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Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain - Damien Hirst

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Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain - Damien Hirst

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Life Class: Today's Nude - Announcements - e-flux

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Life Class: Today's Nude is conceived by artist Alan Kane, commissioned by Artangel and the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and produced for Channel 4 by Artangel. The project is part of the Jerwood/Artangel Open, a new commissioning initiative for the arts launched in association with Channel 4 and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

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The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is exhibiting the works of Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480-1534), a printmaker who collaborated closely with the great Renaissance artist Raphael. The reproductions of Raphael's paintings that Raimondi undertook helped spread artistic knowledge across Europe. It sounds respectable, even staid. Yet there's another side to this craftsman that might make you prick up your ears.

He helped invent pornography. Raphael, who employed Raimondi, was at the centre of a circle of sexual libertarians in Renaissance Rome. They hung out at the villa of Agostino Chigi, banker to the Vatican, who held wild parties in his garden by the Tiber and owned erotic art including a lewd statue of the horny greek god Pan. Chigi was a libertarian - he apparently only married his mistress Francesca Ordeaschi to legitimise their four children after they'd lived together for years, and he also had an affair with the famous courtesan Imperia Cognati. The mood at his villa was hedonistic. One regular guest was the writer Pietro Aretino, who wrote of the erotic art in the villa: "Why shouldn't the eye see what delights it most?"

In the bedroom Chigi shared with Ordeaschi, Il Sodoma - the Sodomite - painted a fresco of Alexander the Great going to bed with his wife Roxane. Raphael himself painted the most famous frescoes in the villa - today called the Villa Farnesina - but according to his biographer Vasari, writing in 1550, he couldn't work properly because he was so distracted by the sex addiction Vasari says he suffered from. So Raphael's lover had to be given a bedroom at the villa. He could paint, then go to bed with her, then paint a bit more.

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Pandore from I Modi, engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi. Photograph: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

According to Vasari, it was Raphael's insatiable sex drive that killed him in 1520 at the age of 37. He came home in the morning exhausted by a wild night of passion, fell into a fever and died. Raphael left his business - he'd employed a huge team - to his most talented assistant Giulio Romano, and he wondered how to use Raimondi's printing skills. He came up with an outrageous idea.

Romano drew a series of explicit illustrations of sex acts and gave these to Marcantonio Raimondi to engrave and print in 1524 under the title I Modi - which translates as The Positions. I Modi takes the sensuality of Renaissance art - all those nudes by Titian - and turns it into frank pornography. The pope would probably have turned a blind eye to drawings being passed around in Chigi's villa. But by printing I Modi, Raimondi made it popular and accessible. He was thrown into jail.

Romano, meanwhile, had left Rome and was safely ensconced as a court artist in Mantua. So Raimondi languished in prison by himself and his dirty book was seized and destroyed.

Ben Jonson mentions I Modi in Volpone. And Shakespeare names the artist who drew the pictures in The Winter's Tale

The outrageous writer Aretino came to the rescue. Not only did Aretino petition the pope to release Raimondi but after getting him out of prison wrote 16 filthy sonnets to go with the pictures. In 1527 I Modi was reissued with Aretino's licentious poems and became a bestseller all over Europe.

The English dramatist Ben Jonson mentions I Modi in his play Volpone. His friend Shakespeare only ever names one Italian artist: it is Giulio Romano. Does Shakespeare's name-checking Romano in The Winter's Tale suggest he knew about the filthy pictures in I Modi?

The huge success of this scandalous creation was a fusion of erotic art - which has always existed - with the new invention of printing. It was the first printed pornographic bestseller. It opened the floodgates for porn to pour off the presses and, eventually, proliferate on computer screens. Who says Renaissance art is genteel?

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Marcantonio Raimondi: the Renaissance printer who brought porn to Europe

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The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is exhibiting the works of Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480-1534), a printmaker who collaborated closely with the great Renaissance artist Raphael. The reproductions of Raphael's paintings that Raimondi undertook helped spread artistic knowledge across Europe. It sounds respectable, even staid.

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Twenty-one artists, from all walks of life, gathered at the New York Academy of Art on Sunday, February 21, 2016, for a special life drawing class with a guest model, American rock legend Iggy Pop. The class was organized by the Brooklyn Museum and conceived by artist Jeremy Deller.

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A quadruple amputee seeking a double hand transplant has bared all in a bid to highlight organ and limb donation.

Corinne Hutton posed nude with her body painted with organs that are deemed transplantable to help raise awareness.

The images were beamed onto London landmarks on Tuesday night including the Royal Opera House.

The 46-year-old single mother from Lochwinnoch, Renfrewshire, has been on the waiting list for a double hand transplant for two years.

Ms Hutton, a former businesswoman, had both her hands and her legs below the knee amputated three years ago after suffering acute pneumonia and septicaemia.

Experts are trying to find suitable hands that match Ms Hutton's own blood group, skin tone and hand size.

The striking pictures of Ms Hutton have been released to coincide with Organ Donation Week.

