johann Burchard (c. 1450–1506), describes
a party at the Vatican attended by Pope Alexander
VI (r. 1492–1503) and two of his children, Cesare
and Lucrezia Borgia (1475/76–1507; 1480–1519).
Part of the evening involved naked women crawling
round the floor picking up chestnuts. These women
were “cortegiane, that is honest prostitutes.” This is
the second recorded use of the word. 65 In Rome and
Venice, the role and the name took off in roughly the
first twenty years of the sixteenth century. In both
cities, these women were the objects of feverish
devotion from suitors who wrote them poetry and
FIG 32 Titian, Venus and Music, c. 1550. Oil on canvas,
54 ¼ × 87 5 ⁄ 8 in. (138 × 222.4 cm). Museo Nacional
del Prado, Madrid. P00420
33
gave them gifts. Famous courtesans could win con-
siderable favor from wealthy lovers and become rich
in their own right. Romanticized accounts of their
sumptuous residences are common, as are moral-
istic tales of their downfall — often from the newly
rampant disease of syphilis. 66
The advent of courtesan culture gave rise to a
discourse that allowed for a more open appreciation
of women’s bodies and sexuality more generally. A
new type of satirical erotic literature grew up in the
early sixteenth century that distinguished itself
from the bawdy writings of the Middle Ages (by
such figures as Boccaccio [1313–1375] or Chaucer
[c. 1343–1400]), by an explicitness that borders on
the pornographic. The pioneer of this genre was the
famed “scourge of princes,” Pietro Aretino (1492–
1556), who wrote several accounts of the imagined
sex lives of prostitutes and courtesans. His most
famous work was the series of sonetti lussuriousi (lust-
ful sonnets) he penned to accompany The Positions,
a series of sixteen erotic engravings by the print-
maker Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1480–c. 1534),
based on drawings by Giulio Romano (1499–1546).
The fate of The Positions is telling: although the orig-
inal engravings were banned by the pope and largely

FIG 33 Raphael (Raffaello Santi; Italian, 1483–1520), The
Council of the Gods, from the Hall of Psyche, c. 1517.
Fresco. Villa Farnesina, Rome. Photo: Alessandro Angeli,
2003. Franco Cosimo Panini Editore © Management
Fratelli Alinari
destroyed, they went on to achieve fame (or, perhaps
more accurately, notoriety) throughout Europe by
means of later copies of the images. 67
It is no accident that the investigations into the
female nude as well as self-consciously sensuous
painting initially f lourished in two cities with a
renowned courtesan culture. Artists, literary men,
and courtesans worked in the same milieu, and often
for the same patrons. While in Rome, for example,
Raphael reportedly painted a naked portrait of one
of the first famous courtesans, Imperia Cognati
(1486–1512). Cognati was the lover of Agostino
Chigi (1466–1520), the wealthy Sienese merchant
who was among Raphael’s most important patrons,
and had several sonnets addressed to her before
her untimely death, perhaps by suicide. 68 Titian
and Aretino each also had a longstanding friend-
ship with a celebrated courtesan working in Venice,
Angela del Moro (active 1530s–1540s), known as “La
Zaffetta.”69 Del Moro may have been depicted by
Titian on several occasions, possibly serving as the
model for both his Young Woman with Fur (see fig. 30)
and the Venus of Urbino (1538; Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence), although this is a hotly contested topic.70
In fact, scholarship on courtesans’ domestic
arrangements suggests that their homes may have
been sites for the display of erotic images of naked
women. Inventories of the houses of these women
in Rome and Venice contain a higher number of
portrayals of nude women than that found in other
34
patrician households of the period.71 Analyses of
the inventory of the Venetian courtesan Elisabetta
Condulmer (c. 1490–1538) have shown that her
taste in paintings was largely in line with that of
other wealthy Venetians, with the exception of the
greater number of nude images in public spaces.
Her quadro da portego — the long, rectangular recep-
tion and entertainment room that was a distinctive
feature of Venetian patrician homes — included
several paintings with nude figures, including an
image of Pyramis and Thisbe; the latter was unusual,
as such spaces were generally given over to martial
scenes or themes related to hospitality and charity.
Another Venetian courtesan, Julia Lombarda, also
had paintings of naked women in her quadro da por-
tego.72 Jacopo Tintoretto’s circa 1555 series of panels
depicting female nudes in a variety of biblical sto-
ries, including Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife (cat. no. 3)
and Susannah and the Elders (cat. no. 4), were most
likely made for a quadro da portego, given their num-
ber, subject, and landscape format. Certainly, their
focus on the female nude and on the temptations of
looking at a naked body would have been suitable
subjects in a courtesan’s home.
It was not only courtesans, however, who dec-
orated their homes with erotic paintings. Starting
in Italy in the 1510s, it became increasingly com-
mon for aristocratic patrons to commission cycles
of mythological tales that typically included nude
figures. One of the early instances of this phenom-
enon is Raphael’s fresco in the Hall of Psyche, the
dining room of Chigi’s new suburban residence
(now known as the Villa Farnesina). With its mass
of naked figures, both male and female (fig. 33), this
painting may be seen as a lighthearted, sensuous
response to Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. This
new enthusiasm for erotic mythological painting
would make its way across Europe over the course
of the next century. Perhaps the most famous exam-
ple is the cycle of six poesie (mythological narrative
paintings) Titian completed for King Philip II of
Spain (r. 1556–98), based on stories from Ovid’s (43
BCE–17/18 CE) Metamorphoses and largely focused
on the depiction of the female nude (see fig. 36).
Their influence is revealed in the many copies pro-
duced throughout Europe, including Rubens’s Rape
of Europa (cat. no. 12).
Courtesans were important not just as purchas-
ers of paintings, but also, almost certainly, as life
models. In what can feel like a determined bid to
write women out of the history of art entirely, some
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650
scholars assert that female nude models were not
used by Renaissance artists — that the hundreds of
female nudes made during the period were solely
based on classical sculptures or drawings of male
nudes.73 I hope to lay that idea to rest here. It is true
that artists of this period sometimes encountered
difficulties finding female models, with some areas
(such as the Calvinist northern Netherlands) more
difficult than others (such as Venice) — largely due
to broader notions concerning female propriety and
prostitution. Artists did often use antique sculptures
as a starting point for their drawings, and on occasion
they also deployed male models for female figures.
Yet the fact that artists sought to use female models,
and managed to do so relatively frequently, is clear.
The identities of most life-drawing models,
whether male or female, are now lost to us. However,
it is significant that Raphael’s earliest forays into
drawing after the female nude took place in Rome
as part of Chigi’s circle, rubbing shoulders with
FIG 34 Raphael, A Kneeling Woman with Her Left Arm
Raised, c. 1518. Red chalk, with touches of black
chalk, over stylus underdrawing on off-white paper,
11 × 7 3 ⁄ 8 in. (27.9 × 18.7 cm). National Galleries of
Scotland, Edinburgh. Purchased by Private Treaty with
the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund,
the Art Fund, and the Pilgrim Trust 1987. D 5145
35
glamorous courtesans such as Cognati. The art-
ist greatly expanded his repertoire of poses for
female models in his preparatory drawings for the
Hall of Psyche. Raphael’s red chalk studies after
the female nude done in preparation for this space
probably constitute the most significant corpus
of extant Renaissance drawings from a life model
(fig. 34). There are drawings after female nudes by
other artists from the Raphael workshop, including
Vincenzo Tamagni (fig. 35), along with evidence of
the use of female life models by other Rome-based
artists — notably Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485–
1547) and Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571). In his Vita
(Autobiography), the latter discusses his female mod-
els in typically exuberant style. Cellini employed
particularly beautiful women as female servants so
that they might serve as models, catching syphilis
from one and getting another pregnant.74
Although there are few surviving Venetian
drawings after a female model, this is true of
FPO Image TK
FIG 35 Attributed to Vincenzo Tamagni (Italian, 1492–
c. 1530), Studies of a Nude Woman, c. 1507–29. Pen
and brown ink on paper, 9 ¾ × 6 ¾ in. (24.9 × 17.1 cm).
British Museum, London. 1946,0713.633
FIG 36 Francesco Furini (Italian, 1603–1646), Female
Nude, Seen from the Back, Right Arm Extended, c. 1633.
Sanguine, 11 ¼ × 7 5 ⁄ 8 in. (28.7 × 19.5 cm). Musée
du Louvre, Paris. Cabinet des Dessins, Inv 1206-recto
Venetian figure drawings in general, and written
evidence suggests that models were used. Thus, in
1522 Titian told the agent of the duke of Ferrara that
he had to stay in Venice to finish his commissioned
painting, because “there is an abundance of whores
and of men here who satisfy me in the nude.” 75
Titian’s contemporary, Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480–
1556/57), records payments to both male and female
models in his account books of 1540–43.76 It is
likely that in Venice, with its relatively relaxed atti-
tude toward prostitution and the uncovering of the
female body, models were more plentiful than in
other locales. Of course, there are indications that
artists encountered difficulties finding women who
had the desired physical characteristics and were
also prepared to strip naked and be looked at — and
probably posed by — a male artist. Letters by the
Florentine painter Francesco Furini (cat. no. 25)
written in 1645–46, when he was living in Rome,
affords insight into some of these challenges. In
these letters, Furini expresses his exasperation with
Roman women — “the beautiful ones don’t want to
strip and the ugly ones aren’t suitable.” Later, he
explains that although many women there “live with
such freedom that it is shameful, for my honest and
36
FIG 37 Albrecht Dürer, Nude Woman with Turkish Slippers
and Bath Towel on Her Hair, 1493. Pen and ink, 10 ¾ × 5 ¾
in. (27.4 × 14.8 cm). Musée Bonnat-Helleu, Bayonne
honorable purposes they all become Lucretias. In
the end the ones who are suitable don’t want to strip,
and those who will strip would make a good model
for witches.” He decided to send for one of the two
sisters who normally modeled for him in Florence,
but on learning both were pregnant he opted to just
take the Venus de’ Medici as his model.77 Furini’s
extant life drawings after the female nude (fig. 36)
were likely made after this pair of sisters. According
to the biographer Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1697),
Furini’s need for female models led to “intolerable
expense”; as such, he never made much money from
his paintings.78
Another artists’ biographer, Giovanni Battista
Passeri (1610–1679), mentions several early seven-
teenth-century examples of painters using female
life models, including Salvator Rosa (1615–1673)
and Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639). Although
there are some indications that artists may have
used their wives as models, it seems more likely that
servants and prostitutes were mainly employed, as it
would have been deemed disreputable for a respect-
able married woman to be portrayed naked.79
Northern artists also drew after female models.
Among the earliest to do so, not surprisingly, was
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

