Why Italy
opinions about italian renaissance art?
say u were some1 from the renaissance period and you see a painting that was painted recently, with nude figures/people. u think that it is completely inappropriate. why? i need opinions PLS NO PERVERTED ANSWERS AND TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY ITS FOR A PROJECT
Public Comments
- omg... There's tones of NUDE in Renaissance art
- I'm pretty sure the 'inappropriate' concept is recent. There are a lot of paintings by well-known (even in their own time) Ital Ren painters that show the human body. If just nudity, all on its own, was considered inappropriate, it wouldn't figure so heavily into so much popular art. Unless you're asking, if they saw like a modern Playboy magazine, would they think that was inappropriate, in which case I think the directness of it, the personal part of it, might be considered that way. The paintings of the Rennaissance were classical figures, heroes, Greek gods, etc., so they weren't some girl you might know staring right at you trying to get you aroused - there's a different aesthetic going on there.
- Well, it depends where the art actually is, and what the context is. There are some nudes in ecclesiastical (church) contexts -- naked baby Jesus on an altarpiece, or saints getting tortured gruesomely (some of them without very much clothes on; St. Sebastian shows up routinely in Renaissance artwork wearing little more than underwear and arrows, like http://www.wga.hu/html/a/antonell/sebastia.html for example). Sometimes the nudes were painted for private customers to decorate their homes (or more privately, their "cabinet," IIRC). In each of these instances, I think the artist is using nudity to generate a different sort of reaction from his audience. Naked baby Jesus, I think, is meant to show the universal innocence of a little child. The nude saints in their various scenes of agony add a visceral sense of exposure and discomfort. And the purely secular nudes ... well, that's all that, really. I think we have to remember that Italian Renaissance attitudes towards nudity (and morality) are different than what ours are today. But I think, if you'd like to read more on this subject, you might want to look for "The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration" by Maria Ruvoldt; it looks like it has some discussion on this topic. There's a preview of this book available via Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=ENYoWVwbnf0C
