Jonathan Jones: The Love Of The Artists - Art And Passion In The Renaissance

Books like this have a problem from the outset. Any attempt to eroticise or sexualise a subject (and the grander the subject the higher the risk) can often read like an attempt to debunk or reduce to the merely human or mere dirty-mindedness. I once read a very serious academic study that managed to make two somewhat later artists, Watteau and Fragonard, sound like the Paul Raymond and Larry Flynt of their day, pornographers for hire.

Jones has a more developed, more historical and more interesting thesis. The engine of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of ancient Greece and Rome, but the truly exciting thing about the classical world was that far from being cool, rational and artfully distressed, it was as gaudy and lascivious as the present. Those iconic statues were once painted and dressed. Those soft colonnades were once as taste-free as the Playboy Mansion and echoed to shrieking girls being chased by middle-aged and overweight Silenuses.

This is familiar stuff. Joan Didion debunked orthodox classicism in her brilliant essay on the Getty Museum. Jones digs deeper. His fascinating thesis is that the Renaissance established the cult of the artist as a charismatic character, defined by his sexuality. Painters and sculptors became the first sexual celebrities. The interest, then, is not so much in finding the sex in the picture as in redefining art as itself an erotic activity.

There is plenty of familiar evidence for this already. Michelangelo's driving, unrequited passion can hardly be missed, as even the Vatican recognises. You don't have to have read 12 volumes of Freud to see that the ecstasy of Bernini's St Theresa is as carnal as it is spiritual. It's present in the legend (again: invention revealing truth) that Raphael died of sexual surfeit, and this seems to have meant shagged-out exhaustion rather than one of the new poxes that swept Italy in his day.

All very interesting and very tabloid. What takes it deeper is the relationship between the artist, his lover/muse/model, the supposed audience and the commodity that binds it all together, which isn't sex but money. A more Marxist historian than Jones might have highlighted this aspect more, but it jingles on every page. Not until Picasso (who repainted and grotesquely resexualised a lot of these subjects and scenes) was there an artist bawdier and more priapic than Titian, but when Titian paints the classical subject of Jupiter's rape of Danaë, the legendary shower of gold is not just divine sperm but also a handful of coins thrown down to an exhausted prostitute.

This blurring of the mercantile and the divine happens constantly in Titian's work. His Mary Magdalene, from about 1535, is explicitly the patron saint of prostitutes. She's not hiding her breasts with her hair, but using it to frame them in a way copied by every centrefold photographer to this day. And yet her expression is also sincerely penitent. When Raphael paints his Baker's Daughter, La Fornarina, he is not just rendering a beautiful woman, but making her both his and available to all. His name is inscribed on her arm band. She is owned. And yet the expression on that lovely face, which can only be from the life, is not that of a chattel.

Something was happening to the status of women in the Renaissance, and not only were courtesans – easily identified according to strict sumptuary laws about dress in most of the Italian states – the subjects of many pictures; they were also the clients. These were advertising hoardings as well as masturbatory objects. Confident female sexuality was also working its way up the social scale.

Henry James's feminine eye recognised something in Bronzino's stunning Lucrezia Panciatichi from around 1541. "Splendid as she is, one doubts if she was good." Put another way, this is a face one couldn't fail to fall in love with, but in full knowledge that she would inflict hurt, casually and without remorse. What a weight of import to put on a flat surface of paint.

There are problems with Jones's book, an imbalance in aspects of his argument which reading more Marx and less Freud might have sorted out. He doesn't always get much help from his publisher's art department, either. One of the earliest, most important, and ambiguous, pictures described is Giorgione's The Tempest, from the first decade of the 16th century. The reproduction here shows a half-naked woman on the fringes of a city, sprawled on the ground beneath a tree, suckling a child who isn't in her lap but at her side, leaving her pubic hair on view. Who or what she is has never been established, though the lightning flash overhead suggests tension and danger. A banished prostitute or fallen woman, dealing awkwardly with the consequences of sexuality?

The caption qualifies the image "as a man looks on lustily in this mysterious pastoral". Unfortunately, the picture has been cropped so that the man, standing to the left, has been excised. Had he been retained, with his codpiece and staff, it would have been obvious that he is not "looking on" but looking into the middle distance. The woman looks at us – for help? in shame? – but what is he? A pimp or a protector? The father? An opportunistic passer-by? There is a theory that he might belong to some guild of bachelors, but we know too little about that to judge what it might connote. Does the broken column in the middle background suggest impotence or security? Just what is going on? My personal theory is that this is a subversive and almost blasphemous version of that quasi-Biblical subject, a favourite for painters, The Rest On The Flight Into Egypt, which arranges the Holy Family in various ambiguous landscapes; but no angel in this one.

Fortunately, Jones's account is better done than the supporting evidence. The Tempest sums up much of what his book is about. It also affords an intriguing exercise in picture-cropping, something we are more alert to in a photographic age. How does the man's absence change the image and its meaning? Discuss. Jones says of Giorgione: "Living close to the courtesans who were his models, and apparently not earning very great sums of money, he bequeathed an art that is erotic and hallucinatory and yet pungent with the dangers of life."

Pungent is a terrific word here, not least because it takes observation of these wonderful pictures beyond the merely visual. Vasari – and Benvenuto Cellini, Aretino, and Michelangelo – wrote freely and confidently about art and sex, but their subtexts have been airbrushed away by centuries of academic finessing and, perversely, by the assumption that art history is a "suitable" subject for young ladies. It's a lot hairier than that.