Dürer, whose sketch of a naked woman, sometimes

identified as a bathhouse attendant, dates to 1493
(fig. 37). 80 However, as Northern Europe became
increasingly riven with doctrinal differences during
the sixteenth century, women’s moral status came
under the spotlight and prostitution was deemed
a criminal offense in many regions. While major
Italian cities remained broadly tolerant, prostitu-
tion was made completely illegal in some Dutch
and German cities in the second half of the cen-
tury. 81 This led to some damning attitudes toward
female models. Thus, in 1648 Johannes Torrentius
(1589–1644), a painter from Haarlem, was said to
be “a second Apelles, as he could paint nude women
who presented themselves to him like whores.”
According to the artist’s own testimony of 1627, he
did indeed seek out prostitutes to model for him;
he would go to a brothel in The Hague, claiming
that he “went there to see if there were persons of
the female sex, beautiful of body and limb . . . [who]
might be willing to show some of their naked parts FIG 38 Lucas Vorsterman II (Flemish, 1624–66), after
with the purpose of being drawn so that these later Peter Paul Rubens after Titian, Titian’s Mistress, 1640–66.
could be used in paintings.”82 Criminal trials in the Engraving, 10 5 ⁄ 8 × 7 ¾ in. (26.9 × 19.8 cm). British
northern Netherlands during this period cite many Museum, London. X, 1.20
other examples of prostitutes being deployed as
models — and it may well be that the criminalization
of prostitution allows us a glimpse into a practice
that was relatively common. 83 This attitude gave
rise to some creative rewriting of Italian art history.
Lucas Vorsterman’s engraving after Rubens’s copy
of a painting known as Titian’s Mistress (fig. 38),
includes an inscription claiming that the woman
portrayed is Titian’s pregnant wife: Behold she who
is pleasing to her husband . . . She bears chaste pledges of
marriage in her belly. 84
This assertion may be telling — because Rubens
is one of the few artists who undoubtedly used his
wife as a model. He married the sixteen-year-old
Hélène Forment in 1630 in order to “enjoy licit
pleasures with thankfulness,” and we know that
Fourment served as the model for Het Pelsken
(see fig. 31), a painting that was kept in her posses-
sion during her lifetime, probably because of its
explicit eroticism. 85 As with the examples noted
above (see figs. 27, 31; cat. nos. 5, 22), it was likely
less problematic to present Fourment in the guise
of a famous figure, in this case a goddess. A 1639
FIG 39 Peter Paul Rubens, Study of Seated Nude
letter from Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria
Woman, Turned to the Right, 1630s. Red and black chalk,
(1609–1641) to his brother Philip IV (r. 1621–65) heightened with white, on paper, 18 ¼ × 11 1 ⁄ 8 in.
explains that the Venus in Rubens’s Judgment of (46.3 × 28.2 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Cabinet
Paris (c. 1606; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid) des Dessins, Inv 20345

