The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered ‘decent’ and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. Simultaneously, artists and the public became increasingly interested in the depiction of specific body parts or excretions. This book explores the concept of indecency and its relation to the human body across drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and texts. The ten essays investigate questions raised by such objects about practices and social norms regarding the body, and they look at the particular function of those artworks within this discourse. The heterogeneous media, genres, and historical contexts north and south of the Alps studied by the authors demonstrate how the alleged indecency clashed with artistic intentions and challenges traditional paradigms of the historiography of Early Modern visual culture.

Fabian Jonietz is a scholar at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, where he leads a research project on the pre-modern commemoration of animals. After receiving his Ph.D. in Art History (LMU Munich, 2012), he has been awarded various fellowships and held research and teaching positions in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States.

Mandy Richter works at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut. In 2014, she received her Ph.D. in Art History and is the author of the monograph Die Renaissance der Kauernden Venus. Ihr Nachleben zwischen Aktualisierung und Neumodellierung von 1500 bis 1570 (Petersberg: Harrasowitz, 2016).

The research of Alison G. Stewart (Ph.D., Columbia University; Professor of Art History Emerita, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, since September 2020) has centred on sixteenth-century secular imagery. Her books include Before Bruegel and Crossroads. Her most recent work addresses Sebald Beham’s move away from Dürer’s Nuremberg to Frankfurt am Main.

List of Illustrations
Indecent Bodies in Early Modern Visual Culture: An Introduction (Fabian Jonietz, Mandy Richter, Alison G. Stewart)
Taste, Lust, and the Male Body: Sexual Representations in Early Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe (Alison B. Stewart)
Private Viewings: The Frankfurt Context of Sebald Beham’s Die Nacht (Miriam Hall Kirch)
To Show or Not to Show? Marcantonio Raimondi and the Representation of Female Pubic Hair (Mandy Richter)
Treating Bodily Impurities: Skin, Art, and Medicine (Romana Sammern)
Indecent Exposure and Honourable Uncovering in Renaissance Portraits of Women (Bette Talvacchia)
Lust in Translation: Agency, Sexuality and Gender Configuration in Pauwels Franck’s Allegories of Love (Ricardo De Mambro Santos)
‘So This Guy Walks into a Forest … :’ Obscenity, Humor, Sex, and the Equine Body in Hans Baldung’s Horses in a Forest Woodcuts (1534) (Pia F. Cuneo)
Indecent Creativity and the Tropes of Human Excreta (Fabian Jonietz)
‘It all turns to shit’ – The Land of Cockaigne in Sixteenth-Century German Woodcuts (Susanne Meurer)
Noëls and Bodily Fluids: The Business of Low-Country Ceremonial Fountains (Catherine Emerson)
Abstracts
About the Authors
Index