Athletic Art Historiography and the Early Modern Male Body

This paper considers the ways that development and expression of sport in sixteenth-century Italy not only literally and imaginatively shaped the bodies of early modern men and women, but also established foundational contours of art historiography from Winckelmann to Burckhardt. Girolamo Cardano classified sport as requiring two separate but intertwined abilities, “agility of body, as with a ball; or on strength, as with a discus and in wrestling.” Such vigorous pursuits occupied the time and inspired the passions of gentlemen whose active leisure and spectacular performances appropriately served their health and befit their social standing. Exercises which emphasized agility over brute strength increasingly gained prominence as venues for the salubrious maintenance of physique and the performance of virtue. The real or potential corporeal dominance of a brawny artisanal class, this paper contends, a “rivalry not of birth, but of strength and ability, wherein villagers are quite a match for nobles,” in the words of Castiglione, fundamentally influenced the regulation and representation of the body. The codification of the rules of those sports, far from simply reflecting a growing interest in athletics, responded to concern for bodies on display and created structures of supervision which consolidated control for powerful operators in homosocial networks. Adoption of the aesthetic of the classical male athlete as an ideal for early modern men introduced enduring changes to why, how, and whose bodies signified and conveyed meaning in life, but also crucially in art and writing about art.