From Breasts to Beard: Pornography, Extreme Violence and other Weird Stuff in Works of Art from the Renaissance

Master of the Fontainebleau School, Gabrielle d'Estrees and one of her Sisters

Alonso Cano, Miraculous Lactation of St Bernard


Cornelis van Haarlem, Monk with a Nun


Quentin Massys, Grotesque Old Woman


Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian

The holy and the profane, or the spiritual and the corporeal, begun to intermingle in Renaissance life and art. Towards the end of the Renaissance the erotic content became more and more evident. Mannerism produced images where a mythological or allegorical motif appears only as a disguise for erotic contents. Quasi sacred motifs such as Cornelisz's painting The Monk with a Nun were just cover ups for erotica if not almost pornography. This painting was meant for the Prinsenhof (the Princes' Court), which had been set up at the Friars Preachers' Monastery of the Dominicans.

Under the influence of Catholic propaganda, which was advertising the human body as 'sinful' and strictly forbidding any nakedness in Christian iconography, many artists themselves painted over the sinful nudity in their paintings. The Church resisted the spirit of the Renaissance, which had just learned that spirit and body are two sides of the same coin. Its medieval mentality postulated the holiness of spirit and recognized the body just as a part of decaying nature."

In addition to the erotic motifs, we have bizarre and/or extremely violent images including a woman with a full beard nursing a child, a man getting flailed in public and two women violently cutting a man's head off. Aiwaz notes, "The Renaissance cabinet of curiosities consists of unexpected motifs from real and imaginary life that displays, by means of twisted reality, the real spirit, mind and body of the Renaissance man, who is split between medieval superstition and the birth of a new Subject.



Jusepe de Ribera, Bearded Woman

Correggio, Leda with the Swan


Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith beheading Holofernes

Giulio Romano, Jupiter and Olympia


Agnolo Bronzino, Allegory of Lust


Jean Fouquet, Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels

After Michelangelo, Leda and the Swan


Pieter Huys, Temptation of St Anthony


Jan Gossaert, Virgin and Child
photos and text via Aiwaz