reasonablysunny

I… what? I can’t read this woman’s artist statement, because it’s in Italian. But Flavorwire says she is asking, “What would have happened if the aesthetic standard of our society had belonged to the collective unconscious of the great artists of the past?” Which is not really a question I feel needs a lot of answering. Because the answer is: they would look like this, and we already know what this looks like. It doesn’t make me angry or anything; it just doesn’t seem very interesting.

Standards of beauty change over time. Admittedly, this is something I only realized in the past couple of years. The reason women in medieval portraits have such freaky big foreheads is because big foreheads were a thing - women plucked or shaved their foreheads to get sexy, sexy big foreheads. Small, set-apart breasts were a thing in the middle ages, too. I saw an advertisement from the fifties once that declared ‘No man wants a skinny girl!’ and promised their product would put some meat on your bones (and curves). Have you seen pictures of Victorian beauties? They’re just okay, by today’s standards. (The fact that some of them have O’Brien hair doesn’t really help.) Foot-binding, stretched necks, scarification, fattening up, corsetry, blacked-out teeth, shaved eyebrows - all fashions that have been ‘in’ at some point in time, somewhere in the world. Some of them are relatively harmless, and some of them are crippling.

So yes. The women in those pictures were idealized figures, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone. I don’t actually know any women who have our current ‘ideal’ body shape, now that I think of it, but I also don’t know any women who are that (for lack of a better, non-negatively connotated word) plump in real life, either, or have waist-length, flowing wavy hair, or are so incredibly porcelain-pale. And, for that matter, no one I know is using lead-based make-up. Was the ‘classical’ ideal of beauty healthier? I don’t know.

These are all different pieces of art painted for different reasons, by different people, under different circumstances, just like art now. Basically what I’m saying is: people have always been jerks about what women look like. Is that really surprising?