It is entitled “Corpi moderni. The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Giorgione” the exhibition that the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice is dedicating to a perpetually relevant theme. Using Venice and the Renaissance as the backdrop for the exhibition narrative, curators Guido Beltramini, Francesca Borgo and Giulio Manieri Elia give shape to a reflection on the body that ranges from anatomy to desire

Eighty-nine works including drawings, sculptures and paintings are the stars of the exhibition Corpi moderni. The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Giorgione, set up at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice until 27 July 2025.
Putting side by side masterpieces from Italian and foreign museums and collections with those held by the host institution ‒ such as Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, shown to the public after six years, or Giorgione’s Old Woman ‒, the exhibition describes the transformations that occurred in the concept of the body in Renaissance Venice. Anatomy, desire, social instances become the filters through which to “read” the body, the focal point of a new cultural construction rooted in modern thought.
It is Giulio Manieri Elia, director of the Gallerie dell’Accademia and curator of the exhibition together with Guido Beltramini and Francesca Borgo, who highlights this fundamental change in his text in the catalogue published by Marsilio Arte: the exhibition “tackles a theme of major interest: the cultural turning point, which took place during the Renaissance period and which led, through an effort of knowledge and a growth in awareness, to a new consideration of the body – hence the title –, which is the one that belongs to us today. Moreover, […] the Gallerie dell’Accademia is the right place for an exhibition dedicated to this theme, by virtue of the fundamental contribution that Padua and Venice made to this significant cultural transition. The former, in the field of anatomical and scientific research, represented by figures such as Andrea Vesalio, and the latter, in the field of publishing production and above all artistic creation by introducing new iconographies that explored the expressive potentialities inherent to the seduction of the body, investigating ways of emotionally involving the spectator”.
The body, therefore, leaves the perimeter of biology and reclaims its connection with everyday life, both individual and collective. Renaissance artists take up the challenge of a body that “is everywhere”, as curator Francesca Borgo points out in her essay in the catalogue. The body, she declares, is “out in life, disciplined by manuals of behaviour and self-care, and inside images. Everyone has one, everyone draws it, and everyone ceaselessly wonders how best to depict it: because transforming the body into a figure remains, today as then, a risky business, an exercise that inevitably brings with it big questions about beauty ‒ what it is, whether it is representable, whether it is the purpose of art or not”.
Everyday reality thus becomes the ground on which artists like Dürer choose to carry out such an “exercise”. “It is, however, above all from the body ‒ the real body, of life, which is empirically observed and measured ‒ that Dürer thinks he can derive the lost formula”, Borgo further explains. “The beauty of the body’”, he writes, is to be sought in the people, in the crowd, in the multitude: «I believe that the correct form and beauty are to be found in the totality of all people […]. He who is able to extract (heraus zihen) this essence I will follow more than he who wants to invent a new measure, of which men have never been a part». And although he states that he does not claim that artists should spend their whole lives measuring, he seems to have done exactly that, and states several times that he has studied (and measured) at least two or three hundred people. The consequence of this anthropometric campaign seems to have been, inevitably, the realisation that nobody is perfect, and everybody has a different idea of perfection. By strokes of the ruler and compass, the Vitruvian canon thus crumbles into the variety of types, into the irreducible difference of the human. In the so-called ‘aesthetic excursus’, a long theoretical text written between 1512 and 1515 and then added to the end of the third of the Four Books on Human Proportions, Dürer reformulates the theory of proportions not as a canon, but as a method of investigation, useful for accounting for all imaginable variations of the body. Based on empirical data, the treatise offers artists a series of terms of difference (thin/fat, soft/robust, strong/weak, black/white) that serve to artificially replicate, in image, the variety that is proper to the body in life. Having abandoned the illusion of a unitary proportional canon, Dürer became aware of the fact that there is no absolute beauty, but multiple forms of relative beauty”.
What emerges is thus “an aesthetics of difference that surprisingly brings Dürer and Leonardo closer together, committed, at a distance but in the same years, to redefining the role of the artist as one who embraces the multiplicity of forms of bodies. For both of them, the repetition of stereotyped figures, rigidly constructed and measured on the always equal univocity of the canon, is to be avoided. Variety is the artist’s goal and prerogative. […] Convinced of the intrinsic unity of the organism, Leonardo does not seek absolute measurements, but internal correspondences between different parts of the body”.
“Almost immediately any trace of Vitruvius disappears”, Borgo concludes, “overtaken by empirical evidence, as a few years later would also be the case for Dürer; he was not openly refuted, but simply put aside: and this was certainly no exception for Leonardo, who in various fields of knowledge thought of the ancient author as an adversary to be refuted”.
The body is everywhere, it was said. But what relationship exists between studies on the anatomical representation of the human body and the birth of architectural drawing ‒ a discipline deeply connected to being in the world? In his essay, curator Guido Beltramini wonders about this. Following in the footsteps of James Ackerman, he closes the circle of reasoning with these words: “[…] it is evident that at the time of their codification, anatomical drawing and architectural drawing posed similar problems of analytical description of external morphology and the correspondence between interior and exterior. The research developed by Piero and Leonardo was made his own by Bramante, who also drew other elements from the latter for his own activity as an architect, such as the use of red stone as a more ductile medium than pen and ink for architectural design. From the ‘workshop’ of the St. Peter’s building site set up by Bramante emerge crucial elements for the definition of a new system of representation. In particular, Antonio da Sangallo, one of the few who came from the practice of the building site rather than from a painter’s workshop, and therefore accustomed to conceiving drawing as an instrument of construction control, systematically developed drawing according to the ‘theorem of the three methods’. It is no coincidence that it will be Palladio, who shares with Antonio the same training in construction, who will transfer to the field of publishing new modes of representation, which once again find their origin in the representation of the human body”.
In light of the reflections proposed by the curators of the Venetian exhibition, the meaning of the accompanying title becomes even clearer: the “making of the body” is a process concerning the sphere of existence in its totality and complexity. A process, indeed, that still belongs to us.

Arianna Testino

BIO
Guido Beltramini has been director of the Andrea Palladio International Centre for Architectural Studies since 1991. He was contract professor of History of Architecture at the University of Ferrara (1994-2002). He is an internationally recognised specialist in the architecture of Palladio and the Renaissance in general, with forays into the 20th century of Carlo Scarpa.

Francesca Borgo teaches History of Modern Art at the University of St Andrews in the UK; since 2021 she has directed a five-year research project at the Bibliotheca Hertziana ‒ Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome. She holds an MA and PhD from Harvard. She has been a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, the University of Hamburg, and Villa I Tatti.

Giulio Manieri Elia has been director of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice since 2019. He also directed the Museum of Palazzo Grimani from 2012 to 2015. In the roles of the Venetian Superintendency, since 2000 he has gained solid experience in the field of restoration, directing conservation interventions on works by, among others: Jacobello del Fiore, Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, Tiziano, Luca Giordano and Giambattista Tiepolo.

INFO
Corpi moderni. The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Giorgione
until 27 July 2025
GALLERIE DELL’ACCADEMIA
Campo della Carità ‒ Dorsoduro 1050, Venice
https://www.gallerieaccademia.it

Image captions:

Corpi moderni. The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Giorgione, exhibition view, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice 2025. Photo Andrea Avezzù

Guido Beltramini, Giulio Manieri Elia, Francesca Borgo, curators of the exhibition Corpi moderni. The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Giorgione at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice 2025. Photo Andrea Avezzù