Renaissance Bodies
The Renaissance in European art is usually thought of as the period from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries - a period of creative rebirth when artists rediscovered an interest in depicting the human body in naturalistic ways. This interest related closed to the notions of humankind from the periphery to the center of the cosmos.
Representations of the body thus occupy center stage during this period of European art. The paintings on view here describe a trajectory from heavily stylized representation, whose origins can ultimately be traced to Byzantine art of the medieval period, through a number of works from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in which High Renaissance ideals can be found. These ideals include carefully modeled, volumetric depictions of the human form, use of warm color and strong light effects, and increasingly sophisticated attempts to situate the body in three-dimensional space. The softly atmospheric three-dimensionality of the last painting in the group, Giovanni Caracciolo's Young Saint John, relate both to the distortions of form which characterized the sixteenth-century artistic style known as Mannerism and to the school of Caravaggio, a highly sensual style that looked closely at works from Greek and Roman antiquity.
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Il Cavaliere d'ArpinoItaly, 1568-1640 . Judith with the Head of Holofernes . 1603-06 . oil on canvas
. 1943.2
Bequest of Andrew C. Lawson
The Old Testament heroine Judith here holds the head of Holofernes after beheading him. Holofernes was the leader of the enemy forces that had besieged Judith's city of Bethulia. Judith had gained entry to Holofernes' camp by pretending to be a traitor.
For artists and a religious public, Judith's deed embodied the virtues of chastity, justice, and the triumph of humility over pride. By the sixteenth century, however, Judith was increasingly associated with less noble heroines, such as Salome. Both were often represented by male artists as the embodiment of feminine erotic tyranny over men.
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Giovanni Battista CaraccioloItaly, about 1570-1637 . The Young St. John in the Wilderness . circa 1615 . oil on canvas
. 1968.42
Bequest of Andrew C. Lawson
Caracciolo worked in the tradition of Caravaggio (1571-1610), whose distinctive use of dramatic contrasts of shadow and light (called chiaroscuro, light/dark), compressed space, and sensuous form constituted perhaps the greatest innovation in sixteenth-century Italian painting.
Caracciolo's limited palette of deep red and dark earthen tones focuses our attention on the young St. John. The seductive immediacy of the casually posed saint asserts his physical reality rather than his divinity. Such sensuality in a religious figure would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier.