A history of the body in the Renaissance

Changes in the art of the period, in Renaissance art, the advent of the Renaissance nude in the work of people like Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, all of that work is embedded in this change in the understanding of the body.

Leonardo particularly used new drawing techniques, new techniques of observation and the availability of paper, to really get to grips and understand the perfected human body — the body as God and they understood it and would have wanted bodies to look like, before the fall of Adam and Eve and their descent from Paradise. This reappraisal of the human body really had massive and long-lasting effects on things that you might not expect, like the study of anatomy and the scientific revolution.

You can see this new interest and real popularity of understanding the human body in new institutional spaces, like the anatomy lecture theatres in Padua or Bologna, where they build anatomy theaters where you would have the cadaver and the teacher (the lecturer) at the bottom. The students would sit on steeply stepped seats so everyone could see what was going on. They would test what they can see — the evidence of the body, the evidence of looking — against the authority of classical texts, like Galen particularly. They would test his hypotheses through experiments, and that was a fundamentally new idea. The records of this experiment were recorded by Renaissance artists. The relationship between science and art was very, very close in this period.

This is such a common way of understanding the body that in the 16th and 17th centuries, they would bring out handbooks of physiognomy that would tell you how to diagnose people’s personalities from the exterior of their bodies. This becomes really important when you look at, for example, advice to men on how to choose wives. Men are told to choose wives with golden, slightly wavy hair and white, peaches-and-cream skin and a slightly plump body; these women were thought to be particularly fertile but also to be obedient and clever enough to have clever children — and because they had the right balance of humors.

Similarly, women with dark, curly hair were said to be not a good match, because they were prone to being argumentative and were likely to be infertile, whereas women with very blonde hair were argued to be unintelligent and not good for giving birth to intelligent male children. There is this overlap of medicine and popular ideas of appearance that is really important for understanding the art and the culture of the period.

However, other things happened in this period, too. For example, the voyages of exploration led to new understandings of people in sub-Saharan Africa, and in what was then called the New World and the islands, often described as "naked" by explorers. There is this new idea of nakedness as being related to a state of innocence and a state of lack of civilization, on the one hand; on the other hand, there is this idea that if artists can draw naked people, that is somehow people without the fashion that clothing and hairstyles, for example, or other kinds of trappings of everyday life.

It is argued that the nude form is a perfect body that is a product of the artist's mind. This goes hand in hand with the idea of the artist as this special category of person that can create beautiful things that are more beautiful than the things that you would find on Earth. The nude is part of that process by which art becomes separated out from just normal earthly things.

For example, Michelangelo's David, which everyone knows well — it is one of the most famous artworks of the Renaissance — when it was first displayed, it had a covering for its genitalia because people thought, and people understood, this might be shocking to those going about their business in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. There was anxiety over nakedness in a way that was progressively forgotten in the centuries since then, because in real life it was very difficult, and people were very rarely seen naked, particularly women. Even in marriage they would keep their underclothes on. A proper, chaste woman would certainly never allow herself to be seen naked, even by her husband.

This painting was made for Ruini's husband and would almost certainly not have been on public display. It would have been something just for her and her husband and perhaps a few others — an intimate portrait.

The nude, more generally, howver, was expected to provoke desire. You often see nudes being shown in the context of bedchambers, for example, and they were understood to provoke desire in both men and women who looked at them. So this is an interesting idea of gender fluidity when it comes to the way that nudes evoke desire in this period.

Ruini’s portrait, in a way, is quite daring, but it also celebrates her beauty, because she was one of the most celebrated beauties in Bologna at the time. There is a lot going on here, related to what is licit, what’s illicit, how desire is regulated. Nudes were acceptable in some settings and not in others. The framing and placement, the original display of these nudes, was really important.

I think Isabella Ruini would have been totally shocked to know that it is now so easy to get an image of her semi-naked — you can get it on the internet — or that these kinds of images are now being shown in galleries. That would have been completely alien to her understanding of what this image was for.

In artistic training, which really starts off with drawing after the nude in Florentine workshops in the later 15th century, people drew after naked male bodies again and again and again. There are many drawings that survive from this period. Sometimes you can see the same model being drawn from different poses by different people in a workshop, for example.

All through the period, right up until the 18th or 19th century, it is still much easier to get ahold of male models for this male-dominated field; there were not many female artists. As you get into the later 15th, and certainly into the 16th, century, people increasingly start to use female models as well, and they start to appreciate the female form — not necessarily as ideal but as beautiful.

They start to understand that maybe women’s bodies can be more beautiful than male bodies. This is an argument that starts to be made again and again in a type of pro-woman literature, where people start to say women’s bodies are very beautiful. You start to get evidence, too, of life drawing after the female nude — probably using servants and perhaps using sex workers (it is not certain); courtesans, certainly; women who would be willing to take their clothes off in return for some payment. This tended to happen not in the workshop but in private rooms.

There is a different understanding of the male and female bodies, but basically you see this increasing idea that although male bodies may be ideal, female bodies can also be beautiful. You see that increasingly into the 16th century.

This is one of the reasons why androgyny — the idea that you could mix male and female to create a more beautiful body — becomes really popular in the early 16th century.

Michelangelo brought together both male and female characteristics in some of his female nudes, particularly, whereas Leonardo used feminine characteristics for male figures in order to create a body that was clearly not existing in the world. It was a body that, for them, was perfectly beautiful.

I relate the beginnings of that idea on a mass scale to the Renaissance. If you can provide some distance, and for people to understand that these feelings that seem so personal and intimate are actually operating in a historical place, in a certain place and time, because of large-scale historical forces, it can help disentangle a complex mass of ideas about selfhood and identity in the body and society. The history of the body can be really helpful to think about our attitudes towards our own bodies — and other people’s bodies, too.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025