The shock of the nude

Early in the 16th century, Fra Bartolomeo painted an altarpiece of St Sebastian for the church of San Marco in Florence. Though stuck full of arrows, the martyr was, according to Vasari, distinctly good-looking in this picture: ‘sweet in countenance, and likewise executed with corresponding beauty of person’. By and by the friars of San Marco discovered through the confessional that this image was giving rise to ‘light and evil thoughts’ among women in the congregation.

It was removed and eventually sold to the King of France (who was presumably less bothered by that sort of thing). So even during the heyday of Michelangelo and Raphael depictions of human bodies without any clothes were not necessarily all about art. This is one of the themes of The Renaissance Nude, a truly marvellous exhibition at the Royal Academy.

This show is packed with lovely things to look at. There are beautiful bodies aplenty, and the roster of artists includes many of the great names in painting and sculpture — Dürer, Titian, Raphael, Signorelli, Memling. As a visitor, that’s really all you need to know.

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Those reading the hefty catalogue, however, will discover that this is a display with a thesis. Sixty or so years ago, Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, made a famous distinction between the naked and the nude. The exhibition aims to qualify and complicate this venerable analysis.

The nude, Clark argued, was invented by ancient Greek sculpture, and then revived at the Renaissance. However no living person actually looked so poised and perfectly proportioned as the figures in Perugino’s painting of Apollo listening to his protégé, the flute-playing shepherd Daphnis, c.1495.

In landscape and poetic mood this little panel is what Oliver Goldsmith called ‘the pink of perfection’ — even if god and flautist are both as brown as you’d expect of someone who went around undressed in a Mediterranean climate.