A gorgeous book! The photographs are amazing and so is the information. A time when nude in artwork wasn't such an issue. Would make a great gift for someone!

The Renaissance Nude is good book, some may feel it is a little dry. I enjoyed it and people who enjoy art will like it.

This was an amazing art book. I really loved it. The formatting in Kindle was really rough and choppy though.

Some people will, like me, point out that whatever the idea of the nude portrait, and however clever the artistic ability and intention is, the point is often purely the very nudity. It's a question of which came first, the desire to make a nude painting, or the desire to have a naked model – and of course whether the story/allegory/classical allusion came before or after the lack of clothing was settled on. Other people will say there's nothing so salacious in any of this. But you hit the first essay here and see how religious imagery for rich patrons proved me right. Even if the religious nude began with the idea of humanising the glory of Christ's body, its godliness and its human perfection both, it quickly became a near-hermaphrodite in diaphanous loincloths – just when the patrons were bisexual and interested in that kind of thing. Bathsheba, bathing nude, was in too much use to be merely an instructional example of the virtues of chastity and covering yourself up.

The mix of educative and erudite surveys ranges from the second, that proves how the northern, Germanic European nude influenced that from Italy and not vice versa as common thought has it, and how the power of the women in the imagery was not always welcomed, to specific sections concerning multiple Vitruvian Men, Venus, Ovid and French romances. It's a wonderfully produced and illustrated book, acting as deeply-expanded catalogue for a Getty exhibition also seen in London for the Spring of 2019. The blurb in front of me says it "examines in a profound way what it means to be human". Yes and no, for it's merely looking at tits. Proof this is either an exemplary academic book, or a wonderful instance of over-thinking. Only those on one side of that fence will buy this, but they will love it.

The Renaissance Nude is an incredible book about painting. It was as the title suggests mostly concerned with paintings of people in the nude. I really liked this book. I think it was very informative and it dug deep into the subject it was dealing with.
My favorite part was about the depiction of Venus.

Really enjoyed this book. Really a textbook setup. If you like art and/or the Renaissance this is a good one for you. Different works are looked at and great information.

This is probably a wonderful book if you are an art historian or a student of Renaissance painting. It appears to be very thorough, hence my 4 star rating.

However, it is overwhelming for me. I am someone who loves art but am not that engrossed in it to read a huge tome like this is which dissects and explains all the artists of the Renaissance period. I was expecting something like one page showing a painting and the accompanying page to explain the painting and its position in the art world at that time..

I am also not enough of an expert to even begin to rate this book and if the information in it is correct or not. I will just make the assumption that it is. In the meantime, I will enjoy looking at the paintings and reading some of the text, at least for the art work with which I am familiar.

Much More Than Just The Bare Essentials

This is the catalogue that accompanies the Renaissance Nude exhibition organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in association with the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition will travel from The Getty to the Royal Academy, but some pieces will appear at only one venue, so this catalogue is the only way to see each and every piece.

The Exhibition is organized around five "Parts", with the central theme being how the nude was addressed between 1400 and 1530, and throughout Europe. The art is central, of course, but the analysis and commentary covers the political, social, cultural, technical, religious, and even economic environment in which the works were created and displayed.

The book is nicely organized. From a wide ranging and rather congenial Introduction, and then through sixteen varied, lively, and sometimes idiosyncratic essays by scholars in the field, we approach the matter of the nude from a fascinating and engaging range of perspectives. Each essay or set of essays is followed by a collection of shorter pieces, (about a page each), addressing individual exhibit items in great detail. This bobbing up for air and then diving deep approach serves the exhibit well and makes the catalogue both a useful tool and a browser's delight.

I was rather taken by the fashion in which the exhibit, and the essayists, played about with the idea of the nude as a source of shame, beauty, confusion, desire, and the idyllic, and very much enjoyed the personality and style that was brought to the project. This book is much more than a dry list or recitation of exhibit "contents", and struck me as quite an achievement on its own.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

The Renaissance Nude
Edited by Thomas Kren, Jill Burke and Stephen J. Campbell
2018
Getty Publications

This is such a beautiful book, as I have come to expect from Getty. Lush reproductions with interesting history and literary content. This was published to accompany an exhibit on view at the J. Paul Getty @ Getty Center, London from 10-30-2018 to 1-27-2019 and also at the Royal Academy of Arts, London 2-26-2019 to 6-2-2019. It includes 15 essays followed by shorter texts on each individual object. It is interesting to read without seeing the exhibits, and includes pieces in Los Angeles.
The Renaissance in Europe was from 1400-1530 and was a time that explored what it meant to be human. True beauty was in bodies that have both feminine and masculine elements, but seeing genitalia was considered taboo.
The book looks at Christian imagery and development in Northern Europe, bound in Christian imagery and spiritual practice, of Christ's humanity. The controversy over if Christ was nailed to the cross naked or with a loincloth. One of my favorite pieces is by Dieric Bouts of the Netherlands titled 'The Way To Paradise' and 'The Fall of The Damned'.

My favorite essay was by Diane Wolfthal, 'From Venus To Witches', and the 11 pieces with it. It was a time when the North developed 2 themes to show female nudes. As a highly sexualized being who endangers men (malevolent witches) or passive and erotic (there to pleasure men). The Ox skull was a symbol used in many paintings to symbol sacrifice. Part 3, 'Artistic Theory and Practice' and Part 4 "Beyond The Ideal Nude' were especially interesting.

This a lush, gorgeous volume. I am thrilled I was able to see it.
Thank you to The J.Getty Museum, and Net Galley for this e-book ARC.
#TheRenaissanceNude #NetGalley

This is based on an exhibition and would certainly be more satisfying if you had been to that event. In the electronic form I had, the illustrations, although high quality, were not set up to be connected with the text about them. Figure 8, for example, was referred to in the text, but you had to make an effort to find it. And by that time you may have forgotten the original analysis. The subject is fascinating and dealt with in detail. The curious fact that mostly only Europeans dealt with the nude human body is explained in various ways.

What a gorgeous book! More than 400 pages filled with highest level artwork from artists like Michelangelo, Dürer, Cranach, Van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Donatello and many famous and lesser known names. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, engravings, reliefs, illuminated manuscripts describing the human form in its natural state. Suffering and lust, young and old bodies, beauty and ugliness, religious, mythological or profane subjects, illustrations of the various forms of human condition, there are all. The text is very readable and enjoyable, describing not only the artworks but also the stories behind them, the uses of the time period, very interesting indeed. I wish I could attend the exhibition!