37
is a portrait of Fourment, “who is without doubt the
most beautiful woman to be found here.”86 Only one
life drawing by Rubens that is unquestionably after
a female nude still exists, and it is recognizably an
image of Fourment (fig. 39). 87 However, Rubens was
likely using naked female models for drawings and
paintings throughout his career; a 1670 inventory of
one of his collaborators mentions studies of naked
women by the artist. 88 Images such as the Fortuna
(cat. no. 14) are loosely connected with life studies he
made after his wife, suggesting that Rubens adopted
Titian’s technique of abstracting ideal bodies from
renderings of specific naked women.
III. Nudes And Their Audiences
a) eroticism and artistry
Along with establishing a precedent for painters’
and sculptors’ use of beautiful women as life models,
the stories of the courtesans and artists of antiquity
played a key role in the emergence of new criteria
for judging the quality of visual art. Successful
paintings and sculptures of nudes were those that
provoked physical desire on the part of the viewer
(who was generally assumed to be male). This testa-
ment to the power of images was a recurrent theme
in art theory from the early sixteenth century — and
could be seen as both positive and negative. On the
FIG 40 Lo Scheggia (Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi;
Italian, 1406–1486), nuptial chest (cassone or forziere),
c. 1421–86. Tempera on panel, 34 3 ⁄ 8 × 81 ¾ × 30 ½ in.
(87.3 × 207.7 × 77.5 cm). National Gallery of Denmark,
Copenhagen
38
positive side, for example, Pietro Aretino wrote
to Federico Gonzaga (1441–1484) in 1527 that a
sculpture of Venus by “the most rare Messer Jacopo
Sansovino . . . will fill with lustful thoughts the mind
of anyone who looks at it.” Several decades later, in
the 1550s, Ludovico Dolce recounted to Alessandro
Contarini (1486–1553) that Titian’s Venus and
Adonis (see fig. 46 in Javier Portús’s essay in this cat-
alogue) was painted in such a tactile way as to pro-
voke in the viewer “a warming, a softening, a stirring
of the blood.”89 The onlooker’s erotic response was
thus used to praise the skill of the painter and the
veracity of the image, a theme that also arose in
Northern European literature as well. 90 For exam-
ple, around 1650 Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679)
wrote a poem about a painting of Susannah and the
elders in which he commends the artist’s ability to
turn lifeless paint into an object of love and desire.91
Although sensuous images decidedly had uses
that many might have considered immoral, such
artworks were also widely seen to play a decent role
in the context of married life. Indeed, the earliest
images of nudes in Italy were connected with the
adornment of the marital chamber. There are sev-
eral extant cassoni (chests) from the mid-fifteenth
century that have nudes on the underside of the lids;
thereby hidden from general view, but accessible to
the eyes of the married couple. The best-preserved
pair is by the Florentine artist Lo Scheggia and
dates from the 1421–86. The woman is completely
naked, but the man is wearing underwear (fig. 40).
Although the painted cassone would fall out of fash-
ion by the late fifteenth century, the practice of
depicting nudes on these objects would give way to
the longstanding custom of decorating the homes
of married couples with reclining nudes and other
images of naked women, often in the guise of Venus.
They include famous paintings such as Giorgione
and Titian’s Sleeping Venus (fig. 41), made for the
Venetian patrician Girolamo Marcello (1860 –
1940) in commemoration of his wedding. Looking
at images of beautiful people was thought to aid in
the conception of healthy offspring. In his treatise,
Considerazioni sulla pittura (Thoughts on Painting) of
1617–21, the physician Giulio Mancini (1559–1630)
explains that “lascivious pictures are appropri-
ate for the rooms where one has to do with one’s
spouse; because once seen they serve to arouse
one and to make beautiful, healthy and charm-
ing children . . . but they must nevertheless not be
seen by children and old maids, nor by strangers
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

FIG 41 Giorgione and Titian, Sleeping Venus, 1508–10. Oil

on canvas, 42 ¾ × 69 in. (108.5 × 175 cm). Gemäldegalerie
Alte Meister, Dresden

and fastidious persons.”92 Inventory records from

merchant homes in Italy suggest that bedchambers
were the usual location for nude images, although
the proliferation of naked figures in the decorative
arts — particularly in the medium of historiated pot-
tery — probably made the nude a relatively familiar
sight, at least in patrician homes.93
In the Netherlands, the link between nudity,
procreation, and the family (or perhaps merely the
fashion for Italianate images) seems to have led to a
more open display of nudes. Inventories from sev-
enteenth-century Antwerp suggest that paintings
of female nudes were often displayed on chimney
breasts, as seen in a 1665–67 portrait by the Dutch
artist Eglon van der Neer (fig. 42). Here, the repre-
sentation of Venus, the goddess of love, is no doubt
intended to wish the couple a long, happy, and fruit-
ful marriage. Throughout Europe during this period,
there was clearly a context whereby depictions of
nudes could be permissibly enjoyed — and this was
largely connected with marital love and procreation.

b) oppositions to the nude

At the same time, the ability to evoke a corporeal
response in the viewer also made such images
potentially dangerous. From Early Christian times
onward, there was a long history of churchmen
FIG 42 Eglon van der Neer (Dutch, 1634–1703), Portrait
of a Man and Woman in an Interior, 1665–67. Oil on panel,
29 1 ⁄ 8 × 26 5 ⁄ 8 in. (73.9 × 67.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Seth K. Sweetser Fund, 41.935. Photograph
© 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