They were projected onto a series of landmarks across London, including the National Portrait Gallery, Waterloo Station and the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

She told the BBC's Good Morning Scotland programme: "It took quite a few hours and there were different stages of exposure, so thankfully I feel quite well covered.

"I've managed to conveniently forget the fact I'm nude in the picture - it doesn't look like it."

Before she became ill, Ms Hutton ran her own graphics company based in Glasgow, but she now devotes her life to her charity Finding Your Feet.

Within four months of losing her limbs, she walked a mile through Glasgow city centre on prosthetic legs, in a bid to raise awareness of the charity which was set up to help other amputees.

Ms Hutton has since climbed Ben Nevis, abseiled, cycled 90km around the Isle of Arran, cycled in the Sir Chris Hoy velodrome, taken up skiing and had ballroom dancing lessons - raising more than £250,000 for her charity.

She said: "When you look at the organ donation system, you realise the depth of it and the complications of it and also the lack of donors.

"That was the whole point of doing it, to increase awareness of how few people are signed up to the organ donation register and how many people are dying every single day.

"I won't die because I don't have hands, but people are dying because they don't have organs."

One of the images shows the outline of a hand, highlighting Ms Hutton's own appeal for a donor.

The option to donate limbs is not recorded when someone registers to become an organ donor so medics have to seek permission from the families of potential donors after their death.

Ms Hutton added: "When you're talking about organ donation you've got to consider that there is a family here grieving and it's a horrendous situation, so I'm mindful of that as well - but you can't take them with you."

In July, Chris King became the first person in the UK to have a double hand transplant at Leeds General Infirmary.

The same surgeon, Professor Simon Kay, will lead on Ms Hutton's operation once a suitable donor has been found.

The hands now used by Mr King were initially identified as a potential match for Ms Hutton, but after they were ruled out for her, they were then used in the surgery for Mr King.

Finding a suitable match for Ms Hutton could prove difficult as she received 25 blood transfusions when she was ill.

Prof Kay said: "As one life is extinguished and grieving begins, great comfort can be felt by those who restore other lives with the courageous gifts of vital organs.

"Unfortunately, we rarely have choice over the end of our life, but we can make the choice to rescue other lives at that time by donating vital organs."

Referring to Ms Hutton's appeal, he added: "Our hands make us human, and gifting them at the end of life is one of the most human things we can do."

Sally Johnson, director of organ donation and transplantation at NHS Blood and Transplant, said: "The images of Corinne are very striking and draw important attention to some of the organs, tissue and limbs that can be donated; saving or transforming lives.

"Transplants can only take place if people are willing to donate and sadly around three people a day die across the UK in need of an organ transplant due to a shortage of people being willing to donate.

"I really hope that the images of Corinne will grab people's attention and encourage them to talk to their families about whether they want to be a donor. I hope that it won't be long before we can find a suitable hand donor."

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A quadruple amputee seeking a double hand transplant has bared all in a bid to highlight organ and limb donation. Corinne Hutton posed nude with her body painted with organs that are deemed transplantable to help raise awareness. The images were beamed onto London landmarks on Tuesday night including the Royal Opera House.

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Looking at naked men is what the European art tradition is all about. The male body was the most fascinating fact in the universe for ancient Greek sculptors like Polykleitos, who strove to depict perfectly proportioned young athletes. Male beauty was a bit of heaven on earth, to be apprehended by a truly philosophical love, as Plato explained and as Greek statues assert.

Two exhibitions this autumn show how that ancient Greek ideal has goaded, and permitted, later artists to dote on the male form. The Male Nude at London's Wallace Collection explores how French artists in the 18th-century studied backs, biceps and buttocks. Masculine/Masculine: The Nude Man in Art from 1800 to the Present Day, at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, brings the story up to modern times.

Yet one of the most fascinating insights into the nude can actually be seen in a third exhibition, Tate Britain's Art Under Attack. It includes a stained glass window from Canterbury Cathedral that portrays Christ leading people away from a pagan idol. The idol has devilish horns and is naked: as they are led away, some of the men can't help looking back at this masculine nude.

In this medieval Christian image, their gaze is plainly sexual. Male nudes promote "sodomy", in the language of the time. When Italian artists revived the ancient Greek nude in the 15th century they relished that homoeroticism. When the Pollaiuolo brothers painted a spectacular altarpiece of Saint Sebastian, it was said they chose the most beautiful young man in Florence to be their model. In their painting, now in London's National Gallery, he gazes dreamily as arrows pierce his flesh.

The ideal of the male form inherited from ancient Greece was profoundly sexual, and yet it also became part of every artist's training. Michelangelo drew male nudes because he desired men. Later artists, like those in the Wallace Collection show, drew male nudes to emulate Michelangelo.

