Love Conquers All, More Or Less
Men who came to me after a long absence from their bodies often spoke about it in terms of return. Not therapy, not healing—those are other people’s words for other kinds of rooms. Just return.
They had been somewhere else, inside their work or their history or their obligations, and they had come back to the fact of their physical existence with a mixture of relief and unease that I came to recognise easily over the years. The body was still there. It had continued without them. They were never quite sure how to feel about that.
I think about return when I think about the Renaissance, because that is essentially what happened to the male body in Western art across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After eight hundred years of near-absence—the medieval centuries during which the unclothed male form was permitted only as evidence of sin or suffering—it came back. The return was not simple. It was disputed, misread, argued over, covered up, stoned, and paid for in very complicated ways.
The humanist scholars who initiated the recovery did so by reaching backward past the medieval centuries to the classical world, treating ancient Greek and Roman thought as a source of permission. What they recovered was not only the male body but a whole set of propositions about it: that the body could be studied, measured, proportioned, understood. That the human form, made by God, was itself a kind of knowledge. The Italian word umanità carried this: the fullness of what it was to be human, in body as much as in mind. The body that had been Augustine’s vestment of sin was being reframed as something else—though reframing did not dissolve the older understanding, which continued alongside the new one.
Leonardo drew the “Vitruvian Man” around 1490. I have looked at it many times and I keep noticing the same thing: it is not quite what it claims to be. The figure is presented as a study of proportion, a demonstration of the Roman architect Vitruvius’s theory that the ideal human body could be inscribed in both a circle and a square simultaneously. The arrangement of the figure within the circle and square reflects the Renaissance humanist belief that the human body mirrors the universe. By studying the proportions of the ideal human body, Leonardo and his contemporaries believed they could infer the rules that guide the universe. This sounds like geometry. What you see when you look at it is a nude man, arms and legs extended in two positions overlaid, staring out from the page with what reads as either calm or challenge—it is hard to tell which. The genitals are present and unambiguous, centred in the figure without apology. The claim is measurement. The result is a male body, restored to the centre of the Western visual field and presented as the measure of all things.
What I notice is the alibi. The body returns under the sign of mathematics and philosophy. The nude is readmitted to respectability by being framed as inquiry. Whether Leonardo himself thought of it as anything more than inquiry—whether the figure is also, to any degree, the object of desire or admiration—the drawing leaves genuinely ambiguous. It is the essence of Renaissance humanism, wherein a man is not merely a subject of the universe, but its measure. It is also, plainly, a man without his clothes.
Albrecht Dürer engaged the same project from the north, from the different theological weather of Germany, and pushed it somewhere more unsettling. He drew himself nude, around 1503 or 1505, in a study that survives in Weimar. The drawing shows a man of middle age looking directly outward with an intensity that is neither comfortable nor comfortable-making—not a self-presentation but a self-inspection. The figure turns slightly, one hand raised in a gesture that reads variously as display and explanation. Dürer depicted himself with meticulous attention to the muscular details and shading of the body, positioned in a slight twist, turning towards the viewer with an intense and direct gaze. Later editions reproduced the drawing cut off at the waist, the lower body quietly removed by editors presumably uncertain what to do with a great artist having looked at his own naked body and found it worth recording.
I find myself returning to that cut, to what the later editors couldn’t manage. Dürer was not drawing an ideal. He was drawing what he saw when he looked at himself—the sag and fall and particular arrangement of a specific body—and presenting it as a subject worthy of exactly the attention he gave to anything else he looked at carefully. The medieval tradition had made the body shameful; the classical tradition had made it ideal; Dürer appears to be doing something that neither framework quite accommodated. He is observing.
Bosch was not observing in Dürer’s sense. The Garden of Earthly Delights, produced around 1500, fills its central panel with hundreds of naked male bodies arranged in a landscape of pleasure so extravagant it tips into nightmare even before you reach the right-hand panel where everything has gone explicitly wrong. The male bodies in the central panel are neither the classical ideal nor the Augustinian emblem of sin—or rather they are both, which is what makes the painting so difficult to settle. The medieval church had a taxonomy for artistic nudity. The French Benedictine scholar Pierre Bersuire, writing in the fourteenth century, distinguished several categories: the nudity of poverty, the nudity of innocence, the nudity of lust, the nudity of worldly vanity. Bosch uses at least three of these simultaneously in the same figure, sometimes in the same gesture. The men in the garden are innocent and sinful and absurd and joyful and doomed, and their bodies register all of these states at once without resolving into any of them.
