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THE CRUEL MIRROR: BODY TYPE AND BODY IMAGE AS REFLECTED IN ART
Last year, I had the great honor and pleasure of being the Art Libraries Society of North America’s closing speaker at its annual conference in Baltimore. My subject was the dramatic fluctuations in female body type in Western art, demonstrated by a discussion of 66 slides drawn from the Visual Resources Collection of Greenfield Library at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
My title, “The Cruel Mirror,” was inspired by Walt Disney’s classic animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), where the elegant witch-queen, with her Marlene Dietrich-like glamour, is obsessively preoccupied with her brutally candid mirror. I was thinking also of Oscar Wilde’s use of the artwork as magic mirror in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), where a young man retains his charismatic beauty while the effects of age and corruption are shifted to his painted portrait.
[Art Documentation, vol. 23, no. 2, Fall 2004]
Young people today in industrialized nations, from North and South America to Europe and Japan, come to consciousness amid a constant shower of media messages glorifying perfect beauty and perpetual youth. While there is reason for serious concern about the quality or realism of images our students see, I find unhelpful and moralistic the standard set of academic terms like “commodification” applied to modern commercial culture. In a careerist era of dreary, word-oriented office routine, sensual appeals to the eye need to be valorized. The media supply what is missing from prevailing social codes.
As a free-speech proponent, I oppose regulation of the media (or the Web). Forms of cultural expression have their own dynamic, whose evolution can never be fully foreseen. But it is educators’ obligation to diagnose and supply what is missing in their students’ experience. This is especially critical in the portrayal of female body type in advertisements and celebrity photojournalism. Since the rise of coed health clubs in the 1980s, a trim, aerobicized silhouette has been projected as the ideal for white middle-class girls. In the 1990s, the outlandishly pneumatic superheroines of animated science-fiction video games gave enormous impetus to the vogue for breast augmentation. Thus, for the past decade a strange and perhaps impossible amalgam has emerged: the thin, sleek, toned female figure with a flat, exposed midriff but startlingly large breasts. This silhouette is difficult enough to maintain during the hormonal teenage years, but its imposition on older women requires a manic regime of exercise and dieting as well as a costly maintenance program of plastic surgery and liposuction.
The massive power of commercial media can only be countered by alternative images from world art and culture. Unfortunately, the venerable survey course in art history, with its invigorating chronological sweep, is slowly losing ground in the United States to narrowly specialized courses, which means that the responsibility for acquiring and organizing representative images will fall more and more on art librarians, with their broad view of university collections present and future. What is needed is not just a complete time range of objects from fine art and archaeology but a record of media images. After the triumph of avant-garde abstraction, movies and advertising became the primary arena for contemplation of the human figure.
From my classroom experience with slide lectures, I find that contemporary students are astonished and fascinated by the mercurial metamorphoses in standards of female beauty over the centuries. My materials thus far have been chosen mainly from Western art, simply because of the centrality it gives to the nude. What follows is a reconstruction (from my podium notes) of my lecture at last year’s conference.
As a general rule, large, ample women have preferred status in agrarian or subsistence periods, while a thin, linear silhouette becomes fashionable for women in urban or courtly societies. When food is in short supply, a plump wife advertises a man’s wealth and property. But there were also biological reasons why, when both pregnancy and childbirth could be difficult and dangerous, fleshy women with wide hips were seen as better prospects for motherhood than thin women with narrow hips. Today we know that body-fat level is connected to fertility: women runners who become too lean may develop amenorrhea, since nature interprets low weight as a sign of famine, insufficient to support pregnancy. With today’s media focus on thinness, young women are torn between nature and society: when fat is the enemy, young women are at war with their own fragile, life-creating physiology.
In the Stone Age, fat was beautiful because it meant vitality and fertility. The Venus of Willendorf (ca. 30,000 B.C.), a tiny limestone statuette found in a riverbank above the Austrian Danube in 1908, has become one of the most popular objects in world art. The sac-like breasts, bulging belly, and padded hips conflate woman with her procreative function. She symbolizes health and abundance. But the masked face and withered arms disturbingly show that she has no sight, speech, or reach—no identity as an individual.
