Ep. 7. BODILY INSIGHTS: A conversation with Jill Burke

I suppose in a particular context, time period because I'm very much focused on the 15th and 17th centuries and particularly in Italy but yeah that's a very good summary of my interest actually.

Okay and it seemed like at least from the very little that I could glean from the situation you were proceeding on a fairly standard as it were renaissance art historical perspective looking at the role of patrons and the development of artwork and the socio-culture of the time and so forth and so on And then, at least to read from the preface of your book on the Italian Renaissance nude, I was teaching this course on the Italian Renaissance nude.

I realized there was a shocking dearth of at least textbook-like material from my undergraduates.

So I thought, okay, let me try to tackle this and get into it myself.

Was that 100% true? Okay, so...

It is true and it's not true, so it's a version of what happened.

You know, I think that you sometimes choose topics and then only after you've done that, you've worked on them for a few years, do you realise the full reasons behind choosing them.

So I think with my first, my early research on patronage was really to do, on the surface it looks like it's not to do with the research on the body and the nude, but actually...

It was to do with the way that looking at objects shapes people's perceptions.

So I was very influenced by the work of Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, which is a book that the subtitle is A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

And it's about how taste is formed because of the way that people understand themselves socially and So why do more working class people like football and why do maybe some classes of people have certain haircuts, others choose others? People have aesthetic judgment for often unknown reasons, reasons unknown even to themselves, but it's also to do with how they feel their choices are limited because of the role in society.

And that really affected my first book.

So it was a kind of critique of this idea of seeing patronage as a recipe that artworks are this kind of easy collusion between artist and patron, but seeing them as a result of unconscious choices.

And so when I went on to look at the body, I did a project on Rome and I started to get interested in a really horrible painting by Sebastiano del Piombo of the Martyrdom of St Agatha.

It was done for a Roman cardinal and it's in the Pitti Palace in Florence.

And when people see it, they often wince.

It's really quite graphic.

St Agatha was a saint who was martyred and she had her breasts cut off and it shows the action.

It's quite a graphic image.

And I was interested in the circumstances behind that and how, and its patronage originally, because it was commissioned by a cardinal.

And I thought, that's a strange thing for a cardinal to have in his house.

And then I started to get interested in life modelling.

And that's when I started thinking, but do people know about life models? And was this a life model? Is this related to life? And if so, how did the new fashion for classical sculpture affect the way that life models felt they should look, that these women felt they should look, and the way that artists felt they should look? And this started me going down a rabbit hole.

And I was also teaching a course called The Renaissance Body.

My research has always been really bound up in my teaching.