Renaissance artists and male Madonnas

The National Gallery has an exhibition on at the moment, sponsored by Credit Suisse,  about the Italian Renaissance sculptors/painters, Michelangelo and Sebastiano, focussing on the relationship between the two artists, who were as thick as thieves for some twenty-five years. This post is not really  a review of the exhibition, which I saw last night , but a reflection on some issues that the exhibition threw up. I did some reading about the exhibition prior to going  and watched an online video of a talk given by the curator. So I knew what to expect.  Thus if you think that the Sistine Chapel has been moved to the NG and that the original Pieta is in the exhibition, you are of course mistaken.


 The point of curating these exhibitions is to develop an art historical theme and illustrate it as best as possible. I go to an exhibition such as this for the curating, and never expect  to view more than a handful of original art works, especially if the exhibition is about Italian Renaissance art. I know I have to fly to Rome or Florence to see most of these works and that does not upset me in the least. Until now this has been quite easy to do, though perhaps things are about to change, once visas to EU countries are introduced for British people and cheap flights are curbed. Much European art will be entirely out of the reach of the average British person, as it will be expensive to access it.


 The exhibition is not in the least disappointing. There are works borrowed from a few sources, including a couple of drawings graciously loaned by the Queen. There is an incredible digital reconstruction of the Borgherini Chapel in Rome (which I have seen!) with  one of Sebastiano's most famous frescos, the Flagellation and Transfiguration.


But what really struck me was how masculine the Madonnas were, especially the one in Sebastiano's Lamentation over the dead body of Christ, an oil on loan from the Museo Civico of Viterbo.
It is  well known that Renaissance models were all male. The Madonnas we see in  such paintings were men in women's  clothing. We have to wait for Caravaggio to find real female bodies - mostly prostitutes, as respectable women did not model and the ones whose portraits were commissioned - aristocratic ladies and queens - certainly were never painted in a state of undress.

People tend to forget this fact about male models in female clothing but it certainly provides  a newer  angle when considering contemporary controversies about real women  and beauty standards. The beautiful Madonnas of the Renaissance were men en travesti.  Classical beauty, at least in the version touted in Renaissance times,  is inflected in the masculine rather than the feminine. Next time you see a Renaissance painting of a stunning Madonna look carefully, it's probably a boy if not a grown man, with breasts added to turn him into a female. You will also notice how athletic and muscular the various Christs are, the ones in the paintings I saw yesterday could have been body builders, even the Christ in the famous Michelangelo's Pietà, which he created when he was just twentyfive years old  (seen in a plaster cast, original in the Vatican) has the body of a Greek god.

National Gallery and a stream of cyclists

Madonnas with  baby Jesus , the quintessential depiction of motherhood, were posed by men. Women were not deemed to be good enough to be drawn or sculpted, not even in what was regarded as their domain, that of motherhood.  Because the whole point was not so much that there were not female models - there would have been women willing to undress (or dress up) and pose - but that female bodies were imperfect, only men' s bodies could be drawn to achieve perfection.

Jill Burke writes in her art history blog that:

"There are good reasons, therefore, beyond convenience, why Renaissance artists might study a male model as the basis for their female figures. What we need to do when looking at this type of Renaissance nude is to disassociate ourselves from expectations of naturalism and to recalibrate our understanding of what is beautiful". Definitely, I could not disagree.
But we also need to bear in mind the profound misogyny that characterised a great deal of historical attitudes to women and their bodies and how that misogyny persists when creating arbitrary beauty standards in our contemporary world.

Exhibition on until 25 June 2017

Comments