The theme of the body was definitely more fascinating in Renaissance Venice than in the era of Tiktok

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Going to the new exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia – Modern Bodies – after watching the English series Adolescence forces our brain to superimpose studies on the measurements ofPiero della Francesca’s skull with calculations on the attractiveness of the jaws that incels in the manosphere do. Of course, it must be said that Piero’s style is infinitely more fascinating than a post on Reddit, but many of the works and artifacts in the exhibition have an automatic connection to the contemporary. The Femina veneta who bleaches her hair in the sun makes you think of the rich tech guy Bryan Johnson who takes light baths to avoid aging; the Nude Woman with a Mirror by de’ Barbari looks like an influencer preparing for an Instagram Live; the Proportional Study of a Woman by Dürer could be a post on fatphobia; the Post-graft Nasal Protection table brings to mind patients who died after rhinoplasties performed by doctors found on TikTok . We are talking about 15th and 16th century artefacts that we adapt to the debate on the present, to realise that the illusion, today, of living in the age of bodies – as some activists on social media tell us – is precisely a delusion.

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Of course, even in the Venetian bookshop, among the postcards of Leonardo and Bellini, Walter Siti's Once Upon a Time the Body is sold (where the body is above all a vehicle for sexual pleasure), and in recent years we have been bombarded by narratives about illness and Pasolini as a martyr and by debates about bodyshaming and manspreading and other Englishisms of the woke world. But the theme of the body is much more interesting in the 1500s, when the minds of the Renaissance studied art to practice medicine and medicine to practice art, and the result is not a Twitter polemic but a self-portrait of Dürer with a naked body. The male gaze was not always so cruel in the age of patriarchy, if Dürer himself says that beauty and form are "included in the set of all people" . Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, exhibited at the show, is more than a model for the canon, it is a manifesto of "nobody is perfect", as Francesca Borgo , one of the curators, also explains in the catalogue. Similar to today's debate on autofiction, even then the masters were asking themselves how much of themselves, of their own measurements and appearance, they wanted to put into the canvases.

“Every painter paints himself” was a fifteenth-century motto, and Leonardo took it as a warning, noting how his contemporaries tended to “make most of the faces resemble their master”. And it is no coincidence that precisely in Venice, where the first glass mirrors were created in Murano, opening up a monopoly on the contemplation of the self, questions on the representation of the body arose. And again, it is no coincidence that precisely during one of his stays in the lagoon Dürer, attentive to his own and other people’s hair, grew a beard, which became a topic of conversation in Nuremberg. It is no coincidence that Venice became the city of vanity, masks and Casanovas .

Of course, the modern bodies of the title, in their experimental flexibility that in the Renaissance, even Venetian, goes from anatomy to erotic publishing, are not only an occasion for parallels with today. There also remains the contemplation of the artistic gesture , facilitated in this exhibition by the pleasant installation that plays with the censorship of naked bodies through panels that blur the sleeping nudes and by the blue operatic curtains, by mirrors and lights that mimic the starry sky.

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