Tag: renaissance art

• November 6, 2020

  Sexual Assault and Hope for the Future in Titian’s Rape of Europe.

  This is the text of a lecture I gave for a conference to consider the Titian: Love, Desire and Death exhibition at the National Gallery, London. If you’d prefer this in video form, you can see a recording of the lecture on YouTube. There’s a lot of rape imagery in art museums – the rape…
• December 9, 2012

  Did renaissance women remove their body hair?

  Notoriously, on the wedding night of the celebrated art critic, John Ruskin and Effie Gray in 1848, Ruskin was so repelled by the sight of his bride’s body that he was unable to consummate the marriage. Effie Gray explained in a letter of five years later “he had imagined women were quite different to what…
• March 4, 2012

  The Da Vinci Debate

  Often, people who don’t have an in-depth knowledge of renaissance art use the short hand “Da Vinci” instead of “Leonardo”. Sometimes you will come across some cognoscenti admitting to “squirming” when they come across people referring to Da Vinci instead of Leonardo – see here or here for example. Although they are certainly correct that…
• October 7, 2011

  Leonardo’s Measure – The Genitals of Vitruvian Men

  There seems to have been something of a genital fixation amongst commentators on Vitruvius’  in the 1490s and early 1500s. Vitruvius’ book on architecture was a favourite for many renaissance theorists, and his small passage about human proportion was revisited several times, notably by Leon Battista Alberti in his On Sculpture, by Francesco di Giorgio…