Sacred erotica: The classicalfigura in religious painting of the early Cinquecento

Abstract

Renaissance works of art show that artists responded to certain erotic elements transmitted by the remains of Classical art. But contemporary theorists of painting and sculpture seem reluctant to emphasize this debt, particularly where it is most controversial, in religious works. It is here argued that Renaissance theoretical repression of the artist's “natural” body is connected with professionalization of the artistic disciplines. Bronzino's homoerotic burlesque poetry discloses that personal fantasy arising from an erotic response to Classical figures like Cupid constituted part of this discourse of adaptation and parody. A more anthropological approach to classicizing eroticism and to perceptions of the body is suggested, so that modern scholarship's precise formal record of Classical influences can be interpreted with enhanced historical resonance.