39
warning against the power of images to corrupt
the viewer, and these admonitions were repeat-
edly expressed during the Renaissance. For exam-
ple, Fra Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), the
Dominican friar who dominated Florentine life in
the 1490s, berated “Christian painters” for paint-
ing bare-breasted figures. In 1497, he asked women
to “take those vain objects, those ugly paintings
that you have, and with the license I give you on
behalf of Christ, throw them in the fire. What do
you want to do with Hercules and Anteus? Put the
Virgin Mary, the cross, the saints all about so that
you seem Christian.”94 In Northern Europe, the
renowned humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus
(1466–1536) voiced concerns over lascivious imag-
ery in his Modus orandi Deum (On Praying to God)
of 1539, claiming that some pictures of the Virgin
Mary or Saint Agatha “provoked one more to las-
civiousness than to piety.”
This type of complaint would become increas-
ingly shrill during the later sixteenth and early sev-
enteenth centuries as the Catholic Church became
intent on restricting access to potentially problem-
atic material. The Index librorum prohibitorum (Index
of Prohibited Books) was published in 1559, and simi-
lar attempts were made to regulate images. Johannes
Molanus (1533–1585), Philip II of Spain’s censor in
the Netherlands, wrote a book on this subject, De
picturis et imaginibus sacris (On Paintings and Sacred
Images), in 1570. Molanus argued that there should
be no nudity in paintings in churches in the event
that it stimulated lust, and that children in particu-
lar should be protected from this danger (“For what
sort of edification can there be in this nakedness?”),
even including the nakedness of the Christ Child.
This extended to images in private settings because
of the potential to encourage immorality in the
young: “We therefore forbid hereafter the making
in any way of pictures which offend the eyes, corrupt
the mind and kindle base pleasures.”95 Molanus’s
text proved highly popular, with several reprintings
in Northern Europe in the early sixteenth century.
His remonstrances against the corrupting power of
naked imagery were frequently echoed by church-
men throughout Europe. Thus, in his Discorso
(Discourse) of 1582 and his Discorso intorno alle imag-
ine sacri et profane (Discourse on Sacred and Profane
Images) of 1594, the Italian bishop Gabriele Paleotti
(1522–1597) likewise stressed the importance of
decency in paintings and the need to avoid corrupt-
ing the innocent viewer.96
40
Churchmen in the North could be even more
strident. In his Marriage, discussed above, Jacob
Cats emphasized the dangerous titillation of the
viewer caused by the female nude; and the better the
painter, the more likely the peril.97 Similarly, Dirck
Raphaelsz Camphuysen (1586–1627) railed against
painters who “present men and women stark naked,”
lamenting their selection of biblical themes that
allow for the presentation of the nude, such as the
daughters of Lot, David, and Bathsheba, or the
story of Susannah and the elders. As he warned,
the viewing of beautiful figures “[m]akes the mind
drunk and causes men to lose their senses.”98
Despite (or perhaps because of ) the fact that
its aristocratic patrons owned the most important
collections of erotic paintings in Europe, the fierc-
est opposition to nudes in paintings occurred in
Spain. 99 Juan de Butrón’s (1603–1647) defense of
painting, Discursos apologéticus (Apologetic Discourses),
published in Madrid in 1626, affirmed that paint-
ings of nudes can make the onlooker a “slave to lust.”
Likewise, in his Diálogos de la pintura (Dialogues of
Painting) of 1633, the court painter Vicente Carducho
(c. 1576–1638) asked artists to prevent mortal sin by
not painting those “dishonest and lascivious things . .
. that were the invention of the devil.”100 This injunc-
tion was given legal standing in the 1640 Novissimus
librorum prohibitorum et expurgandorum index (Newest
Index of Prohibited and Expurgated Books), which for-
bade the importation of “lascivious paintings” into
the kingdom of Spain; their display in public squares,
streets, and common areas of the home; and also, on
the threat of excommunication, prohibited the paint-
ing or sculpting of new works in this vein.101 The
most stringent opposition to erotic images may have
come from the preacher Hortensio Félix Paravicino
(1580–1633). Himself an avid collector of paintings
who nevertheless believed that the ownership of
paintings of the nude should be outlawed, Paravicino
wrote in 1669, “The finest paintings are the greatest
threat: burn the best of them.”102
c) erotic painting, ambivalent viewing
Given the highly fraught nature of the pleasures of
looking at naked women, many of the paintings of
female nudes from the mid-sixteenth century and
beyond present beautiful naked women to the view-
er’s eye while simultaneously cautioning against the
sinfulness of looking.103 This is evident in Titian’s
Diana and Actaeon, one of the six poesie made for
King Philip II of Spain in 1551/52–62 (fig. 43). Here,
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650
FIG 43 Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–59. Oil on canvas,
72 5 ⁄ 8 × 79 5 ⁄ 8 in. (184.5 × 202.2 cm). National Galleries of
Scotland, Edinburgh. NG 2839
we see the hunter Acteon mistakenly stumble across
the spot where the virgin goddess Diana is bathing
with her nymphs. He holds up his hands in alarm,
seemingly aware of his fate: Diana transforms
him into a stag, and he is eaten by his own hunt-
ing hounds.104 The viewer considering the female
nudes displayed in this image is clearly invited to
assume the role of the unfortunate Acteon.
This much-admired commission for Philip II
may have established a theme that would contin-
ually arise in Spanish aristocratic circles. The ten-
dency to at once provoke eroticism while expressing
the sinfulness thereof recurs in paintings made for
and collected by Spanish patrons during this period,
as manifested in the abundance of works on the sub-
ject of Susannah and the Elders (cat. nos. 4, 24).
As in Guercino’s painting of the story, the viewer
41
usually encounters a beautiful female nude while
being reminded of the depraved nature of looking at
naked women. From the Book of Daniel in the Old
Testament, the episode recounts how Susannah,
a virtuous and beautiful housewife, takes a daily
bath in a secluded pool. Two distinguished elders
of the city regularly spy on her, and eventually one
evening they proposition her and are rebuffed. In
revenge, they allege they witness her committing
adultery, and she is sentenced to death before being
saved by Daniel, who cross-examines the two men
and exposes them as false witnesses. The message
of the tale is that nothing good comes from expo-
sure to alluring female flesh. In most paintings of
the period, the moment depicted is that of the elders
spying on Susannah; the images are made from the
elders’ perspective.105 Many other popular subjects
of this time similarly manifest this ambivalent atti-
tude toward the viewing of the female nude. Lot’s
daughters ply him with alcohol in order to com-
mit incest (cat. no. 25); Potiphar’s wife attempts to
seduce Joseph, and when unsuccessful accuses him
of rape (cat. no. 3). Beautiful naked women die by
suicide (cat. no. 21), or are symbols of Vanity (cat. no.
22). These paintings both attract and repel.
Renaissance and early modern Europe had a com-
plicated love affair with the nude. Always a point of
anxiety and contestation, berated by moralists and
argued over, the nude, both male and female, was a
test of prowess for artists all over Europe. The genre
likewise tested its viewers: Did they have the back-
ground to grasp the slew of artistic references that
were embedded in these images, or were they looking
at the works with an uninformed sexual response?
Did viewers merely see an individual’s naked body,
or were they able to look beyond the image and
understand it as an archetype, a kind of pure form
that reflected humanity as a whole? Did they regard
their own bodies in comparison with those of the
unattainable beauties paraded before them? This
introduction to the Renaissance and early modern
nude has inevitably barely scratched the surface of
these questions. Complex and multifaceted, the
cluster of ideas that circulated around these images
often mirrored the divisions in religious, political,
and social beliefs that characterized this period. In
fact, that may be precisely why the nude became such
a powerful artistic form at this time — in a period
of disorienting flux, the academic nude seemed to
embody the essential, unchanging, human.

notes

1. There have been many useful studies on the subject in recent years. See especially
Karolien de Clippel, Katharina van Cauteren, and Katlijne van der Stighelen, The Nude
and the Norm in the Early Modern Low Countries (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011); Elena
Lazzarini, Nudo, arte e decoro: Oscillazioni estetiche negli scritti d’arte del cinquecento (Pisa:
Pacini, 2010); Lazzarini, “The Nude in Central Italian Painting and Sculpture (1500–1600):
Definition, Perception, and Representation” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 2005),
https://lra.le.ac.uk/handle/2381/30490; Eric Jan Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Much of this essay is informed by
research completed for my own, forthcoming book on the subject, The Italian Renaissance
Nude (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), which considers the development of the
nude form in Italy from its inception in the early fifteenth century up to 1530.

2. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London: John Murray, 1956), 48.

3. Ibid., 3.

4. Scholars who have taken Clark to task include Richard Leppert, The Nude: The Cultural
Rhetoric of the Body in the Art of Western Modernity (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2007);
Sherry Lindquist, “The Meanings of Nudity: An Introduction,” in The Meanings of Nudity
in Medieval Art, ed. Sherry Lindquist (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012), 1–46; Lynda Nead,
The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1992); Marcia Pointon,
Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830–1908 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990).

5. The phrase disegno interno was coined by the artist Federico Zuccaro in 1607; Zuccaro,
L’idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Turin: Agostino Disserolio, 1607). For more on this, see
David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 285–87.

6. For more on nakedness in the classical world, see Mireille M. Lee, Body, Dress, and Identity
in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

7. Ibid., 188.

8. The Venus de’ Medici was known from at least 1559; see Francis Haskell, Taste and the
Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1981). It was one of many sculptures of the Cnidian Venus type known in the Renaissance,
many of which were little more than torsos.

42
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

9. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson,
2008), Book XIV, chapters 16–17. On the reception of Augustine in the Renaissance in gen-
eral, see Meredith Jane Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).

10. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (London:
Faber & Faber, 1984); Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle
Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg.” Renaissance Quarterly 39, no. 3 (October 1, 1986): 399–439,
doi:10.2307/2862038.

11. On portrayals of Saint Sebastian in Renaissance art, see Louise Marshall, “Reading the
Body of a Plague Saint: Narrative Altarpieces and Devotional Images of St. Sebastian in
Renaissance Art,” in Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and
Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, ed. Bernard J. Muir (Exeter, England: University
of Exeter Press, 2002), 237–72.

12. Michael Hirst, Michelangelo (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011), 331, n. 30.

13. “[S]cis enim non licere idem nobis, qui Christiani sumus, quod olim poetis, qui
Deum ignorabant.” Quoted in Eugene O’Connor, “Panormita’s Reply to His Critics:
The Hermaphroditus and the Literary Defense,” Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 4 (Winter
1997): 997.

14. “Nudare hominem graeca omnino res, tam ob artis ostentionem, quam ob libidinem
reperta.” Quoted in Kathleen Wren Christian, Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in
Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 199.

15. “Nam vetustas illa ut minus vitiosa fuit, ita simplicius apertiusque de unaquaque re
philosophata est; necque erat tunc temporis in humano corpore quicquam quod vel visu,
vel nuncupatione sua, turpe iudicaretur.” Pierio Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, sive: De sacris
aegyptiorvm literis commentarii (Basel: Oporinum, 1556), 245v, http://archive.org/details/
desacrisaegyptio00vale; discussed in Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 21; Alexander Nagel,
“Experiments in Art and Reform in Italy in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in The Pontificate of
Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Sheryl E. Reiss and Kenneth Gouwens (Burlington,
Vt.: Ashgate, 2005), 397–98.

16. Karolien de Clippel, “Defining Beauty: Rubens’s Female Nudes.” Netherlands

Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek Online 58, no. 1 (January
1, 2007): 119, http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/content/
journals/10.1163/22145966-90000744.

17. As revealed by the abundant literature on clothing and fashion produced over the last
two decades. See, most recently, Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy:
From Sprezzatura to Satire (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014); Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up:
Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

18. For clothing in Florence, see Carole Collier Frick, Dressing a Renaissance City: Society,
Economics, and Gender in the Clothing of Fifteenth-Century Florence (PhD diss., University of
California, Los Angeles, 1995); Carole Collier Frick, Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families,
Fortunes and Fine Clothing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

19. Catherine Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (London: Clarendon Press, 2002).

20. John Florio, Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English
Tongues (London: Melch, Bradwood, 1611), 335.

21. For more on the humoral system and how it was seen to determine gender, see Patricia
Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).

22. “Un’altra casione e la femina e de complexione freda e humida . . . imperho non puo esser
la femina prudente e savia se non rare volte.” Girolamo Manfredi, Opera nova intitulata: Il
Perchè (Venice: Bindoni, 1523), 91.

23. “Alzoo doorgaens der wijven geslacht als kouder ende vochtiger, minder bequaemheid
heft tot zaken, verstand vereisschende, als ‘t geslacht der mannen, zoo is het mannelick
gheslacht genoegzaem aengeboren eenige opperheid over de wijven.” Quoted in Eddy de

43
Jongh, “The Model Woman and Women of Flesh and Blood,” in Rembrandt’s Women, ed. Julia
Lloyd Williams and Sebastien A. C. Dudok van Heel (New York: Prestel, 2001), 29.

24. On the use of urine in early modern manufacturing, see Jeff Persels, “Taking the Piss
out of Pantagruel: Urine and Micturation in Rabelais,” in Meaning and Its Objects: Material
Culture in Medieval and Renaissance France, Yale French Studies 110 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 2006), 137–51.

25. Deanna Shemek, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy
(Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 36–37. For similar practices in
England and Germany, see Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance
Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 26; Michael Rocke, “Gender and Sexual
Culture in Renaissance Italy,” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown
and Robert Charles Davis (Harlow, England: Longman, 1998), 158–59.

26. For a fuller discussion of the taboos against female nakedness, see the first chapter of
my forthcoming book, Renaissance Nude.

27. Manuth, “As Stark Naked,” 48.

28. “[I]mperò che tal cosa è lecita a toccare, che non è lecita a mirare . . . Donna . . . inanzi
morire che lassarti vedere lecita a mirara.” Quoted and discussed in Franco Mormando,
“‘Nudus Nudum Christum Sequi’: The Franciscans and Differing Interpretations of Male
Nakedness in Fifteenth-Century Italy,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 33 (2008): 187; 197, n. 62.

29. “Se una donna di voi si spogliasse innuda . . . a quanti uomini e donne credi che venisse
tentazione. Io ti dico solo per vedere; a molti e molti.” Quoted and discussed in Franco
Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underworld of Early
Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 118.

30. “[L]asciviores, insolita corporis parte conspecta, ceu igne subiecto accendantur . . . ne
quid cernertur ex corpore, mancipio vilissimo, ac nequissimo.” Juan Luis Vives, The Education
of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000), 128.

