NPF Naked People Finder
Fig. 1
1 Comp. Jacques Bonnet, Die Badende. Voyeurismus in der abendländischen Kunst, trans. from French by Katja Richter, Berlin: Parthas, 2006 and Burkhard Leismann and Martina Padberg (eds.), Intimacy! Baden in der Kunst, Köln: Wienand, 2010 (no English translations available)
Invitation to a Bath Marc Munter
Bathing scenes are as common in art as the daily shower or the soak in the tub. Both phenomena indicate exceptional, privileged circumstances. For water has always been scarce in many regions and is becoming more so across the globe, while the situation for art is similarly precarious. During the 15th and 16th centuries, wars and disease brought the medieval tradition of bathhouses, itself a reinvigoration of the antique and Islamic cultures of bathing, to a sudden end. A book illustration from 1470 offers an impression of such a bathhouse (Fig. 1). Emphasising the immorality of the bathers, the bathhouse is depicted as a bordello with a large mixed-gender tub. Naturally this suggests a moral double standard: the didacticism of the image requires pornographic exaggeration, thereby legitimating it and offering the colorful action to the viewer’s unveiled gaze. Here lie the beginnings of the steady rise of representations of the nude under the protective mantle of religious, epic and later profane bathing scenes, finally surfacing as an ambivalent voyeurism.1 In fact bathhouses were avoided by the privileged classes for much of the early modern period: doctors involved in the early scientific explorations of medicine during the 16th century perpetuated the false belief that bathing causes water to flow inside the body, thereby categorically condemning the practice. In courtly rococo society perfumes and powders became fashionable, which gave rise to still-familiar ex pressions such as “a French shower” – to cleanse oneself using deodorant instead of water and soap. Meanwhile bathers in art were becoming increasingly emancipated from religious connotations and developed autonomous imagery: Albrecht Dürrer’s pen drawing The Women’s Bath and his woodcut The Men’s Bath (both 1496) in a sense kick off this development. They show bathing scenes in authentic settings, exceptionally realistic for the pictorial conventions of the time (Fig. 2 and 3). Dürrer’s ambitious representation of different human types in characteristic poses, as well as the skilful demonstration of his knowledge of proportion and anatomy, is apparent