The standard of feminine beauty in the Renaissance period was quite different than are our standards today, when "little breasts" and "fleshy large hips" are hardly the ideal structure for women's bodies now. At that time artists were convinced that women's breasts should be depicted as "small,white,round-like-an-apple, hard, firm, and wide apart."
In her fascinating (1997) History of the Breast, Stanford Prof. Marilyn Yalom observes that a century after the images of nursing Madonnas in Italy, a painting of the mistress of the king of France--Agnes Sorel (1450)-- which featured an undeniably erotic image of "a voluptuous globe bursting out of her bodice," with a flagrantly arousing erect rosy nipple- "hit the onlooker right in the eye." (p.49). It was during the Renaissance of the 16th century in Europe that the nude breast emerged as a focal point in female portraits in art, corresponding to a new sense of feminine beauty, whereby "the breasts were somehow viewed as a part--[or extension or mirror]--of the face."
This work known as the Virgin of Melun shocked its earliest viewers accustomed to images of a discreet rather than erotically charged female figure nursing the Christ child. Here they saw a courtly lady holding her baby beside her exposed breast--a la Janet Jackson--whose bare breast rather than being desexualized was served up like a piece of fruit stimulating erotic fantasies and desires for the delectation of the engorged gaze of an outsider outside the picture, rather than for the delectation of the baby seated placidly and looking bored within the frame. This portrait of Agnes Sore marked a transition from an ideal of the sacred breast associated with motherhood to that of the eroticized breast denoting sexual pleasure…Increasingly in art and literature, the breast would belong less to the baby, or to the church, and more to men of worldly power who treated it solely as a stimulus to [sexual] desire.
"This was the moment when the small round perfectly formed naked breast became the uncontested playground for male desire." "This revolutionary depiction of the nursing Madonna and child archetype has, says Renaissance cultural historian Johann Huizinga "a flavor of blasphemous boldness…unsurpassed by any other artist of the Renaissance."
This portrait of the king's mistress painted under the guise of the Madonna marks a transition from the sacred breast of the Middle Ages to the erotic breasts of the Renaissance depicted particularly erotically by Lucas Cranach, the Elder, in his images of naked figures like the Nymph, Venus, Eve, and Lucrezia.
The NYMPH at the FOUNTAIN
VENUS and CUPID
EVE
LUCREZIA
Perhaps the equivalent in the blasé late 20th century was the appearance of the provocatively clad pop star MADONNA crooning the song "Like a Virgin…for the very first time" on MTV while she radiated an opposite message shocking her audiences at that time.
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