Opera magazine
2025-11-03
THE DIVINE BEAUTY OF THE BODY
The Nude in the Masterpieces of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore
The human body in its naked form—studied and imitated, idealized or deformed, humiliated or exalted—has always been one of the keys to Western art. It is the image of the relationship that humankind maintains with itself, with nature, and with God; an expression of beauty not only physical and external, but also moral and spiritual.
The monuments of Santa Maria del Fiore, cradle of modern culture, abound in depictions of the nude. This may come as a surprise, since it is well known that with the fall of classical civilization and the advent of the Christian era, representations of the nude declined: for the Greeks and Romans, the beautiful naked body was divinized and expressed the equation beauty of the body = beauty of the soul. With Christianity, censorship prevailed. For Christians, humanity lived in a constant conflict between the flesh, marked by sin, and the soul, destined to ascend to God; thus, the body was no longer considered worthy of celebration as it had been in the classical world.
In Italy, however, first with the spread of Franciscan spirituality—which reintroduced the idea of a creation that is beautiful because it reflects a good Creator God—and later with the advent of Humanism between the 14th and 15th centuries, which revalued the human being in a Christian key, placing him at the center of the universe as a creature made in God’s image, the nude returned to artistic representation.
This true revolution blossomed in Florence in the 14th century and exploded with the Renaissance; and if the sacred heart of Florence is the Baptistery and the Cathedral, it is easy to understand why it was precisely here that the nude reappeared in art for the first time since the Middle Ages, this time with a positive meaning.
Roman art with nudity, moreover, remained visible in the city, as in the case of the two sarcophagi reused in the ancient cemetery area in front of the Baptistery (today preserved in the Museum).
Inside the Baptistery begins our journey back to the origins of Florentine art: in the great 13th-century mosaic appear the naked bodies rising from their tombs at the feet of the great Christ the Judge, from the very sepulchers still visible outside. Yet those who ascend among the elect are clothed in white garments trimmed with gold, while the sinners hurled into hell on the opposite side remain naked. Still in the mosaics of the vault, in the first three Genesis stories (c. 1270–1290), Adam and Eve appear naked, in the company of their Creator, in harmony with the animals and plants of the Garden of Eden. Their bodies, however, are rendered with a Byzantine abstraction, and their nudity is theologically justified as belonging to a moment prior to Original Sin.
Sixty years later, in the lower register of reliefs carved by Andrea Pisano for Giotto’s Bell Tower, Adam and Eve once again appear naked, in the hands of the Creator God who has just given them life. Nearby, Noah, drunk in his vineyard, prominently displays his genitals: the artist remained faithful to the biblical account, and here nudity takes on a character of obscenity, tied to the negative meaning of the story. Yet in one of the lozenges of the upper register appears a strikingly novel detail: in the hand of the allegorical personification of Venus, the star traditionally associated with love, two tiny statuettes of nude lovers embracing can be seen. For the first time, a nudity of love—even carnal—was interpreted in a positive light.
With the flourishing of the early Renaissance, in the early 15th century, nudes "in the ancient manner" began to multiply. In a frame of the Porta della Mandorla of the Cathedral, between 1404 and 1409, Nanni di Banco inserted beautiful nude figurines among the acanthus scrolls, a series of Hercules that seem to anticipate Michelangelo's David.
A few years later, for a niche of the Bell Tower, Donatello and Nanni di Bartolo created in the group of Abraham Sacrificing Isaac the first life-sized nude of the Christian era. The young Isaac, with a pose devoid of rhetoric yet poetically offered to be admired, kneels unclothed at the feet of his father on the sacrificial pyre; his adolescent limbs, carved in white marble, become the expression of pure and innocent beauty together. A masterpiece.
Four years later, Ghiberti produced for one of the niches of the framework of the Gates of Paradise a splendid statuette of Samson nude, reminiscent of an ancient bronze in its perfect anatomical rendering and harmonious stance. Nearby, in the first panel, the sculptor once again meditated on the creation stories of Adam and Eve, placing at the center the beauty of the female body: the first woman is generated by God as He gently draws her from the side of the sleeping Adam, while a crown of angels frames her in song of her perfection. This was an unprecedented image, revisited also by Ghiberti’s son Vittorio, who, at the base of the right jamb of the south door (1453–1466), modeled a figure of Eve scarcely veiled, as beautiful as a classical Venus.
We do not know whether the Ghibertis, father and son, were familiar with the terracotta of the same subject that Donatello modeled around 1406–1408 for a wedding chest, which by chance entered the collections of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. It stands midway between Andrea Pisano’s Adam and Eve and those of the Gates of Paradise, yet with a greater degree of natural truth and drama, as seen in Eve clinging to God the Father like a newborn to the parent teaching her to walk.
In the Cathedral’s workshop, under the shadow of Brunelleschi as he prepared to close the dome in 1436, a series of works were produced that developed the study of the child’s nude figure: the youngest singers in Luca della Robbia’s Cantoria (1432–1438) are nude or semi-nude, as are the dancing angels in Donatello’s gallery (1433–1439, today in the Museum). Entering the two sacristies, we find other works from the same period: in two beautiful marble lavabos by Buggiano, mischievous winged putti play with the water spouts above the basin, while others appear frolicking with garlands in the wooden furnishings of the Sacristy of the Masses.
A few years later came a turning point in the entire history of art: the directors of the Cathedral’s decoration sought to adorn the external buttresses with sculptures. A massive block of marble was prepared, from which someone was to extract a colossal David. Several skilled sculptors attempted the challenge, but none dared to complete it. Michelangelo did, and in 1504 he unveiled his David, the most important statue of modernity. Nothing like the adolescent and androgynous Davids of Verrocchio and Donatello: Michelangelo’s is a powerful nude of absolute anatomical perfection, the very image of the humanistic ideal of man as the noblest of creatures and center of the cosmos. His nudity recalls the biblical passage that calls David “naked,” that is, without armor, yet Michelangelo elevated him into a symbol of absolute beauty, revealed as an example and model of physical and inner perfection.
From then on, the David became an indispensable archetype. In the mid-16th century, Baccio Bandinelli, assisted by Giovanni Bandini, decorated the exterior of the new marble choir enclosure of the Cathedral with 88 relief figures of uncertain identification—probably patriarchs, prophets, and sibyls—many of them nude, displaying muscular bodies in complex poses. Among the 24 now preserved in the Museum, four of the finest are unclothed: one (perhaps Jacob), curled up and sleeping with his head on a bundle of clothes; two places away, another young nude is caught from behind gesturing with his raised left arm. In another group, a man with thick curly hair twists around a dry trunk, melancholy in pose and expression; near him, another unclothed figure, seen from the back, raises an open book in his right hand. Their nudity likely alludes to humanity before the birth of Christ, according to the iconography of the time.
The same occurs in the vault of the dome, where Vasari and Zuccari painted dozens of colossal nude figures to populate their Last Judgment. Naked bodies rise to ascend to heaven or descend into hell, and just as in the Baptistery’s Judgment, the damned retain their nakedness, flesh exposed to the demons’ torments, while the blessed are clothed in splendid garments. At the center of the eastern segment, aligned with the altar, stand two monumental nudes: the winged figure of Time, seen from behind, and at the very center, Mother Earth, unclothed, lying forever with her six withered breasts.