Less well-known are other Stone Age objects also ironically named after the Roman Venus. The Venus of Laussel, found in 1911, was carved into the rounded wall of a limestone rock shelter in the Dordogne. Once again we see the blank face, protuberant belly, and dwindling, knock-kneed legs with their lack of feet, which may sometimes have been ritually broken off, perhaps to keep fertility from leaving. The Venus of Laussel holds a bison horn, an early cornucopia. Shaped like a crescent moon, it is incised with a calendar of lunar months.
The Venus of Lespugue, found in 1922 in the Pyrenees foothills, is carved of ivory (mammoth tusk). Here for the first time we see a major change in female body type. The suave, streamlined linearity of this object strikes us as modernist. The doll head is blank and the arms pencil-thin, so that the balloon-like breasts and buttocks hang like waistline pouches—possessions rather than body parts.
Continuing this long process of female stylization were the marble “idols” (3000–2200 B.C.) found in graves in the Cyclades islands in the mid-Aegean. Cycladic faces are blank, as in Stone Age cult objects, but they are lifted, as if communing with invisible forces. Now the female silhouette is elongated and geometric. The sex organs are treated schematically—a pubic delta and surprisingly small breasts. The violin shape of early Cycladic idols prefigures the Western analogy between woman’s body and stringed instruments that can be seen all the way down to Picasso and Man Ray.
In ancient Egypt, woman is projected as a visual object, a sophisticated work of art. Svelte, body-revealing garments of sheer linen can be seen as early as the Old Kingdom tomb sculptures of Prince Rahotep and his wife Nofret (ca. 2660 B.C.), where there is also an interesting disparity in skin color. The affluent woman, with the luxury to stay out of the desert sun, is paler than her husband or servants. The famous bust of Nefertiti (ca. 1350 B.C.), found in 1912, has a mathematical severity that is new in portraits of women. She is all head, while the Venus of Willendorf was all body. Nefertiti’s chiseled cheekbones have a mannequin’s high-fashion hauteur. (I analyzed Nefertiti’s relation to the Egyptian cult of beauty in my book, Sexual Personae.) Aristocratic Egyptian style became increasingly linear and elongated, as illustrated in my lecture by several chic New Kingdom princesses (18th and 19th dynasties).
The mysterious Minoan statuettes of snake priestesses (ca. 1500 B.C.) found at Knossos on Crete combine the prior traditions. We see bursting, bare, nursing breasts set off by ornate, highly structured clothing—a wasp-waisted corset, double apron, flounced hoop skirt, and symbolic hat crowned by a wild animal. Serpents, presumably symbolizing earth power, wind around the figures’ raised arms. I also showed crude Minoan vases where the upraised, prophesying arms are perched on bell-like bases: the female body here is a vessel—like Mary as the chosen vessel inseminated by the Holy Spirit.
A striking segue can be made between Egyptian princesses, draped in pleated linen, and the columnar Archaic Greek korai (7th–early 5th centuries B.C.), holding out their devotional plates. I like to contrast the plain Attic style of the sprightly Peplos Kore with a demure kore from Chios in a rippling blue chiton—fan
cy Ionian dress. Here we spot an early sense of fashion, associated with the cultivated western coast of Asia Minor, notorious for its “feminine” lyricism in music and poetry. The korai (“maidens”) were ingénues, suggesting an innocent, springtime femininity. They became more statuesque in the graceful caryatids of the Erechtheum’s Porch of the Maidens (ca. 415 B.C.) on the Athenian Acropolis. These grand constructions show both power and composure as they literally hold the roof up on their heads.
There are no large-scale female nudes in high classic Greek art: such depictions weren’t considered respectable. (The rollicking nudes in pornographic pottery are prostitutes.) Instead, heavy, clinging drapery (the “wet look”) reveals the female torso and thighs, as in the three intertwined, banqueting goddesses from the Parthenon’s east pediment (ca. 438–32 B.C.). The common claim that the Athenians were misogynistic or exclusively homosexual is undercut by these voluptuous sculptures, with their relaxed, regal womanliness.
