Beyond Titian's Venus: The Nude Body and Social Control in Late Cinquecento Venetian Painting

Above all others in Renaissance Italy, the painters of sixteenth-century Venice were renowned for their depictions of the eroticized female nude. Indeed, the sensually painted flesh of these figures, as seen in Titian's famous Venus of Urbino, still beckon the modern beholder's gaze and activate a desire to touch. Most scholars of art history have largely agreed that the Italian Renaissance nude figure served as a status symbol for elite men to collect and salaciously enjoy in private. While I concur that many of these paintings were produced for the delectation of the male gaze, my dissertation proposes that certain depictions of the nude, especially those from late Renaissance Venice, also constituted a response to women's rising influence in early modern society. Furthermore, these paintings depict not only nude women, but also nude men, in compositions and situations that speak to period anxieties over what we now refer to as gender politics. In the mid-sixteenth century, artists of the Veneto began to more frequently paint the ancient gods, goddesses, and heroes of their secular compositions performing illicit sexual acts that were, to contemporary Venetians' eyes, immoral and/or illegal. More specifically, these depictions of the nude, which were often anachronistically painted in contemporary Venetian surroundings, mirrored the city's own inhabitants acting out improper sex acts such as adultery, rape, and prostitution. In closely examining four examples of this phenomena from circa 1550-1610, my dissertation project demonstrates how these works of art would have provoked unease in the eyes of contemporary Venetian viewers, especially affluent males. In illustrating these scenes of social disorder, I argue that painters of late-sixteenth-century Venice ultimately exposed as well as prompted men's fears of losing sexual and societal control over to women.