The sensual aspects of a work of art are essential for its capacity to captivate us as viewers. In the early-modern period these qualities were both admired and censored. We will examine this cultural tension within both religious and secular works of art. The beginnings of mass-produced pornography and the visual embodiment of gender within works of art within the period.
- Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper, eds. The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
- Lynne Lawner, I modi : the Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988)
- Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
- Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
- Margot and Rudolf Wittkower, Chapter 7 “Celibacy, Love, and Licentiousness” in Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists – A Documentary History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: Random House, 1963)
- Art and Ambiguity - the sensual and the erotic: We will examine the subtle tension between the role of sensuality within religious iconography and the piety of the early-modern period. This will be understood within the context of the top-down approach of the Counter-Reformation church, which attempted to both clearly define the boundaries of the sensual and to censure its expression.
- The Engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and the early mass-production of pornography: In 1524, the engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi, famous for his prints after works by the painter Raphael, published a series of scandalous engravings (I Modi) that vividly depicted sixteen sexual positions. Following their publication, Raimondi was imprisoned by Pope Clement VII and copies of the work destroyed. The poet, Pietro Aretino, who assisted in organising the release of Raimondi, later had the images republished with his own accompanying and extremely lewd sonnets. This caused a further moral outcry which resulted in Aretino having to flee the city of Rome. In this class, we will analyse both the influence of Raimondi’s prints, their iconography and their broader relationship to other works of art within the early-modern period.
- Homosocial Behaviour and Experience in the Renaissance: In this class, we will aim to understand how same-sex attraction functioned within the context of the early-modern city of Florence. We will look at the role of the city’s “moral police”, the Officers of the Night, who between 1432 and 1502, charged more than 17,000 men with the crime of sodomy, convicting around 3000. Among those charged included the young twenty-four year old artist, Leonardo da Vinci. These large numbers will be seen to reflect the context of a broader homosocial culture that promoted the segregation of the sexes, as seen in the image of men bathing, by the late sixteenth century painter, Domenico Passignano, in his work, The Bathers at San Nicolo. From this broader context, we will examine homoerotic works of art by other Italian artists, including Michelangelo, Bronzino, Cellini and Correggio.
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Gain awareness for the cultural constructions of sensuality, eroticism, sexuality and gender in the early-modern period
- Visually identify iconography that broadly encompasses both the sensual and the erotic within the visual arts of the early-modern period
- Gain an appreciation for both the cultural synthesis and the perceived contradictions one might be presented with, when seeking to understand the relationship of the sensual and erotic within the context of religious and secular art of the period
