Eros in art: Origins of the female nude

Venice was famous for its sophisticated courtesans, who mingled with the aristocracy and intelligentsia, as well as its thousands of common sex workers. This culture contributed to the nude genre.

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1534, Florence, Uffizi

Venice became one of the most important Renaissance centres of a new romantic and erotic sensibility in painting, just as it made a crucial contribution to the development of landscape painting. The Venetian school indeed, with painters such as Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and Lorenzo Lotto, became the main alternative to the Florentine-Roman mainstream. By the middle of the 16th century, it was a commonplace that Michelangelo and Titian were the two greatest living artists; they came to stand for two different approaches to art, and even for sculpture and painting in the debate, known as the paragone, about the respective merits of the two art forms.

Venice was not an ancient city like Naples or Rome; it had been founded by Byzantine and Italian refugees from Ravenna, Padua and other neighbouring cities when the territories reconquered from the barbarians by Justinian in the 6th century were overwhelmed by new waves of invaders from the end of the century onwards. The settlement’s position on islands in the middle of a vast, shallow and treacherous lagoon made it hard to attack and served the city well in later struggles against rival powers.

In this new position, and with a unique republican constitution that endured for a thousand years, Venice survived the centuries of turbulence and decline elsewhere to become a great trading state, the most prosperous in Renaissance Italy and only rivalled by contemporary Flanders. Venice had important cultural links with Constantinople – even taking a leading part in its conquest in 1204 – built up a considerable maritime empire in the Greek world, and was the main Italian entrepot for merchandise that had travelled along the Silk Road to Constantinople. But trade with the east had a price and Venice suffered repeatedly from outbreaks of the plague; two of its favourite saints, Rocco and Sebastian, were invoked against the disease.

It was a city full of pageantry, colour and ceremonies that had developed in an unbroken tradition since late antiquity. Compared to Florence, which epitomised the “modernism” of the 15th century, Venice seemed at once ancient, archaic and oriental. The new world of the Renaissance did not come to the city until the second half of the century, after Donatello’s stay in Padua and his astonishing achievement in casting the first bronze equestrian statue made for 12 or 13 centuries. Donatello inspired the brilliant young painter Andrea Mantegna, and Mantegna in turn, marrying into the greatest family of painters in Venice, influenced his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini.

Bellini (1430-1516) was a great painter who was fortunate to have extraordinary pupils and to live long enough to learn from them in his turn. He was perhaps the supreme painter of the Madonna and Child subject inherited, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, from the Byzantine tradition. In a work like the Madonna del Prato (1505), the tenderness of the mother’s gaze down at her sleeping child seems to resonate across the stillness and serenity of the surrounding countryside, filled with subtle emblematic motifs, like the well, a reference to the water of life.

Bellini was also the master of a genre known as the Sacra Conversazione, in which the Virgin and Child are surrounded by saints from different historical periods. There is, despite the implications of the title, no literal conversation between the figure, but rather a kind of mystic communion across time and space. One of the most beautiful of these works is the San Zaccaria Altarpiece (1505), still in the church for which it was painted. Here the Virgin and Child are flanked by Saint Peter and Saint Catherine on one side and Saint Jerome and Saint Lucy on the other, all deep in contemplation and suspended in an exquisitely subtle light from the garden visible on either side, while an angel in the centre plays music to the viewer’s imagination.

Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510, Dresden, Gemaeldegalerie

Not all the love evoked in Venetian art was sacred, however. Venice was famous for its sophisticated courtesans, who mingled with the aristocracy and intelligentsia, as well as its thousands of common sex workers. The city seems to have been remarkably tolerant in general although stricter in its attempts to suppress sodomy than the notoriously lax Florentines, unless the occasional spectacular executions at the stake were mainly for show; Venetian religiosity seems to have been largely ceremonial and ritualistic.

One of the most fascinatingly matter-of-fact images of Venetian courtesans is a painting by Vittore Carpaccio of two blonde women on the kind of rooftop terrace called, in Venice, an altana (c. 1490); expensively-dressed and wearing pearl necklaces, they are also remarkably similar in features and may be sisters. In between gentlemen callers, they are bored, playing with their pet dogs and birds, attended by a young servant boy; on the upper left may be seen a pair of the platform shoes they like to wear.

A similar situation is evoked in Titian’s famous Venus of Urbino (1534), today in the Uffizi. The goddess of love is invoked as a courtesy title more than anything else; the beautiful nude reclines on her bed, presumably after her bath, while in the background on the right two servants take fresh clothes from a chest. Edouard Manet would have been well aware of all this when, three and a half centuries later, he made an oil sketch of this painting before adapting it to become his notorious Olympia (1863).

