Jenny Saville’s Nudes Bring Renaissance Masters Down to Earth

In a huge show across five museums in Florence, Italy, the artist’s fleshy paintings and drawings hang next to idealized female forms of created by Botticelli, Michelangelo and others.

FLORENCE, Italy — When Botticelli and Luca della Robbia created masterpieces about motherhood, they honored Renaissance idealism with reverential depictions of a serene Madonna and child. When the painter Jenny Saville created “The Mothers,” in 2011, her Leonardo-inspired composition countered that 500-yeary-old sanctity with a firsthand reflection of her own experience: Two unwieldy babies exhaust the forlorn-looking artist, in a self-portrait that is also an every-mother story.

Those divergent representations are now facing each other on display at the Museo degli Innocenti here, as part of Saville’s biggest solo exhibition to date. Running through Feb. 20 and spread across five Florence museums, the show pits 100 paintings and drawings by the 51-year-old British artist against works by Renaissance masters, on their home turf.

Hanging beside Michelangelo’s marble Pietà in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, a larger-than-life drawing by Saville called “Pietà 1” depicts her own family in the same entwined pose. In Palazzo Vecchio, amid Giorgio Vasari’s grandiose 16th-century murals of men in battle, Saville’s immense painting “Fulcrum” introduces a mountain of naked women.