Too Sexy for the nude

Abstract

James Grantham Turner, Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) 464 pp., £60, Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-300-21995-1 Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018) 240 pp., £50, Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-300-201567 Interest in the topic of the nude in Renaissance art has surged again recently with the organisation of a major exhibition, several TV programmes, and the publication of a number of scholarly books devoted to the subject. Toward the outset of her informative study simply entitled The Italian Renaissance Nude, Jill Burke suggests that the topic has been ignored or overlooked; but she may really be noting a brief lull in interest rather than something more fundamental. After all, there was once a time when the question of the nude was the mainstay of art history, around which competing versions of cultural value and meaning...