Skip to main content

The Renaissance Nude review – a sexy, sacred riot of flesh

Royal Academy, London
Naked men cruise, fight and flagellate, nude nymphs brandish whips, and creatures ambush sleeping maidens. What an astonishing show – I could look all day

Full of surprises, and a few shocks, sexy, sacred and profane, The Renaissance Nude is almost as salacious as it is scholarly. With substantial loans from all over Europe and the US, the exhibition has travelled from the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and now fills the Sackler galleries at the Royal Academy.

It is a riot of bodies in these low-lit, sober grey rooms. Christian martyrs are impaled on trees. Jan Gossaert’s Christ, stripped, awaits his fate, sitting on the cold stone and wracked with palpable terror. Several Saint Sebastians stand about, pin-up boys oblivious to the arrows that pierce them. A procession of flaggelants in a Netherlandish Book of Hours prepare themselves for their hooded tormentors in a scene as erotic as it is devotional. The delicacy and intimacy of the image counterpoints its impending violence. Titian’s Venus Anadyomene rises from the waters, wringing her hair, fully exposed and oblivious to the spectator. Peering to the side, she doesn’t see us looking, or pretends as much. Perhaps this is Titian’s double bluff (she knows that we know … except of course, she is only painted).

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BXcjqK
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more