What I notice, sitting with that image, is that the men in Bosch seem to be enjoying themselves in ways that the theological frame cannot quite contain. The painting ostensibly warns against the pleasures it depicts. Whether the men in the garden are being warned, or simply observed in their pleasures by a painter who watched what bodies actually did when given the chance, is a question Bosch appears to have left deliberately open.
Michelangelo closed fewer questions and opened more of them. His Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed around 1512, gives us two male bodies: God the Father, bearded, wrapped in a burgundy cloak, surrounded by attendant figures, reaching out with one finger; and Adam, nude, pale, half-reclined on a rock that shades into what might be earth or might be nothing, reaching back. Adam’s body in this fresco is considered by many who write about these things to be among the most significant depictions of the male form in Western art—and I notice that what makes it significant is partly its detail, partly its scale, but also the quality of incompleteness that the reach enacts. The finger has not yet arrived. The touch has not happened. The creation is about to occur, and the male body exists in that instant of about-to, not yet fully itself, waiting for the current to pass.
Michelangelo’s relationship to the male body was, I understand, complex in ways that never fully resolved, and the paintings and sculpture he produced across a lifetime of work carry that complexity without offering a stable account of what it means. The David—finished in 1504, stoned by a Florentine mob that same year—is a body that simultaneously invokes the classical tradition, demonstrates the craft of anatomical study, and produces in many viewers a response that the marble alone does not explain. Thirty years later, the genitalia in The Last Judgement would be covered on the orders of Pope Paul IV. The trouser-maker went to work. The body that had been restored to art under the sign of humanism and theology kept arriving at edges that the institution would not cross.
And then Caravaggio, nearly a century after Michelangelo finished the Sistine ceiling, painted what became known as Amor Vincit Omnia: Love Conquers All. He painted it for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, a wealthy Roman collector, around 1601 or 1602. The work portrays a nude, youthful Cupid in a provocative pose, triumphantly stepping over an array of scattered objects symbolising human endeavours in war, peace, arts, sciences, and music. The model was Cecco Boneri, Caravaggio’s young studio assistant, who appears in other paintings—as an angel, as Isaac, as John the Baptist. Here he is Cupid, with large borrowed eagle’s wings and an expression described variously as mischievous, mocking, and knowing. The genitals are not centred in the composition the way the Vitruvian Man’s are, but they are unmistakably present and the pose draws attention to their presence. Giustiniani reportedly prized it above all other works in his collection. It was displayed in pride of place in his palace behind a green curtain.
The curtain, I have read, was not there to conceal the painting. It was there to reveal it—to make the showing of it an event, the final object a visitor was brought to after seeing everything else. The curtain was theatrical. It was the frame for the frame.
What I notice most about Caravaggio’s Cupid is the grin. The boy in the painting is not idealised in the way Michelangelo’s bodies are idealised. He has knobby knees and irregular proportions and he looks like a specific child having a good time wearing wings and being looked at. And yet the painting was, by all accounts, immediately successful in the circles of Rome’s intellectual and cultural elite—poets wrote about it, critics named it, the patron refused large sums to part with it. The male body had returned to art carrying the full weight of the classical tradition, of humanist philosophy, of theological argument, of patronage and power—and then Caravaggio painted a real boy making a rude face at all of it and called it Love Conquers All.
After three decades of working with men, I am still not sure whether that title is triumphant or rueful or simply accurate. The men who came to me had bodies that had been shaped by everything I have been describing: the classical ideal, the medieval shame, the Renaissance recovery, the persistent habit of covering what the viewer found excessive. They carried all of this in the way they held their shoulders, in the hesitations before undressing, in the apologies. They had been everywhere—in the Sistine Chapel, in the garden of Bosch’s ambiguous delights, in the shaft at Lascaux—and they had arrived in my room, which was not any of those places, just a room, with the usual imperfect bodies that actual men have.
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