My examples of Hellenistic nudes (4th–1st centuries B.C.) were the Aphrodite of Syracuse, with her pear-like buttocks, and the Venus de Milo, whose robes are provocatively slipping down her hips as she prepares to step into her bath. The motif of the bathing woman, turning the viewer into a Peeping Tom, can also be seen in the canonical Cnidian Aphrodite and Capitoline Venus (Venus Pudica, the “modest Venus”). The Venus de Milo’s precipitous decline in reputation over the past half century demonstrates the evanescence of style. A symbol of female perfection since 1820, when she was found on the island of Melos, the Venus de Milo is still touted by drawing pencils or hair salons as a paragon of beauty. But tastes have so changed that she now seems stolid and broad in the beam, and she has vanished from art books.
Even mutilated, the Winged Nike (“Victory”) of Samothrace (ca. 190 B.C.) wonderfully illustrates muscular female power, like that of the caryatids. Nike is woman in action, her great wings beating as the sea spray plasters her filmy robes against her curvaceous torso. Most published photographs of the statue, which commands the Daru Staircase at the Louvre, do not show that she is landing on the prow of a war ship. But the entire brilliant drama was that Nike is a female energy entering and dominating male space—a naval battle where she is the arbiter of victory and defeat.
Had I had more time, I would have liked to show Etruscan enthroned goddesses (ca. 5th century B.C.), where woman was defined by her lap and embracing arms, and also ancient Roman portrait busts where aging matrons flaunted their wrinkles and double chins. But I moved on to the Middle Ages with a fifteenth-century German carved-wood Vierge ouvrante (“opening Virgin”) from the Musée National du Moyen-Age (Cluny): the hinged tabernacle doors swing out to reveal Mary’s body as internal space. These popular devotional items, sometimes called Shrine Madonnas, were finally banned by the Pope. They show Mary as a cosmic cathedral containing Jehovah and the crucified Jesus, as if she were a Great Mother goddess like the winged Isis. A fruitful comparison would be to Piero della Francesca’s Misericordia (Madonna of Mercy, ca. 1460), where a giant Mary spreads her bat-like cape to shelter humanity.
Standing in the elegant S-curve posture of the courtly High Middle Ages, the silver-gilt Golden Virgin (1339) from the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis can be juxtaposed with her descendant, Botticelli’s blonde goddess in The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485). The sinuous linearity of these figures is an enduring type of female beauty. In his excellent book, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Kenneth Clark contrasts the ideal women of Renaissance Florence and Venice as the Crystalline versus the Vegetable Venus. The former—tall, small-breasted, and intellectual—is like Botticelli’s reserved Venus, while the latter is languid, vapid, and opulent, her organic figure resembling the rolling hills. As examples of Venetian style I chose Titian’s lush Venus of Urbino (1538) and Venus with a Mirror (1555), the latter introducing the themes of narcissism and self-scrutiny. Correggio’s naughtily rear-view Jupiter and Io (1532) demonstrates how Venetian artists saw full-figured fleshiness (and even “problem area” cellulite) as sexy.
The line is clear to Rubens, who studied Titian’s work in Italy. My examples from Rubens were The Toilet of Venus (1612–15), Venus at a Mirror (1655), The Fur (bare-breasted Helene Fourment as Venus Pudica; 1635–40), and The Three Graces (1636–38), in which Botticelli’s sylphlike nymphs have become big, beefy, good-humored women with assertive peasant feet. Amusing examples of Rubens’s physically imposing women are the lusty, biceps-popping rowers of the allegorical Ship of State in his Life of Marie de’ Medici series (panel XVI; 1622–25) for the Luxembourg Palace. To demonstrate the extremes of rococo eroticism, I suggest juxtaposing Boucher’s paintings of two of Louis XV’s mistresses: the pearly, splayed L’Odalisque (Mlle. O’Murphy; 1745) and Madame de Pompadour (1758, National Galleries of Scotland), the latter showing the king’s meddling confidante as the epitome of high fashion in her beribboned, décolleté gown as she archly lounges with—shock!—a book in her hand.
Nineteenth-century Romantic and realist painting offers a dazzling variety of body types. I showed Ingres’s Grand Odalisque (1814) and Manet’s Olympia (1863) as nudes in the Venetian tradition of recumbent, lewdly accessible beauty. The first, with her zucchini shape and perversely unmarked foot-pads, is a doped and sullen Turkish sex slave, while the second (a homage to Titian’s Venus of Urbino), with its bleak dawn light, shows a shrewd Parisian businesswoman with a slightly bored, scandalously direct gaze. Alternative nineteenth-century styles are represented by Ingres’s coolly self-contained Portrait of Mlle. Rivière (1805), with her Greek-inspired Empire dress, ermine boa, and mustard gloves, and Whistler’s moody Symphony in White, no. 1 (1862), the “White Girl” with her unpinned hair and unstructured Pre-Raphaelite dress.
