J​ames ​G. Turner Uncovers the Erotic Dimensions of Italian Renaissance Art

Jun 28, 2018 1029

Proportion, harmony, mythological subject-matter – all well-known and indisputable effects of classical recovery on Renaissance artistic expression. But James  G. Turner (James D. Hart Chair in English at UC Berkeley) in Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality, and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy underscores an easily neglected side of art and court culture during the Italian Renaissance.

Uniting the erotic and the aesthetic, Turner takes a fresh look at the canonical works of masters such as Raphael and Michelangelo. These works, closely analyzed alongside a wide range of visual and textual erotica, come to characterize a “corporeal turn” in Italian art during the sixteenth-century. Turner productively relates this sensibility to two points of origin in antiquity: the Mars, Venus, and Vulcan episode and the narrated account of seeing Praxiteles’s statue of Aphrodite at Knidos. 

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SOURCE: https://www.lavocedinewyork.com

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