The Sensual Body and Artistic Prowess in Netherlandish Painting ca. 1540â 1570

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Netherlandish painters turned their attention toward the sensual nude. The leading contemporaries of Pieter Bruegel, including Frans Floris, Willem Key, Jan Massys, Maerten van Heemskerck, and Michiel Coxcie, favoured subjects that allowed them to elaborate their respective approaches to the ideal body. Artistsâ deliberate attention to the visual and tactile qualities of their painted figures had affective and artistic aims: painters sought to cultivate empathetic responses in their viewers while simultaneously asserting their individual brands. These artists also favoured subjects that presented the sensual nude as a problemâ an object for erotic delectation and one that could raise salient social concerns around gender, love, and coupling. An important feature of the paintings in this study is the way they orchestrate the possibility for contrasting points of view, thus complicating attempts to derive unequivocal interpretations. Indeed, contemporary rederijker drama, public festivity, vernacular literature and poetry, authoritative classical texts, and prints from across Europe suggest the range of issues that might have been projected onto Netherlandish depictions of the nude. While little is known of the patrons of such works, the scale, quality, and erudite subject matter point to a relatively affluent and educated class of individual; we know, for example, that Frans Florisâ s nudes were collected by Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, a Habsburg official and the Bishop of Arras, and by the wealthy Antwerp financier, Nicholas Jonghelinck. Such patrons were as attracted by the visceral, affective qualities of the sensual body as they were by the opportunities it gave to display their erudition. They also valued how the leading artists adapted the fashionable formal vocabulary of antiquity and post-Raphaelesque figure painting to Netherlandish thematic demands and artistic traditions. By allowing their works to negotiate between the international and the local, Frans Floris and his contemporaries were active participants in a discourse on the sensual nude that had regional relevance and pan-European purchase. This very prominent and prestigious image category must be better integrated into art historical narratives of Netherlandish painting and Renaissance art.

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