Renaissance nudity

I happened to catch some of  Radio National's The Body Sphere today, and the section in which an Italian Renaissance art historian [Jill Burke] discussed attitudes to nudity at that time was particularly interesting, and amusing.   Here are some things of which I was not fully aware:

There's a kind of golden age of acceptance of the nude in art in Florence in the 1480s when Botticelli's painting his Venuses and these get very popular. Then there's a big swing, a big kind of religious turn in the 1490s, when some of these nude drawings, nude paintings are burned. The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, 1498 in the Piazza della Signoria just where the David was later to be displayed. And the David itself when it was first put up in Florence, he had a little kind of garland of leaves to cover his private parts. So even though you might think that it was all very acceptable, it was always a little bit problematic because of the potential of art to arouse erotic feelings in the viewer.

Burke then comments that as for public nudity, some males doing certain types of work might be seen nearly naked; but as for women, it was all very taboo, unless they needed to be punished:

They'd also have these kind of shaming rituals in some Italian cities where women who'd been caught for adultery would have to run round the city with no clothes on being pelted by vegetables, that kind of thing. But actually for what you might call respectable women, it would be shocking to see women naked.

Even bedroom activities were the subject of anti-nudity instruction:

They were told to have sex with their clothes on. There's a lot of religious texts and sermons that talk about women never allowing their husbands to see them naked. So, there's a Franciscan preacher called Bernardino Siena who in the early 15th century said to women in a sermon, 'It's better to die than let yourself be seen naked.' And that was by husbands, not in public. And there are other handbooks for married life. There's one by a man called Cherubino da Siena, again early 15th century, that tells both men and women that they shouldn't see each other naked, that's it's okay to touch areas but it's not okay to see them. So it's that kind of thing; on an official level no, they weren't meant to have sex naked, but what they actually did…I suspect that they really did have sex naked.

And as for the use to which what we might now consider "high brow" nude art was put; well, the erotic potential was not lost on its owners:

Jill Burke: From what we know, the evidence that we have from inventories is that these paintings would have been kept in the bed chamber. Often they were covered in some way, either with curtains…or there's another kind of nude that's very early, actually, that was on the underside of the lids of wedding chests…

Amanda Smith: The cassone…

Jill Burke: Cassoni, yes, that you'd keep clothes and things in. And you'd lift the lid and there's a reclining nude. Often they'd come in pairs and there'd be a naked man on one side and a naked woman on the other side. Again, whether this kind of almost taboo nature…you can imagine opening a chest or pulling aside a curtain might raise the erotic charge of these paintings.

Amanda Smith: But having that sort of naked image on the inside lid of a cassoni, for example, I mean was that to get the bride fired up as she, you know, pulled out her nightie?

Jill Burke: I think it probably was, yes, to get the couple kind of 'in the mood'. There's also a belief in the Renaissance that if you look at pictures of beautiful men that you're more likely to conceive a beautiful boy baby. So there's almost this kind of magic thing attached to it.

Burke's segment was too short.  But there is more at the transcript on the website.