Desire and Decorum: The Male Nude in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Books

Nudes that do not seem to anticipate the muscular, active nudes of Michelangelo—that do not appear to fit a teleological art historical narrative charting the development of a Humanist, classicizing appreciation for the unclothed human body—are often neglected or dismissed as conservative or backward-looking. And yet, fifteenth-century artists exhibited a variety of approaches to the nude in order to elicit varying responses ranging from heroic to abject, from familiar to uncanny, from exhibitionist to demure, with many unexpected and difficult-to-categorize hybrids. Devotional books offered a particularly charged and personal framework in which to contemplate images of the human body, whether as surrogate selves, supernatural beings in human guise, or antimodels in the margins. They were designed to stimulate extreme emotions like longing, humility, grief, love, regret, and desire, and to urge readers to undertake discomfiting self-scrutiny. Because women were often held responsible for a family's piety including the religious instruction of children, Books of Hours and other texts associated with private devotion have been much studied in relationship to the social status and personal identity of women. Focusing on a selection of books owned by male bibliophiles associated with French, Burgundian, and English courts in the fifteenth century, this paper addresses less studied questions of how nude images of divinities, saints, souls, and grotesques in devotional books shaped masculine identities in Northern Europe in the long fifteenth century.