The Guardian

The shock of the nude: how art embraced nakedness | Jill Burke

As one of the curators of the Renaissance Nudes exhibition, I know that nudity didn’t discriminate in the 15th century
Naked Cupids in Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea, c 1512. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

I’m one of the team who put together exhibition, opening at the Royal Academy in London next March. This week we were bemused to read in the press that we had imposed a “makeshift gender quota” on the nudes we chose to display, in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In fact, a quota simply wasn’t necessary. Based on decades of research and years of planning, the exhibition shows how images of naked men in the Renaissance were just as as their female counterparts.

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