The Renaissance Nude Thomas Kren, Jill Burke, Stephen Campbell, Andrea Herrera, Thomas Depasquale

Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs - the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume - essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks - permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

Thomas Kren is an independent scholar and adjunct professor of art history at UC Santa Barbara. A specialist in medieval and northern Renaissance manuscripts, he founded the J. Paul Getty Museum's Department of Manuscripts in 1983. He recently retired from his position as associate director of collections.||Jill Burke, a senior lecturer in art history at the University of Edinburgh, specialises in Italian Renaissance art.||Stephen Campbell, the Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor and acting chair of the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University, is a specialist in Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.||Andrea Herrera is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Birmingham. She teaches art history at Riverside City College and is a curatorial assistant at the J. Paul Getty Museum.