One of the most significant phenomena associated with the shift in focus from God to man during the early Renaissance was the rise of the nude. Semi-naked portrayals of figures such as Bathsheba and Christ had appeared in northern European secular manuscripts and devotional images from the late 14th century onwards, but it in Italy it was renewed interest in the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome – where the body was the means to express ideal beauty - that sparked the new genre. One of the first works clearly influenced by antique sculpture was Donatello’s famous nude David in bronze of ca.1435-40. Donatello (ca. 1386-1466) had travelled to Rome in 1407 with Filippo Brunelleschi, both of them no doubt drawing monuments such as the colossal nude Dioscuri or Horse Tamers on the Quirinale. As Vitruvius and Pliny had explained, these kinds of statues were based on a system of harmonic proportions and mathematical relationships between the parts of the body and the whole. The popularity of classical sculpture by the mid-century is clear from guides to the monuments of ancient Rome such as Flavio Biondo’s Roma Instaurata (published before 1474).

EARLY NUDES

Interest in the naked figure took different forms. From mid-fifteenth century on, all Italian apprentices were made to do regular drawings of the male body from life and two-and three-dimensional models. Leonardo advocated that on winter evenings, young artists should study all the nudes they had drawn in summer - when it was warm enough for their subjects to stand naked - correcting their efforts during the following year. The practice of drawing the female nude in Italy seems to have started much later, well after the turn of the 16th century.

 NORTHERN NUDES

Whether or not 15th-century northern European artists and apprentices did life-drawing exercises like their Italian contemporaries is not documented. Nevertheless, naked or semi-naked figures appear in early drawings by French and Flemish illuminators and artists such as the Master of the Cité des Dames (active from around 1405 to 1415) and Hugo van der Goes (ca. 1430-1482). The Study of a Naked Woman by Albecht Dürer (1471-1528), produced before he visited Italy, is perhaps the earliest surviving female nude drawn from life. He would return to the genre often: his expressive Nude Self Portrait is from after his second trip to Italy, as are his Four Books on Human Proportion based on the works of Vitruvius and Alberti. His most talented pupil, Hans Baldung Grien (ca. 1484-1545), also drew the nude from life.

 AFTER THE ANTIQUE

According to Alberti’s Della Pittura, the role of the arts is to create beauty by selecting the most “excellent parts… from the most beautiful bodies”. Young artists found these in classical sculptures which provided them with models for representing volume, pose and expression. Often they would copy these sculptures from drawings by their masters of monuments such as Marcus Aurelius and the Spinario in Rome, or from small three-dimensional models and casts. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions such as Mantegna, most artists took several decades to grasp the anatomical and formal principles of the originals. It was not until the following generation, that of Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael (1483–1520), that artists would fully take on the challenge of representing the Antique. By then, Pope Julius II had filled the Vatican’s Belvedere Courtyard with newly excavated works such as the Hellenistic Laocöon, and Baccio Bandinelli (1488-1560) had started an informal academy in which the study of classical sculpture was a central part of the curriculum. This would be followed, some 30 years later, by the first formal academy, the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, established by Duke Cosimo de’Medici on the initiative of the artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574).