31. “[H]oe menigh dertel quant / Ontfangt uyt dit gesicht een ongetoomden brant? / Ten is
met geene ont ten vollen uyt te drucken, / Waer toe het los gesicht de siele weet te rucken;
/ Hoe verre dat het vyer door al de leden schiet, / Wanneer de losse jeugt een naeckten
boesem siet.” Quoted in Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 146. Sluijter offers many
other examples of this type of warning.

32. Sluijter, “‘Horrible Nature, Incomparable Art’: Rembrandt and the Depiction of the
Female Nude,” in Williams and Dudok van Heel, Rembrandt’s Women, 42.

33. The iconographical debate over this statue is summarized in Max Seidel, Padre e figlio:
Nicola e Giovanni Pisano, Collana del Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-
Institut 15/I–II (Venice: Marsilio Press, 2012), 57–59.

34. The evidence for this is assembled in ibid., 273–303. See also Leopold D. Ettlinger,
“Hercules Florentinus,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 16, no. 2
(January 1, 1972): 119–42; Nikolaus Himmelmann, Ideale Nacktheit (Wiesbaden, Germany:
Springer, 1985), 53–68.

35. “[N]on tenghon vergogna delle loro vergogne.” Quoted in my article “Nakedness and
Other Peoples: Rethinking the Italian Renaissance Nude,” Art History 36, no. 4 (September
2013): 714–39, doi:10.1111/1467-8365.12029; in this essay, I also discuss new ideas on the nude
in light of the voyages of discovery. There is a fuller account of this topic, including a discus-
sion of Lactantius, in my forthcoming monograph.

36. Ibid.

37. “[U]t plurimum nudata omni ex parte vel seminuda conspiciuntur . . . ut artificum et
temporum illorum insignia opera censerentur, quae ipsa prasertim nuditate iudicantur . .
. Quippe quod non omnis tegumenti usus, neque omnibus temporibus et gentibus placet.
Aliaque idcirco aliis calceamentorum genera vel sagulorum cingulorumue, armorum etiam
ipsis picturis irridentur. At quod naturae praecipuum est artificium, nulla temporum novi-
tate mutatur.” Quoted in Michael Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello

44
Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

d’Este: Angelo Decembrio’s De Politia Litteraria Pars LXVIII,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 26, no. 3 (1963): 312–15.

38. These drawings are discussed in Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Gigetta Dalli Regoli,
Firenze, 1470–1480: Disegni dal modello (Pisa: Università di Pisa, Istituto di storia dell’arte, 1975).

39. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of “De Pictura” and
“De Statua,” trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon Press, 1972); Jane Andrews Aiken, “Leon
Battista Alberti’s System of Human Proportions,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 43 (1980): 68–96.

40. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture. Although Protagoras’s saying was known in the
Renaissance, it was not as widely influential as later commentators have suggested. See
Charles Edward Trinkaus, “Protagoras in the Renaissance: An Exploration,” in Philosophy
and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Edward P. Mahoney
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1976), 190–213.

41. “[N]on ha nessuna perfetta misura.” Cennino Cennini, Il libro dell’arte (Paris: F. LeMonnier,
1859), 50.

42. For more on the fifteenth-century tradition of the female nude in the Netherlands, see
Paula Nuttall, “Reconsidering the Nude: Northern Tradition and Venetian Innovation,” in
Lindquist, Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art, 299–318.

43. “Wiltw ein schön menschlich bild machen, so thut not, das dw dÿ art und glidmas jn vill
menschen ersuchest, do fan eim daz hawbt, van eim anderen dy prust, arm pein.” Quoted
in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 191; see ibid. for further discussion of Dürer and his
approach to the nude.

44. My comments here are indebted to Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early
Seventeenth-Century Rome (University Park, Pa.: Penn State Press, 2008), 72–78.

45. Sluijter, “Horrible Nature,” 46.

46. For the early part of the period, see Burke, Renaissance Nude; for the later sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries in Italy, see Cavazzini, Painting as Business.

47. The choice of models is discussed in Burke, Renaissance Nude; Lazzarini, “Nude in Central
Italian Painting and Sculpture.”

48. Cavazzini, Painting as Business, 77.

49. “[D]e welcke ordinaris int collegie van schilders opentlijck sat ende daer toe gebruyckt
wiert.” Quoted in Manuth, “As Stark Naked,” 47.

50. “[V]oor haar getuygen als andere collegialiter moeder naeckt als model geseten heft, en
dat sy getuygen daernaer geteeckent en geschildert hebben.” Quoted in ibid., 50.

51. Fredrika H. Jacobs, “Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina, Masculo,
Grazia,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 51–67, doi:10.2307/3051364; Jonathan Katz
Nelson, “The Florentine Venus and Cupid: A Heroic Female Nude and the Power of Love,” In
Venere e amore: Michelangelo e la nuova bellezza ideale, ed. Franca Falletti and Jonathan Katz
Nelson (Florence: Giunti/Firenze Musei, 2002), 26–63.

52. “E le donne l’ha fatte di tale sentimenti et effigie, che pareno lontane da quella dili-
catezza ch’esse hanno, et un pittore da cocozze se ne doveria vergognare, con . . . l’aspri
moscoli, con le mammelle a uso di cetroni, e sono sì musculose e si stranamente acconcie.”
Quoted and discussed in Nelson, “Florentine Venus and Cupid,” 31. Ligorio’s Antichità di
Roma is now available online via the Scuola Normale di Pisa website; see “Pirro Ligorio e la
storia cristiana di Roma,” http://ligorio.sns.it/ligorio.php?tipo=home.

53. “Michelagnolo . . . o non sa o non vuole osservar quelle diversità delle età e dei sessi . . .
chi vede una sola figura di Michelangnolo, le vede tutte.” Ludovico Dolce, Dialogo della pit-
tura intitolato l’Aretino, ed. Paola Barocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1960), 1:25, http://www.memofonte.
it/trattati/lodovico-dolce-1508-1568.html; quoted and discussed in Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s
“Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2000), 171–72; see also Nelson, “Florentine Venus and Cupid,” 31.

45
54. “[L]atende aen d’een sijde de vroylijcke coloreringhe, en ander duysent aerdicheden,
die ander Schilders tot vermakelijcken welstandt ghebruycken.” Quoted and discussed
in Walter S. Melion, Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s “Schilder-Boeck”
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 41–42.

55. “[D]um pro carne marmor coloribus.” Quoted in Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par
principes (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1708), 140; for a discussion of the entire passage, see
Clippel, “Defining Beauty,” 123.

56. Larry Silver, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art
Market (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

57. For a discussion of the intellectual context of landscapes in this period, see Leopoldine
van Prosperetti, Landscape and Philosophy in the Art of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625)
(Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009).

58. For a discussion of this painting within a painting and gallery pictures more generally,
see Fiona Healy, Rubens and the Judgement of Paris: A Question of Choice (Berlin: Pictura
Nova, 1992), 83–86.

