Seen from behind : perspectives on the male body and Renaissance art / Patricia Lee Rubin.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 260-277) and index.

Preface and acknowledgments. Preposterous perspectives: representations of the rear view : The visual repertoire of the read -- Dirty talk -- Abject to aesthetic. Bare bottoms, bent elbows, and bending meanings : The rhetoric of the image -- The post of the queer? -- Representing love in the Florence of Duke Cosimo I -- Contexts, content, and complication. "Especially good in front and perfect from behind" : Cupid's targets -- The loves of gods and men. Models, motif, and the migration of meaning : Standing strong/standing for strength -- The shape of Hercules. Viewpoints and views: multiplying sides in painting and sculpture : Viewpoints -- Turning points -- Monstrous multiplications: beauty and the bizarre -- Torso style/dorsal style -- Posterity and the posterior: installation and reproduction. Behindsight: Michelangelo, modernity, and the specter of the ideal male nude : "a certain image of nude figures" -- "la Scuola del mondo" -- Michelangelo's ghosts. Notes -- Bibliography -- Primary sources -- Secondary literature -- Picture credits -- Index.

Renaissance bodies, dressed and undressed, have not lacked attention in art historical literature, but scholarship on the male body has generally concentrated on phallic-oriented masculinity and been connected to issues of patriarchy and power. This original book examines the range of meaning that has been attached to the male backside in Renaissance art and culture, the transformation of the base connotation of the image to high art, and the question of homoerotic impulses or implications of admiring male figures from behind. Representations of the male body's behind have often been associated with things obscene, carnivalesque, comical, or villainous. Presenting serious scholarship with a deft hand, 'Seen from Behind' expands our understanding of the motif of the male buttocks in Renaissance art, revealing both continuities and changes in the ways the images convey meaning and have been given meaning.