Nude Art During The Italian Renaissance

Nudes. The study of the human body reached its epitome in Western culture during the Renaissance. Such fascination with the human body developed both in a religious and erotic/secular sense. Throughout the Italian Renaissance period, nude characters reached a gradual progression in the incorporation of public and esteemed art, as before they were primarily hidden in private rooms or secretly shared as pornography. Eventually, with the shift of religious influence during the Renaissance, nude works became more publicized and even deemed as great works, such as Michelangelo’s David.
The general attitude toward nude works followed a trend of acceptance, rejection, and the re-incorporation. Nudity, though not necessarily the stark full body nudity
Luca Signorelli and Leonardo da Vinci stood as benchmark artists in the development of nude works during the mid-1400’s to early 1500’s. Both worked in a very similar fashion – they chose to break down the human body anatomically and study it analytically. In Signorelli’s Nude Works compilation, one can see the striations and creases indicative of the muscle and tendon movements under the surface of the models. Within da Vinci’s journal, drawings of even the skeletal system were found as well as speculations on how the human body functioned, such as a fetus inside of a womb. Both artists were known for their on-hand study through human dissection, this included the removal of the skin to observe the underlying muscles. Though both artists sketched many realistic bodies that included deformities and surface-level flaws, a sense of idealism in terms of the human body also existed in their works of art. Most likely to the influence of the Greeks/Romans, ideals for females of this time included the expression of their curved stomachs, supple arms, and higher foreheads. Titian, who existed slightly after da Vinci and Signorelli in the late 1400’s to late 1500’s, also took on the trope of nude works except with a different approach to expressing such nude figures. Though he too studied anatomy and shared similar body ideals as his predecessors, he focused more so on the expression of warmth, beauty, and