59. For a summary of the literature on Laura, see Anne Christine Junkerman, “The Lady and
the Laurel: Gender and Meaning in Giorgione’s ‘Laura,’” Oxford Art Journal 16, no. 1 (January
1, 1993): 49–58, doi:10.2307/1360536.

60. For more on these images and the visual culture of courtesans in general, see Patricia
Fortini Brown, Private Lives: Art, Architecture, and the Family in Renaissance Venice (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004); for Veronica Franco, see Margaret F. Rosenthal,
The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Women
in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

61. For a list of paintings of this subject, see Jill Berk Jiminez, Dictionary of Artists’ Models
(New York: Routledge, 2013), 99.

62. For recent discussions of this panel, see Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance
Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 327–30; Katherine A. McIver,
“Visual Pleasures, Sensual Sounds: Music, Morality, and Sexuality in Paintings by Titian,”
in Sexualities, Textualities, Art, and Music in Early Modern Italy: Playing with Boundaries, ed.
Linda L. Carroll, Melanie L. Marshall, and Katherine A. McIver (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate,
2014, 13–22.

63. Burke, Renaissance Nude, chapter 5.

64. “[L]aonde si vede che Tiziano ha dipinto alle volte non così belle secondo che ha tanti
corpi belli da ritrarre, come quello, che procedeva solo per via del ritrarre.” Quoted and
discussed in Lazzarini, “Nude in Central Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 250–55.

65. Johann Burchard, At the Court of the Borgia: Being an Account of the Reign of Pope
Alexander VI, trans. Geoffrey Parker (London: Folio Society, 1963), 194.

66. There is a great deal written on courtesan culture; see in particular Rosenthal, Honest
Courtesan; Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); Storey, “Courtesan Culture: Manhood, Honour, and
Sociability,” in Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, ed. Sara Matthews-Grieco (Burlington,
Vt.: Ashgate, 2010), 247–73.

67. For Aretino, see Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-
Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2004). The best account of these engravings is in Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the
Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

68. For Cognati, see G. Moncallero, Imperia de Paris nella Roma del cinquecento e i suoi cantori
funebri (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1962).

69. For this woman and her friendship with Titian, see Courtney Quaintance, Textual
Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2015).

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Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

70. For a recent assertion of Angela del Moro as the model for the Venus of Urbino, see
Guido Rebecchini, Un altro Lorenzo: Ippolito de’ Medici tra Firenze e Roma (1511–1535) (Venice:
Marsilio Press, 2010), 246–48.

71. See Brown, Private Lives, 160–87; Monika Schmitter, “The Quadro Da Portego in
Sixteenth-Century Venetian Art,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 1, 2011): 728–
42, doi:10.1086/662848; Storey, Carnal Commerce, 195–99.

72. Cathy Santore, “Julia Lombardo, ‘Somtuosa Meretrize’: A Portrait by Property,”

Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 44–83.

73. For a recent example of this, see Anne-Marie S. Logan’s statement “It is doubtful that
Rubens made drawings of the female nude from life at all. At the time it was common for
Flemish artists to draw only from the male model, imitating the practice of the Renaissance
masters Michelangelo and Raphael” (Anne-Marie S. Logan and Michiel Plomp, Peter Paul
Rubens: The Drawings [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005], 148); quoted and
enthusiastically agreed with in Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 321. In fact, docu-
mentary evidence that Rubens did draw after the female nude is also given in Logan, Peter
Paul Rubens, 295. The theory that Michelangelo and Raphael did not draw after female
models is often repeated by specialists in Northern European painting who are not familiar
with the Italian sources; in this vein, see Erna Kok’s problematic article “The Female Nude
from Life: On Studio Practice and Beholder Fantasy,” in Clippel, Van Cauteren, and Van der
Stighelen, Nude and the Norm in the Early Modern Low Countries, 35–50.

74. For Cellini’s models in the context of practices of drawing after the female model in
general, see my forthcoming monograph.

75. “[E]t che non vene hora, perche qui ha comoditate de putane, et d’homo, che nudo lo sat-
isfa.” Quoted and discussed in Monika Ingenhoff-Danhäuser, Maria Magdalena (Tubingen:
Ernst Wasmuth, 1984), 110, n. 46; also referenced in D. R. Goodgal, “The Camerino of Alfonso
I d’Este,” Art History 1 (1978): 177; Hans Ost, “Tizians sogenannte ‘Venus von Urbino’ und
andere Buhlerinnen,” in Festschrift für Eduard Trier zum 60 Geburtstag, ed. Justus Mülwe
Hofstede and Werner Spies (Berlin: Mann, 1981), 129–49.

76. Lorenzo Lotto, Il “Libro di spese”: Con aggiunta di lettere e d’altri documenti (Venice and
Rome: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1969), 236–37.

77. “[L]e belle non vogliono spogliarsi, le brute non sono il caso” and “use a vivere con
tanta libertà che è una vergogna, per un mio honesto et honorate fine diventano tutte
tante Lucrezie . . . alla fine, chi sarebbe il caso non si vuole spogliare, e chi si spoglierebbe,
appunto sarebbe modello a proposite per le gabrine.” Both quoted in Catherine Monbeig
Goguel, “Francesco Furini dans le prisme du dessin,” in Un’altra bellezza: Francesco Furini, ed.
Mina Gregori and Rodolfo Maffeis (Florence: Mandragora, 2007), 65–69. Monbeig Goguel
discusses these and other excerpts from Furini’s letters in the context of the artist’s life
drawings.

78. Filippo Baldinucci, Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue: Con nuove annotazioni
per cura di F. Ranalli, ed. Ferdinando Ranalli (Florence: V. Batelli e Compagni, 1846), 2:4, 642;
discussed in Monbeig Goguel, “Francesco Furini,” 67.

79. For a summary of the use of female models by early seventeenth-century Roman artists,
see Cavazzini, Painting as Business, 77–78. Wives were unlikely to pose naked for artists in
the Netherlands for similar reasons; see Manuth, “As Stark Naked,” 48.

80. For more on Dürer’s images of the female nude, see Joanne G. Bernstein, “The Female
Model and the Renaissance Nude: Dürer, Giorgione, and Raphael,” Artibus et Historiae 13,
no. 26 (1992): 49–63.

81. For an overview of this topic, see Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern
Europe, New Approaches to European History 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 100–2.

82. “[H]y was een twede Apelles, al shy naakt Vrouwen mocht schilderen die haar ten toon
stelden also Hoeren” and “aldaer gegaen om te vernemen, off daer vroupersoonen waerne,
schoon van leeden en lichaem om sulcx, also bevindende, deselve daertoe te vercrijgen dat
se eenige van haer naecte leden souden willen verthoonen om nageteyckent te worden

47
omme deselve daernaer in schilderijen near gelegentheyt te passe te brengen.” Both
quoted in Manuth, “As Stark Naked,” 51.

