The Brooklyn Rail

How should we understand the artistic development of the Renaissance? In his classic survey Painting in Italy, 1500 to 1600 (1971) S. J. Freedberg describes the birth of Venetian Renaissance art formally, in terms of purely art historical influences, writing, “What earlier had been a stress of coloristic splendor, part Byzantine, part Gothic, was transposed in Venetian painting of the early Renaissance into an emphasis on the sensuous beauties, visual and tactile, that were to be observed in nature.” Responding to Freedberg and numerous other historians’ broader accountings of the sources of this marvelously original period of art history, Corpi Moderni: The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice looks to a wide range of artifacts from the period to understand the importance of the changing “codes of the body.” Anatomical studies (especially of female bodies) items of luxury clothing, architectural remnants, and pornography are among the ninety objects installed alongside familiar masterpieces by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, and Giorgione, and others. Presented in this novel, historical context, the well-known works look startlingly different. The corpus of art historical commentaries is thus radically extended; in place of traditional, historical analyses like Freedberg’s, we have an exhibition setting Venetian art in its cultural context.

For a relatively compact show, a great deal of material is presented. Leonardo’s famous Vitruvian Man (1498) is set next to some of his lesser known anatomical drawings. A number of images of bodily dissections, both male and female, are displayed alongside Antonio Rizzo’s 1472 sculpture of the nude, biblical Adam. We see Albrecht Dürer’s nude self-portrait and his drawing of varied bodies in a bath house, made during one of his visits to Venice. We also have Bernardino Licinio’s uncanny painting La Nude (ca. 1540), and Titian’s Venus and Adonis (ca. 1555–60), and a nude from Francesco Colonna’s famous novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in Venice in 1499. Interspersed with Giorgione’s masterpieces, The Tempest (ca. 1505–08) and Portrait of a Young Man (ca. 1503), are engravings of nudes, including one of female gay love. Though no one was checking, a side gallery labeled “only for visitors 18 or older” contains a selection of the pornographic images by Marcantonio Raimondi, an engraver who was able to capture an amazing variety of sexual positions. Paintings that depict glass mirrors, which were invented in Murano, are on view, as well as images of cosmetics and hair lightening tools and procedures, a fashionable interest among Venetian women of the time. Body modifiers like corsets and armor, and elaborate metal mechanical arms made for men who lost their limbs in warfare, are also exhibited.

The basic ideas behind Corpi Moderni have been discussed by scholars, many of whose writings provide materials for the catalogue, which is only available in Italian. But long wall labels in English present much essential information, and this is the first time that I have seen these concerns displayed in a large, major museum. Context matters in the art museum; setting these varied artifacts alongside traditional works of art should inspire hard, uncliched thinking. Giorgione’s The Tempest (ca. 1505–08), famously mysterious, takes its place alongside diagrams of female anatomy. Otto van Veen’s history painting Persian Women (1597–99) in which a crowd of women ‘moon’ Persian warriors in order to shame them is situated alongside an untitled scene by Hans Christoph von Puchheim of lovemaking in a gondola (1591–1601). Also on view are engravings of a lesbian love affair, Dürer’s portrait of a young African man, and depictions of Venetian women sunbathing with wide-brimmed hats, which allowed their hair to blond while keeping their faces from tanning. What better way to inspire original reflection about familiar paintings than by relating them to these little known images?

In a pair of books called Wild Art (2013), a study of the enormous variety of visual images that are normally set outside of the art world, Joachim Pissarro and I argued that these materials should be of great interest to art historians. Here, without reference to our discussion, and in ways which we did not entirely anticipate, Corpi Moderni employs our conception of wild art, resulting in a radically novel view of the artistic revolution that took place in Renaissance Venice. Like the familiar Venetian paintings, the artifacts deserve serious interpretation. The show, up until late July, will allow visitors to the Venice Biennale to relate these older works to the contemporary art on display for that venue, which often takes up untraditional visual issues. Usually the old master paintings in the Academy seem to come from a different world from the new work exhibited at the Biennale. But now visitors will discover that some, at least, of the visual concerns of the Venetian Renaissance were not so different from those of many living artists.