ART Italian Beauty

Giambattista Tiepolo, La morte di Giacinto, Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 1752 - 1753 Ratto delle Sabine is a statue, by Giambologna 1574, in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria in Florence

ITALIAN ITALIAN BEAUTY

by Alessandro Cecchi Paone

Michelangelo’s David Statue in Florence, Italy The Three Graces (Le tre grazie) by Antonio Canova

Those who travel in search of the beauty of the human form have always looked to Italian art. Not surprisingly, Italy has long been a destination for aesthetic lovers, pleasure seekers, heterosexuals and homosexuals. Devout believers in the pagan religion of the unadorned nudity of young females and males. In fact, for the ancient Greeks and then for the Romans, naked bodies did not represent anything embarrassing or immoral, indeed, the Greek and Roman artists challenged each other in the search for the perfect representation of the human form, including intimate parts, and especially female breasts and male buttocks. Symbols and trophies of youth, health, pleasure and love. At a time when the average life span was about 35 years, the representation of fresh uncorrupted bodies was also thought of as a sort of talisman against disease, old age and death. Over two thousand years later, museums and classical Italian archaeological sites are overflowing with beautiful figures portrayed in their natural

state, and for every erotic preference. For those who are not satisfied with such a generous offer and want to embark on the Grand Tour of essential nude art masterpieces, it is necessary to point to the Tuscan Renaissance. When artists and patrons, rediscovering the Platonic and Socratic doctrines of love, abandoned the medieval Catholic demonization of the body as a prison of the soul, and sexuality as the corrupter of the spirit. They rediscovered the pleasure of the miracle of marble that becomes flesh, with muscular strength in the tension of tendons and nerves, and with an anatomical precision that combines science and sensuality. One can see these traits in masterpieces like Michelangelo’s David, but also in the promiscuous tangles of Giambologna. The Italian idea of beauty changed again with the anti-Protestant Counter-Reformation, which shifted the artists’ talent towards religious and other worldly themes. But lovers of carnality glorified and on display will be able to relive the splendor of the most beautiful naked bodies that can be seen in the world, by visiting exhibitions and workshops of Antonio Canova, the protagonist of yet another revival, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of neoclassicism, even surpassing it in technical modernity in his Venus and in his Graces, in his Parides and Theseus and in a young and lusty Napoleon Bonaparte on horseback and completely nude.

Canova, Sculpture, Palazzo Braschi, Roma