In 18th-century France, the period this exhibition covers, the Greek ideal was given a new intensity. In J-L David's painting Leonidas at Thermopylae, a nude warrior pauses at the heart of a vast battle. While Greeks and Persians clash all around him, the Spartan hero Leonidas contemplates the meaning of it all - and his philosophical moment is expressed physically. His body is a Greek statue come to life. You can see his pubic hair. He is free in mind and flesh.

David's powerful portrayal of male nakedness comes out of the tradition of academic drawing the Wallace show explores. Here, you can see male nudes drawn by the likes of his follower Gros. Today, art training recoils from disciplined drawing. But for thousands of years, the discipline of drawing the male nude entered artists into a rich, ambiguous territory between idealism and sex.
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Looking at naked men is what the European art tradition is all about. The male body was the most fascinating fact in the universe for ancient Greek sculptors like Polykleitos, who strove to depict perfectly proportioned young athletes.

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The great art cover-up: Renaissance nudity still has power to shock

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The great art cover-up: Renaissance nudity still has power to shock

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/jul/25/renaissance-art-nudity-cover-up-sistine-chapel-leonardo-censorship

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You never know what will offend people. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that a skirt was crudely painted over the naked Eve in a Renaissance manuscript soon to go on view at the city's Fitzwilliam Museum. Some time between the 16th and 18th centuries a particularly prudish owner had this image bowdlerised, even though the nudity of Adam and Eve is a venerable and respectable religious theme.

It's far from the only incident where Renaissance art has been considered so sensual and provocative that it has been censored, or even destroyed. Works of art get lost for many reasons, but there is a suspiciously high destruction rate for those involving nudity. Leonardo da Vinci's Leda and the Swan was one of the first openly carnal depictions of myth in art, delighting in a big-bosomed, curvy-hipped Leda. Today, this painting is only known through drawings and copies. A French owner probably destroyed it deliberately.

Leda and the Swan is a particularly troubling Greek myth: understood literally, it is the tale of a woman who made love to a swan. In our own time it has been provocatively filmed by Sam Taylor-Wood, before she went on to make the Hollywood film of 50 Shades of Grey (as Taylor-Johnson). Perhaps one day a religious censor will destroy all copies of Taylor-Wood's Leda video. Not only did someone obliterate Leonardo's version, but yet another pious fool destroyed Michelangelo's (admittedly highly perverse) painting of Leda.

Michaelangelo gives Leda the face of his male assistant Antonio Mini and presses her/his lips to the tip of the swan's hard beak. This suggestion of fellatio may be one of the factors that pushed a prude to destroy the painting. Even a copy that survives in the National Gallery has a controversial history: in the 19th century, it was kept in the director's office because it was considered too disgusting to be on public view.

Another racy Renaissance painting in the National Gallery was, until comparatively recently, censored just like Eve in the Cambridge manuscript. Bronzino's great, and stupendously sensual painting An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (about 1545) had a flimsy veil added to make Venus "decent". A myrtle branch was also added over Cupid's buttocks. The nipple Cupid is caressing was painted out. These clumsy additions and erasures date from the 19th century. Only in 1958 did restorers remove them to reveal the full glory of Bronzino's masterpiece.

Why has so much great Renaissance art been censored over the centuries? The nudity of Eve in the 1505 manuscript at the Fitzwilliam reflects the classical sensuality of the Renaissance. This explosion of the carnal in art, when Europe rediscovered the beauty of the nude and the freedom of ancient Greek and Roman thought, crashed into religious revivals, iconoclasm and holy war during the Reformation and counter-Reformation, not to mention the later hypocrisies of the Victorian age.

Religion turned against the sexual freedom of Renaissance art. When it was unveiled in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's Last Judgment was accused of being more fit for a gay bathhouse than the Pope's church. As soon as Michelangelo died, a painter was hired to cover the buttocks of his flying nudes with "decent" draperies. Many of these idiotic veilings are still there - the Vatican has not allowed modern restorers to remove them.

The same goes for Michelangelo's statue of the Risen Christ in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, which wears a ridiculous loincloth added after Michelangelo's death. It's all gratifying proof of the power and life of great art. The Renaissance is still dangerous after all these years. Just ask its censorious enemies.

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Agnolo Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, as it was meant to be seen. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

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The great art cover-up: Renaissance nudity still has power to shock

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You never know what will offend people. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered that a skirt was crudely painted over the naked Eve in a Renaissance manuscript soon to go on view at the city's Fitzwilliam Museum.

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Andrew Ameral's eloquent figures follow from his rigorous study of musculature. By Lisa Wurster

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Durga, Perseus & Beyoncé: From Exploitation to Empowerment

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Durga, Perseus & Beyoncé: From Exploitation to Empowerment

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum

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Durga, Perseus & Beyoncé: From Exploitation to Empowerment

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Former high school interns examine the contradictions of nudity in art and the world.

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A hundred years of over-baring censors

The law remains vague on when naughty bits may be seen on screen

http://read.economist.com/?a=21669062&cid=rea|&cid1=d/dsp/disp/sub/n/20160205-n/paid/banner/n/RFBRRT/n/Cont/n/n