DJan van Hemessen’s naked “Judith” has something irritating about it, as shown in the exhibition “Manns-Bilder. The Male Nude on Paper” at the Bremer Kunsthalle stomps resolutely into the interior of the picture. On the copper engraving from 1535, the well-trained Renaissance heroine, like the actress Jella Haase as Stasi agent Kleo in a current film series, is characterized by broad shoulders, well-modeled upper arms and plump calves.
The rather masculine-looking body in the familiar outlines of a woman is indeed one: in Dürer’s and Hemessen’s sixteenth century there were hardly any female models, unless the artist used his own wife or a maid to help. In most cases, a workshop assistant had to be a pragmatic model or the artistic imagination was sufficient to bring an ancient Roman statue into the desired form with a sketch or eidetic image memory.
Light and shadow on the body from Hellas to Rembrandt
However, since the Roman statues are almost entirely copies of Greek originals, the exhibition is reminiscent of an often forgotten basic element of art: until the break with the “Greek” image of man through its abuse in totalitarian systems, the Hellenic body was the perfect unit from serious study of the Anatomy and Celebration of Beauty. The Graecizing nude was the basis of almost every depiction of human beings, be it in Baroque, Classicism, the unbridled success of nudism in Art Nouveau around 1900 or the seemingly diametrically opposite Expressionisms and Neoclassicisms of the 1910s and 1920s.
However, it is by no means only the impeccably beautiful and therefore often boring body that has been immortalized by the artists; Greek sculpture, in particular, placed enormous value on shoulders, knees and feet, far less on the primary sexual characteristics of male nudes, which in Graeco-Roman antiquity were shown below average in size anyway. Well-formed body landscapes in the area of the shoulders, the knee zone around the patella or the calves and feet allowed the artists to let the play of light dance on the numerous ups and downs of these body landscapes and to let the marble stone become light.
Even if the opening sheet of the exhibition, Hendrick Goltzius’ “Great Hercules” from 1589, was ridiculed even during his time as the “Tuber Man” because of the countless lumps scattered all over his body, because he looked like Arcimboldo’s figures composed of plump vegetables and potato tubers , one thing remains recognizable even in this extreme example: even in the most exaggerated mannerisms, this “Greek” joy in the play of light on the elevations of the body is still expressed. And if the show cunningly repeatedly breaks the ideal, for example in the eighteenth-century Japanese prints by Katsushika Hokusai in his unembellished “Self-Portrait as an Old Man” or Japanese woodcuts of the bulky sumo wrestler mountains of meat or even Rembrandt’s fascinating etching of a by no means particularly idealized ” Naked people sitting on the floor” or an “act in front of a curtain” (both from 1646) or with Max Beckmann’s watercolored lithograph “Sleeping Athlete” (from the series “Day and Dream”) from 1946 even an embryonic, hunched and injured muscular male – long anticipating Baselitz’ damaged heroes – smuggled in, the exceptions here confirm the rule: the distinctiveness and the eye for detail of the male nude also beat the flawlessly pure beauty in depictions of old age.
Because recognizable in the Bremen chapter “Gods and Heroes” is the nudity shown in Marcantonio Raimondi’s flawless “Apollo und Admet” from 1506 or in Gian Domenico Tiepolo’s almost eerily beautiful, because not aging Dorian Gray “Bacchus” a heroically ideal, like the archaeologist Nikolaus Himmelmann validly summed it up in his opus magnum. This does not apply to Jusepe de Ribera’s deranged “Drunken Selen”, although he also represents a deity, but broken.
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