From: Rod Fleming (rodfleming@sol.co.uk)
Date: 09/18/00-03:09:23 PM Z
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lukas Werth" <lukas.werth@rz.hu-berlin.de>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca>
The main verve, however, was religious.
You have to tread carefully here. The Quattrocento, and even more the
Cinquecento, are times when Humanism as a codified movement came into
being. The Church was none too happy with the idea, but nevertheless, as
far as secular artistic patronage is concerned, it made huge strides, and by
the end of the Cinquecento we see many major public works being commissioned
with no religious context at all. (Bear in mind that we are discussing Italy
here.)
Significantly, in
> the Netherlands, Breughel and Bosch were not much concerned with the naked
> body, indeed with body studies at all (for Bosch, nudity meant sin).
Again, care is required here. For a start, Bosch was a typically Medieval
rather than a Renaissance artist. He is obsessed with Hell's mouths and
other very Medieval themes, and in particular his drawing of the human
figure is conditioned by an earlier tradition. Breughel (or rather the
Breughels, father and son) are a part of the post-Renaissance era. But, and
it is a big but, they had not the exposure to Classical art that Italian
artists had.......At that time Europe was a very big place.
>In the
> sixteenth century, too, reformation and counterreformation, the Calvinist
> puritanism in many places probably frequently prevented the occupation
with
> the body in nature, although Rubens' women are proverbial.
This is simply not true; 16thC mannerism, which grew from the influences of
Michelangelo and Raphael, moved seamlessly into 17thC Baroque and Rococo. In
fact Calvinism is a relatively minor influence here- the great patrons of
the visual arts at this time are the Royal Houses of Europe, particularly of
France, which was unrelentingly Catholic. (It is possible that the
Calvinists had other things to spend their money on..........) The nude has
hardly been more celebrated than in the baroque and rococo periods.
> In Barock times, I see free depictions of the naked body - only to be
> eschewed again in later times. Places also would of course have to be
> differentiated.
I think there is a danger of allowing hindsight to interfere with reality
here; from the time of Raphael on, the nude was a major theme in art. This
persists through neo-classicism, Romanticism, and the myriad movements of
the 19th and early 20th C's.
> But the naked body was used in very different contexts in the visual arts
> of different centuries: classical allegories and Christian topics are not
> among the main uses today.
Dead right. It is only in the 20thC that we see a real change- but this
change has to do with a rejection of figuration and representation which
became the mainstream viewpoint in the west in the latter half of the 20thC.
In a way, figuration has had to rediscover itself as a result of the great
catharsis of abstraction and particularly Abstract Expressionism. These
threads came to dominate Western art to a staggering extent in the 60's and
70's and it is only really in the last decade that this trend has been
reversed.
Figuration today- and that includes photography of the nude- has been
liberated from its former classicist justification, and has in a way become
re-justified by its Humanist background, which goes all the way back to the
QuattroCento. The best photography of the nude- indeed the best art of the
nude- today deals with real people- their relationships to others, their
relationships to their own bodies.
(And if you doubt that figuration is back, big time, consider this- one of
the biggest public art commissions, perhaps even the biggest, in Europe in
the last decade, is "Angel of the North" outside Newcastle in England. This
vast and magnificent work, which dominates the landscape for miles around,
is a piece of pure figuration. 20 years ago such a project would have been
simply unthinkable.)
There will always be those who see mere prurience in the depiction of the
nude, and personally, I could not care less. It's their loss, and in seeing
the nude as "tits and bums" they reveal a great deal more about themselves
than about the medium itself. They see the nude as no more than a chance for
a cheap drool; but then, and I don't know about anyone else, I'm not making
work for them.
Rod
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