The culture of courtesans no doubt contributed to the appearance of the female nude as a subject, if not a subgenre in its own right – one that persisted as a minor theme from this time until the 19th century when, with the decline of narrative subjects, it became a staple of modern art. The most beautiful example is Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (c. 1510) – the model for the Venus of Urbino – with a landscape possibly finished by Titian after the artist’s premature death.

Detail: Giovanni Bellini, San Zaccaria Altarpiece, 1505, Venice, Church of San Zaccaria

The harmonious relationship with nature that Giorgione evokes in this painting goes far beyond the anecdotal level of Carpaccio’s picture. It speaks in fact of a new poetic sense of nature which has its roots in the genre of bucolic poetry, first makes itself felt in the painting of Venice, and pervades much of the later history of the landscape genre.

Unlike most genres, bucolic was invented by one man, the Hellenistic Sicilian Theocritus, who grew up, as far as we know, in Syracuse and would have heard from boyhood the rustic music and songs with which shepherds entertained themselves and each other during long days of watching over their flocks. Like some composers in the modern era, he decided to turn folk song into a high art form, an artificial synthesis, typical of Hellenistic literature, of the rustic and the sophisticated. His Idylls – from which we have the adjective “idyllic” – were adapted by Virgil in his first work, the Eclogues, and Virgil was in turn imitated by later medieval and Renaissance authors.

All of these classical sources became far more accessible after the invention of printing in the middle of the 15th century. Towards the end of the century and in the early part of the 16th, there was a knowledge explosion comparable to the one we have witnessed with the growth of the internet, and two of the main centres of polyglot printing, including Greek and Hebrew as well as other oriental languages, were Flanders and Venice. For this, among other reasons, Venetian art in the 16th century seems to respond particularly to a literary genre that celebrates the beauty of nature and especially the association of nature and love.

Thus although Venetian art is particularly distinguished by Titian’s magnificent mythological pictures – which will be discussed next week – it also gave birth to a new genre which is usually called a poesia, a visual poem, whose distinctive feature is to be a figure composition without any subject traceable to a specific literary or historical source. Such paintings are in fact the painterly equivalents of bucolic poems about shepherds and goatherds.

The two most famous examples of this category are both by Giorgione (c. 1477-1510), the brilliant fellow-pupil of Titian in Bellini’s workshop who died so young – perhaps the second most regrettable premature death in art history after that of Masaccio, who would have changed the history of 15th century painting if he had lived.

One of these beautiful and mysterious pictures is the Tempesta (c. 1508). On one side of a stream a young woman crouches among the bushes, nursing an infant; on the other side stands a handsome young man with a spear, perhaps a soldier. The picture illustrates no prior story, but invites us to make what we will of the relationship of these two figures, so close yet clearly separated. In the background is a cityscape and, above, the approaching storm which gives the work its title; the lightning is not only poetically significant in breaking the ostensible serenity of the scene, but is also a display of virtuosity: the great Apelles, according to Pliny, “painted things that cannot be painted”, in particular lightning.

The other remarkable work by Giorgione has sometimes been attributed to Titian in recent times, but although it may have been finished by him, its conception is completely foreign to his imagination. The Concert Champêtre (1509-10), as it is known, presents an unusual combination of clothed male figures and naked women, later adapted by Manet in his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) combined with a composition from Raphael’s Judgement of Paris (c. 1510-20).

Giovanni Bellini, Madonna del Prato, 1505, London, National Gallery

There are many mysterious things about this painting: the evocation or anticipation of music from three different instruments as well as the splashing of water; the contrast between the dress of the two young men; the nakedness of the girls and finally the complete lack of communication between the male and female figures. The composition appears to be a pure pastoral fantasy drawn from the worlds of Theocritus and Virgil, but it could also have an autobiographical significance. We may imagine the shepherd boy with his pipe as standing for Giorgione’s very humble origins, and the young gentleman in finery as the man he grew to be because of his talent as a painter and, according to Vasari, equally as a lutenist and singer.

Indeed the reason that Giorgione died so young was that he caught the plague from an aristocratic girl with whom he was able to consort because his talent – and in particular his musical talent – had given him an entree into a higher social sphere. “He fell in love with a young woman and they both took great pleasure in their love affair. It happened that in the year 1511 she became sick with plague; unaware of this and frequenting her as usual, Giorgione caught the plague and within a short time he died at the age of 34.”