Bad und Akt

Physical cleansing is an anthropological constant. The bath serves hygienic as well as ritual purposes and can also be related to spiritual healing in a figurative sense. Above all, however, it relates to the body in need of care, which must be uncovered for washing. Mythology, theology and medicine cannot be imagined without this theme. Representations of people bathing are correspondingly diverse. Jan-David Mentzel uses selected works of art to present the rich pictorial world surrounding the bath and traces the theme’s manifold cultural connections. In doing so, he shows how artists such as Jan van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer addressed the subject as a field of experimentation during the Renaissance in order to test new images of the body.

• Well-founded overview of the rich pictorial world of the bath in the 15th and 16th centuries
• New evaluation of bathing depictions as a field of artistic experimentation
• Presentation of the most important bathing iconographies in painting, graphic art and book art