83. Many instances of this practice are discussed in ibid.

84. “Ecce viro quae grata suo est. Pignora coniugii ventre pudica gerit.” For a discussion
of the attempt to accord licit, married sexuality to artists’ models in early sixteenth-cen-
tury Antwerp, see Margit Thøfner, “Helena Fourment’s Het Pelsken,” Art History 27, no. 1
(February 1, 2004): 10–14, doi:10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.02701001; K. Lohse Belkin, ‘“La
Belle Hélène’ and Her Beauty Aids: A New Look at Het Pelsken,” in Munuscula Amicorum:
Contributions on Rubens and His Colleagues in Honour of Hans Vlieghe, ed. Katlijne van der
Stighelen (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 8.

85. “[F]ruimur licita voluptate cum gratiarum actione.” Quoted in Thøfner, “Helena
Fourment’s Het Pelsken,”, 2–3;

86. “La Vénus qui se trouve au milieu du groupe est le portrait fort ressemblant de sa proper
femme, qui est sans doute la plus jolie femme qu’il y ait ici.” Quoted and discussed in Belkin,
“La Belle Hélène,” 299. The original letter is published in Max Rooses and Charles Ruelens,
eds., Correspondance de Rubens et documents épistolaires concernant sa vie et ses oeuvres
(Antwerp, 1887–1909), 6:228–29.

87. Logan and Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens, 294–95. For more on this painting, see Belkin, “La
Belle Hélène,” 303–4.

88. Logan and Plomp, Peter Paul Rubens, 295.

89. “Credo che M. Iacopo Sansovino rarissimo vi ornerà la camera d’una Venere sì vera e sì
viva, che empie di libidine il pensiero di ciascuno che la mira.” Pietro Aretino, Il primo libro
delle lettere (Milan: G. Daelli, 1864), 20; the quote comes from Aretino’s letter to Battista
Zatti of December 11, 1537. Ludovico Dolce’s celebrated letter to Contarini can be read in
the original in Giovanni Bottari and Stefano Ticozzi, eds., Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura,
scultura ed architecttura (Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1822), 3:377–82. The original quotation
appears on 381: “ niuno così raffredeto dagli anni, o sì duro di complessione, che non si senta
riscaldare, intenerire e commoversi nelle vene tutto il sangue.” Both passages are quoted
and discussed in Paula Findlen, “Humanism, Politics, and Pornography in Renaissance Italy,”
in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. Lynn
Hunt (New York: Zone Books, 1993), 63–65.

90. Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 154–55.

91. Sluijter, “Horrible Nature,” 40; Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 130–31.

92. “[P]itture lascive in simil luoghi dove si trattenga con sua consorte sono a proposito, per-
ché simil veduta giova assai all’eccitamento et al far figli belli, sani, e gagliardi . . . ma però
non devono esser viste da fanciulli e zitelle, né da persone esterne e scrupolose.” Quoted
in David Rosand, “So-and-so Reclining on Her Couch,” Studies in the History of Art (1993):
109. For the original, see Giulio Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, ed. A. Marucchi and L.
Salerno (Rome: Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, 1956), 1:143. This concept is often cited in
the art-historical literature, but Rosand’s article is the first to discuss it.

93. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, “‘The Spirit Is Ready, but the Flesh Is Tired’”: Erotic Objects and
Marriage in Early Modern Italy,” in Matthews-Grieco, Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy,
141–69.

94. “Voi donne, pigliate quelle cose vane, quelle figure brutte che avete, ché io vi do licen-
zia da parte di Cristo che la mettiate in sul fuoco. Che vuoi tu fare di Ercole e di Anteo?
Metti la Vergine Maria, la Croce, li Santi per tutto, che paiate cristiani.” Quoted in Michel
Plaisance, Florence in the Time of the Medici: Public Celebrations, Politics, and Literature in
the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, 2008), 66.

95. “Quid enim in hac nuditate esse potest aedificationis?” and “Picturas ergo quae ocu-
los perstringunt et mentem corrumpunt et ad turpium voluptatum movent incendia, nullo
modo deinceps imprimi iubemus.” Quoted and discussed in David Freedberg, “Johannes
Molanus on Provocative Paintings: De Historia Sanctarum Imaginum et Picturarum, Book II,
Chapter 42,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 229–45.

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Jill Burke The European Nude, 1400 – 1650

96. For an overview of Italian art theory regarding nudity in the late sixteenth century, see
Lazzarini, “Nude in Central Italian Painting and Sculpture,” 238–74.

97. Sluijter, “Horrible Nature,” 40; Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 146; in ibid.,
Sluijter summarizes ideas on nudes in painting, 143–62.

98. “Soo stelt gy mans en wijfs met moeder-naackte lijven” and “Maeckt droncken in de
geest en sinneloose lien.” Quoted in Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, 144.

99. For a discussion of both the collections of and admonitions against nude paintings, see
Javier Portús, La sala reservada y el desnudo en el Museo del Prado (Madrid: Museo Nacional
del Prado, 2002); Portús, “Nudes and Knights: A Context for Venus,” in Velázquez, ed.
Dawson W. Carr (London: National Gallery, 2006), 56–67.

100. “[P]ecado mortal de pintar cosas deshonestas y lascivas . . . que fue invención del demo-
nio.” Quoted in Pierre Civil, “Erotismo y pintura mitológica en la España del siglo de oro,”
Edad de oro 9 (1990): 42.

101. Antonius de Sotomaior, Index novissimus librorum prohibitorum et expurgandorum . . .

pro catholicis hispaniarum regnis Philippi IV. Reg. Cath. (Diaz, 1640), xiv; discussed in Portús,
“Nudes and Knights,” 63.

102.“[L]as mejores pinturas son la más grande amenaza: quemad las mejores de ellas.”
Quoted and discussed in Portús, “Nudes and Knights,” 63. For more on this subject, see
Javier Portús, “Indecencia, mortificación y modos de ver en la pintura del siglo de oro,”
Espacio, tiempo y forma 8 (1995): 55–88.

103. As noted by several scholars, including Sluijter (Rembrandt and the Female Nude,
144–45).

104. For the context and similar interpretations of this painting, see Tom Nichols, “Defining
Genres: The Survival of Mythological Painting in Counter-Reformation Venice,” in Forms of
Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne (Burlington, Vt.:
Ashgate, 2009 136; Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s “Poetics” and the
Rise of the Modern Artist (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 175.

105. For more on this subject, see Babette Bohn, “Rape and the Gendered Gaze: Susanna
and the Elders in Early Modern Bologna,” Biblical Interpretation 9, no. 3 (July 1, 2001): 259–86,
doi:10.1163/156851501317072710; Dan W. Clanton, The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful: The
Story of Susanna and Its Renaissance Interpretations (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

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