A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

Antionio del Pollaiuolo (1431-1498) was a renowned Florentine painter, sculptor, draftsman and goldsmith who was particularly admired for his dynamic and expressive portrayal of the human figure. He carried out a wide range of projects, but a relatively small number of his works survive, and he is perhaps most widely known for his magnificent engraving, Battle of the Nudes. The Cleveland Museum of Art's unique first state of the Battle of the Nudes has long been regarded as the exemplary early impression, printed before the plate began to wear and was supposedly re-engraved by another hand. All other known impressions are second states, pulled from the reworked plate.

Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists--including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy--turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained. "Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy "examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings--both in drawings and in three dimensions--constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.

EROTIC ART The wonderful world of the whole history of erotic art from prehistory to the present day is explored in this comprehensive, detailed and fully illustrated survey. The major erotic artists of the Western tradition are featured: Egon Schiele, Thomas Rowlandson, Pablo Picasso, Titian, Jean Baptiste Dominique Ingres, Felicien Rops, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Leonardo da Vinci, Pierre Renoir, Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Louys, Gustave Courbet, J.M.W. Turner, Edgar Degas, Michelangelo de Caravaggio, the Surrealists, Gustav Klimt, Gustave Moreau, Constantin Brancusi, and Eric Gill. Sections include: the female nude male nudes erotica in ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt Oriental erotic art (Taoist, Tantric art from China, Japan and India, including many famous erotic woodcuts) statuary and sculpture; prehistoric artefacts (including Goddess art) sexuality in art of the 18th and 19th centuries photography and eroticism. 'Erotic Art' also includes discussions of topics such as art and pornography (illustrated with numerous examples) censorship sex and religion sexuality and Christianity pagan and mythological erotic art phallic art lesbian art orgasm voyeurism artists and models. Fully illustrated. This book contains many illustrations which are rare. And an introduction and bibliography. ISBN 9781861712479. 612 pages. www.crmoon.com"

“As erotic and powerful as the paintings that inspired it.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room Paris, 1927. In the heady years before the crash, financiers drape their mistresses in Chanel, while expatriates flock to the avant-garde bookshop Shakespeare and Company. One day in July, a young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a coolly dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist, a dispossessed Saint Petersburg aristocrat with a murky past. The two become lovers, and Rafaela inspires Tamara's most iconic Jazz Age images, among them her most accomplished-and coveted-works of art. A season as the painter's muse teaches Rafaela some hard lessons: Tamara is a cocktail of raw hunger and glittering artifice. And all the while, their romantic idyll is threatened by history's darkening tide. Inspired by real events in de Lempicka's history, The Last Nude is a tour de force of historical imagination. Ellis Avery gives the reader a tantalizing window into a lost Paris, an age already vanishing as the inexorable forces of history close in on two tangled lives. Spellbinding and provocative, this is a novel about genius and craft, love and desire, regret and, most of all, hope that can transcend time and circumstance.

Originally published in 1983, Leo Steinberg's classic work has changed the viewing habits of a generation. After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility. Steinberg's evidence resides in the imagery of the overtly sexed Christ, in Infancy and again after death. Steinberg argues that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition. Christ's lifelong virginity, understood as potency under check, and the first offer of blood in the circumcision, both required acknowledgment of the genital organ. More than exercises in realism, these unabashed images underscore the crucial theological import of the Incarnation. This revised and greatly expanded edition not only adduces new visual evidence, but deepens the theological argument and engages the controversy aroused by the book's first publication.