The Nakedness Of The Nude

Charles Darwent sees through the gauzy prudishness covering the genitalia in the nude paintings of the Renaissance to the naked truth concerning the unclothed human figure

- Charles Darwent

The cover of the catalog for the Royal Academy’s major spring exhibition, The Renaissance Nude, is revealing in being rather less so. It shows Titian’s Venus Anadyomene (Venus Rising from the Sea) circa 1520, on loan to London from the National Galleries of Scotland. Or, rather, the cover does not quite show Titian’s Venus. In the painting itself, the Roman goddess’s naked body is cut off halfway down the thigh by the sea from which she mythically rises. On the front of the RA’s catalog, she is cut off just below the navel. Thanks to this cropping, Titian’s impudent Venus is made a Venus pudens, her pudenda sacrificed to spare the puritanical blushes of the modern world.

It has long been thus. Perhaps the most famous Bowdlerisation of nudity in art took place just 40 years after Titian had painted his freshly-cropped goddess, when Daniele da Volterra was ordered by Pope Pius IV to cover the naked genitals of figures in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, 1535–41, on a wall of the Sistine Chapel, in wisps of painted cloth.

Earning himself the deathless nickname Il Braghettone (The Breeches-maker) in the process, Daniele duly obliged. His additions were only removed in a restoration of the Sistine frescoes in 1994 – and, even then, not all of them. Reasoning that four centuries of cardinals had sat in convocation below clad saints and sinners and only four decades beneath unclad ones, the decision was taken to leave some loincloths in situ. They are there still.

So, what had happened in the years between 1509 and 1511, when Michelangelo painted the 20 brazenly nude male ignudi on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and 1565 when Il Braghettone wielded his censorious brush?