The Body in Artistic Theory and Practice

Giorgio Vasari claimed that the aim of any good ‘modern’ artist is to depict the nude. Ideally, he says, ‘by help of the imagination without ... having the living forms in view’. This chapter will consider how the imaginations of renaissance artists were able to form the perfect nude body - and to consider how and why the depiction of the naked body became a central part of artistic practice.
The next section will start with a focus on drawing after a naked model, a practice that started to become widespread from the later fifteenth century. Using primary source material alongside existing drawings, I will consider who these models were and how they were posed; we will also investigate varying attitudes to male and female life models in terms of wider understandings of gender difference. Some artists used not living models but mannequins – I will consider the evidence for this, looking both at extant mannequins and drawings that suggest their use. Some artists went one step further in their observation of the body, literally delving below the skin to carry out their own dissections, and we will consider early evidence for artists’ anatomical investigations.
Renaissance anatomy, like life drawing, sought to find the norm - a body that somehow represented all humans and was not subject to individual idiosyncrasies. Life models, though generally chosen for their beauty, could never represent perfection, with bodies that were tainted by original sin, and prone to aging. In order to represent the perfect body, some artists such as Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, turned to mathematics and proportion, typically measuring a wide range of bodies to arrive at a figure that the understood to represent the ‘essence’ of humanity. I will consider a selection of these proportion drawings and consider their relationship to Vitruvius’s On Architecture.
Finally, we will consider how renaissance artists used the nude figure in motion as a test of their excellence. With twisted torsos, intertwined limbs and elegant gestures, the naked body became a means for artists to create ‘stupendous variety’, to quote Paolo Giovio, allowing Renaissance artists to claim that they had finally equalled – and even surpassed – their antique forebears.