How the Church Tolerated Nudity in Renaissance Art
Through the dark ages the Church preserved the art, books, and ideas of the ancients as the essence of Western civilization. As the Renaissance brought these materials to light for the first time in centuries, the ancient gods and myths weren’t viewed as divinities and scripture, which would have been a heresy in strangely monotheistic, triune Christianity, but as allegories imbued with the wisdom of the ancients.
Another element of the Classics, especially the Greeks, was their comfort with nudity. In Greek athletics the physically perfect human bodies were considered evidence of the transcendence of humans toward divinity. So, for example, a Roman bust of Julius Caesar places Caesar’s head atop a torso with six-pack abs: the idea isn’t so much that Caesar had a great body but that he was a demigod.
When the Renaissance happened, the Church scriptoria’s vast collections of texts and art, nipples and all, paved the bridge to the ancients. The idea was to pick up civilization where the Classical civilizations had left off.
Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510).
Tempera on panel. Uffizi Gallery.
Consequently, a Church and society that were patriarchal, authoritarian, and prone to aversion to nudity tolerated it…
