Dr Jill Burke (University of Edinburgh)
Italian renaissance erotic writing is full of salacious peering through holes in walls, cracks in floorboards and happening across naked bathing women. In a culture where couples were asked never to see each other unclothed by church authorities, and where the undershirt (camicia) was a ubiquitous - and rarely removed - garment, gazing upon a naked woman was transgressive, and gained a potent erotic charge in itself. How does this affect our understanding of renaissance visual culture, and in particular the proliferation of images of the naked female form in the early sixteenth century? Focussing on the burgeoning sexual literature of the sixteenth century, the novel use of female models in life drawing, and the sudden rise of the satyr as an artistic subject, I will discuss the importance of voyeurism in understanding the Renaissance female nude.