Ideals of Beauty
The representation of ideals of beauty has been a goal of many artists over the last five centuries, perhaps most famously realised by The Birth of Venus. Here, a goddess is depicted having emerged from a shell, accompanied by Zephyrus and Aura, personifications of heaven and earth on the left and Hora (or one of the three graces) on the right. The painting eschews realism (the sea appears almost abstract and roses tumble from the sky) in favour of fantasy and the central figure is an ideal of Renaissance womanhood, with an unnaturally long neck and legs, modestly covering herself (but not quite succeeding). The artist has taken the medieval idea of the Chaste Venus as his inspiration, and as the critic E.H. Gombrich commented, the story of the birth of Venus was ‘the symbol of mystery through which the divine message of beauty came into the world.’ (Gombrich, 1950). Other commentators have also spoken of the painting’s conceptual symbolism – the fusion of Spirit and Matter for example, but at a more basic level, Botticelli was also providing his Medici paymasters with an image of a woman whose beauty and nudity would both flatter high-minded and intellectual pretensions while titillating and eroticising. Even in the modern era, the images of early Renaissance ideals of female beauty still underpin our expectations of women today, reinforced by Hollywood, the press and social media. The advances made in twentieth and twenty-first centuries of the acceptability of feminist thinking still have some way to go before they can make an impact on the stereotypes established five hundred years ago.
Bartolomeo Vento’s painting, Portrait of a Lady (1506) is representative of the canon of Renaissance depictions of women where, as Paola Tinagli observes ‘paintings represent women principally or exclusively because of their beauty’ and whose purposes were either ‘commemorative, celebratory or purely decorative’. (Tinagli, 1997) The Lady is certainly beautiful, and idealized. She wears myrtle on her head, which might suggest marriage, but also holds a small posy of flowers and it has been suggested that this might associate her with the nymph Flora; in other words, she may not be a particular woman, but a perfect and ideal version of an archetypal woman. Her golden hair and pale skin reinforce the fantasy while her sidelong gaze and bared breast imply a more ‘come-hither’ attitude. In any event there is an ‘erotic tension established between the image and the beholder.’ (Tinagli, 1997). What this underlines is that male artists could blur the distinction between portraiture and the actuality of the sitter in front of him with his imagined and illusory fantasy of woman on a pedestal.
Leonardo’s Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine similarly uses the animal to symbolize the woman’s purity. Her gaze off to the side and her angled sitting position suggest aloofness, while her exaggeratedly elongated hand and fingers concentrate attention on the tenderness and softness of her touch.
The ultimate ideal of beauty, recognised world-wide, is Leonardo’s portrait of a Lady, known as Mona Lisa. Here, it is imprecise detailing, the modesty of her pose and the enigma of her expression which has allowed viewers to project their own feelings onto this idealization of feminine beauty. The many millions of reproductions and the ubiquity of the image has so firmly embedded itself in our consciousness and accreted itself into the bedrock of our culture that it has become almost impossible to look at it objectively. Mona Lisa is woman and woman is Mona Lisa, however much we might want to resist the idea.
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