Misbehaviour in the Papal Palace

Last Saturday, in connection with the exhibition From Raphael to Carraci: The Art of Papal Rome that has just opened, the National Gallery of Canada invited me to a day's lectures on Renaissance Art. Seven lectures, the first one by Jill Burke from the University of Edinburgh about Raphael, Courtesan Culture and Life Drawing in Renaissance Rome which wasn't half as dry as it sounds, being about the artists who liked to sketch nudes and the foibles of the Cardinals and their mistresses.

The practice of life drawing goes back to the 15th century, Alberti in his treatise On Painting (1435) having stated that in order to make a figure look real, you first have to "draw the naked body beneath" before covering it with clothes. "It was easy to get hold of naked men in the Renaissance!" said Ms Burke, hence the many studies for Adam and so on, but women in those days were not so accessible. Michelangelo's sketches for the sibyl in the Sistine Chapel obviously had male muscles: they were in fact feminized males. Androgyny was considered graceful, desirable, in those days. It wasn't until the early 16th century that artists began to sketch actual females from life, prostitutes, actually, Raffaelo being interested in their "anatomy in motion". Of course, becoming distracted by his models he often became "very amorous and [was] swift to serve them."

The courtesans of Papal Rome often liked to adopt "Venus" poses, wanting to look like the recently discovered antique sculpture of ancient Rome or like Raffaelo's frescos. They took to shaving their body hair so as to resemble the ideal more exactly. "That's the way our husbands like it," they said. They used arsenic and quicklime as a depilatory: "When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn't come off." In 1501 Machiavelli received a letter about the twenty-five women who frequented the Pope's Palace. His friend was quite explicit about it: "The entire palace has been turned into a brothel." Encouraged to dance with the servants for the entertainment of the Cardinals after dinner, the girls stripped as they danced, picking chestnuts off the floor that had been strewn around so that they'd bend over. The most famous of these loose women were often to be seen "walking the city by themselves or by mule" about which the hypocrites were duly shocked.