This was a long-awaited treat that more than met its promise. The show has set out to find the ‘nude’ meaningful and, as a result given food for thought on so much that mattered to the European Renaissance and beyond. Issues of gender, truth, the notion of design as either divine or human or both, body and spirit – and much more. The room dealing with the supernatural body came as a surprise but I don’t, on reflection, see why.
Dominating the first room is a Jan Gossart nude Christ (46f.) which raises all the problems about the representation of perfection and the impossibility of transcendence in such a task. The issue goes deeper than matters of style – Classical and otherwise – to the meaning of the body itself in such a problematic framing of the human senses as a witness to notions of either the divine or unembodied thought. That problem when it arises in relation to representing the human animal is dwarfed by this consideration as is the greater art representing Adam & Eve (Cranach notably (34ff.)) by this Grosart.
The issue is partly mediated by the link of the divine to the endurance of pain as the sign of the mortal and immortal in combat. Hence there is much food for reflection in the section of paintings of the Sebastian icon from Donatello’s relief (52f.) to a Holbein reliquary in silver which objectifies all those themes in the precious-metal-formality of a container for a ‘real relic’ of a decaying arrow to which it turns them.
There is comfort in the turn to a more thinkable section on humanist perfection and the exploitation of classical form that is more unproblematic. Comparing Perugino’s Christ and Apollo it is clear that the provenance of the humanised divine did not concern some humanists – shielded, as they were, by the elite theories of Neo-Platonism. However the shadowing of representations of pagan goddesses by those of witches does re-introduce the element of discomfort that classicism alone had put to sleep, particularly in those allegories of mortality and the human resistance to that idea that so often remind you of Munch’s versions of them (especially in Hans Baldung 112f.).
The Titian Venus is of course immaculate in its ability to combine interiorised emotion and sheer sensual delight, down to the floating and abandoned scallop shell(134f.) and it was correct to place this before the great theorists of human form, geometry and beauty in the examples from Leonardo and even Michelangelo, wonderful as these otherwise are (e.g. 204f.). You have to succumb to the curatorial genius that shows the wonderful presence of reflection and improvisation on classical themes shown by a wonderful set of paintings and sculptures that base themselves on the Spinario sculpture (the boy extracting a thorn from his foot). The range of meaning made available here by very careful selection, curatorial emplacement and minimal but telling commentary was a sheer joy.
There is nothing disappointing in this exhibition or the beautiful catalogue accompanying it.
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