St Mary's church in Warwick is a fine parish church. Simon Jenkins gave it five stars in his book England's Thousand Best Churches. As Jenkins mentions, the church has the tomb of Robert Dudley, who died in 1588, the first earl of Leicester and a favourite of Elizabeth I. But for some reason Jenkins omits to tell us that Dudley's tomb is flanked by two statues of half-dressed nymphs, their naked breasts prominently on display.
Another church discussed in Jenkins's book is St John the Baptist in Burford, Oxfordshire. But again, Jenkins fails to mention that the Tanfield tomb—belonging to Lawrence Tanfield, chancellor of the exchequer to Elizabeth I—is decorated with a bust of a nymph, naked breasts on show once more. It was Tanfield's wife who commissioned the tomb after his death in 1625.
Should a person be surprised by these brazen displays in the house of God? If naked breasts were uncontroversial then surely they would be discussed in the guidebooks. Their images would be reproduced as well. But although photographs of the Dudley and Tanfield tombs abound, as do reproductions of the many other topless church monuments, they are usually truncated or taken at modest angles. Today's church custodians are clearly uncomfortable with the statues—but the original patrons presumably were not. So what were they thinking?
The aesthetic compass of medieval artists was written by the Italian Renaissance polymath, Leone Battista Alberti. In his treatise On Painting, published in 1435, Alberti explained that art was no longer the domain of artisans but of artists. And artists were at the cutting edge of the new learning called the Renaissance. There was no distinction, Alberti said, between art and science: both were based on mathematics, observation and experiments. Indeed, it was art that led science, as evidenced by the fact that art had conceived the two great advances of contemporary science: the discovery of perspective and the rebirth of anatomy through the dissection of human bodies. Great art, therefore, embodied both advances: not only was there no shame attached to depictions of the naked body, but the cultured man should revel in the glory of God's handiwork, which should be reproduced within a framework of vanishing points and horizon lines.
And since the church reformers saw themselves as the embodiment of intellectual advance, they too embraced the naked body. The frontispiece of Erasmus's Greek New Testament, published in 1516, displayed engravings of full-frontal female nudes as well as the bare buttocks of both sexes. Martin Luther's Three Treatises of 1520 were also illustrated with bare breasts and buttocks. And the early counter-reformation was as explicit: Henry VIII's 1521 Vindication of the Seven Sacraments, Against Martin Luther was illustrated with a topless woman. To educated Europeans of the day, nudity spoke of erudition.
The eroticism behind the scholarship did not go unrecognised, and the Council of Trent (1545-63) proscribed nudity from Catholic churches. In 1565, Daniele da Volterra was commissioned to paint fig leaves and loincloths over Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. But Volterra went to his grave mocked as il braghettone (the breeches-maker). The futility of trying to stop cardinals from commissioning nudes can be seen to this day in Rome.
Protestant churches grew more puritan and took mallets to their statues and whitewashes to their paintings. Nonetheless, some worldly patrons maintained their faith in Alberti. Invoking the medieval images of the Virgo Lactans, which portray the Virgin breastfeeding the infant Christ, they claimed the breast as a symbol of mother church and continued to commission nipples in the nave. Meanwhile, the secular nude flourished, proliferating all over Europe—but only, you understand, to illustrate classical, historical or religious scenes.
In truth, the nudes were always erotic, even in church, yet for centuries artists and their patrons tacitly colluded in the production of soft pornography. The hypocrisy was exposed in 1863, when Édouard Manet painted Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, which placed female nudity within a contemporary secular setting. But the bourgeoisie didn't like this, and Manet and his peers were denounced for violating public virtue. Their paintings were, famously, refused by the Paris Salon.
The nude has a long history in art, starting with the Willendorf Venus of c23,000 BC. Its continued popularity is unsurprising—of course people like to contemplate naked women, and young men too. Ecclesiastical nudes are, admittedly, unexpected because we associate the monotheistic religions with sexual repression—and Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all rediscovered the shame of Adam and Eve. But the culture of the day linked nudity to scholarship and erudition, and the churches' congregations were enriched in consequence.