In the twentieth century, the seductive female figure remained a central inspiration for Matisse, with his bold lyricism, and Picasso, a master of mutating styles. A superb example is Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror (1932), where his mistress’s breasts and belly become apples and hanging pear, while the hatched Matisse wallpaper evokes a paradise thicket. Another modern artist who saw the female body mythologically was the sculptor Henry Moore, whose monumental, reclining earth mothers (inspired by Mayan art) follow the landscape or, hollowed out, expose woman’s creative inner space.
Western art’s ambivalent love affair with the female body was taken up by studio-era Hollywood after World War One. My final slides came from the collection of media images that I have helped build at the University of the Arts over the past fifteen years. Jean Harlow, with her loose, slatternly breasts, broke from hyperactive 1920s flappers who had bound their bosoms for a flat, androgynous look. At exactly the same moment (the early 1930s), Mae West was sporting her flamboyant signature costume as Diamond Lil—the corseted hourglass figure of the long-gone Belle Èpoque, clearly a nostalgic dream to many in her vast audience. Meanwhile, Norma Shearer was modeling Madame Vionnet’s new, simple, elegantly streamlined evening dress, daringly exposing the small of the back.
Claudette Colbert as the empress Poppaea in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) illustrated how ancient archetypes of the femme fatale were used to costume Hollywood vamps. The same can be seen in the controversial poster for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), where Elizabeth Taylor, barely contained in a tight white bathing suit, emerges from the waves like Aphrodite. My other examples from Hollywood history included Betty Grable’s famed 1943 pin-up, which demonstrates how radically ideal female proportion has changed. Grable’s once-perfect “million-dollar legs” now look a bit stumpy because our eye has been retrained by the long-legged models of the sports era inaugurated in the 1970s by Cheryl Tiegs’s “California girl” look. Today’s coltish models and actresses (like Nicole Kidman and Gwyneth Paltrow) would have been considered miserably scrawny and gawky before World War Two.
Big-breasted blondeness (a cardinal modern category) can be traced from Harlow to Marilyn Monroe and her more bosomy disciples like Jayne Mansfield, who plays her cartoonishly exaggerated figure
for laughs. Monroe has the sleepy look and moist, parted lips of French odalisques. The “missile cone” 1950s brassiere (parodied by Jean Paul Gaultier’s lethally pointy stage costume for Madonna) deployed the breast as a social weapon. A composite slide showed the Monroe/Mansfield constellation still flourishing in that Rubensian Texan, Anna Nicole Smith.
In the late 1990s, Jennifer Lopez made history by mainstreaming the black and Latino “booty”: buttocks had never before been a focus of white Anglo-American eroticism. But this advance in acceptance of women’s natural contours was overshadowed by a deceptive editorial trend over the past decade for using Photoshop software to thin out women’s faces and bodies on magazine covers. I showed a 2002 Rolling Stone cover that flatteringly elongated Britney Spears’s squat legs and blocky torso. A slide of a skanky, whip-lean Christina Aguilera illustrated the child-harlot or Lolita syndrome.
My final slide was of the current St. Pauli Girl beer carton (“Germany’s fun-loving beer”). It shows a merry beer-hall maid, her bosom overflowing her peasant bodice and each hand effortlessly hefting three foaming beer steins—quite a feat! Her arms are flung wide in the embracing posture of medieval Madonnas. The St. Pauli Girl is in the Rubens line of powerful, exuberant, life-affirming women. But St. Pauli is Hamburg’s red-light district, where sailors carouse. Hence, one suspects, she too may be on the menu.
The body, for good or ill, has become a primary marker of identity in this transient society where the extended family and old community ties have broken down. Style is cyclic: all standards will eventually change. But that may not be soon enough for young people (increasingly male as well as female) barraged by images of “better” bodies than the ones they have been dealt. By encouraging historical exploration, we can reduce pressure and anxiety. There are companions and competitors beyond number in the great image book of the past.
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