No. This is not a repeat.
For those of you who have read my blog from the beginning you know that I already have two posts titled:
History of Fat: Part 1
and
History of Fat: Part 2
These posts talk about my own history battling with my weight.
I would now like to discuss the global History of Fat or, more accurately, the history of body image and the ideal of beauty throughout the ages. I was just too lazy to think up another title.
Warning: There will be a bit of nudity ahead.
Let's start way back in the Egyptian empire...
I think most of us base our idea of Egyptian beauty on this:
Or maybe this:
But Good Lord - Hopefully not THIS!:
Wow!
In reality this was what the Egyptians considered beautiful and the ideal body:
These statues of Cleopatra and Nefertiti give some idea of the ideal body shape in Ancient Egypt. The women's bodies seem to be quite natural looking, with gently flaring hips, and thighs that touch.
You'll notice too, that while they don't have a large stomach, they also don't have a "six pack" flat stomach. That is a very modern invention for women. It isn't until well into the latter half of the 20th century that women are depicted without the slightly rounded lower abdomen.
Next lets visit Ancient Greece. The Ancient Greeks were all about strength and athleticism, even for women.
So here we see a Greek fresco depicting women exercising. We can see that their bodies are lean, but not what we would term "skinny". Their thighs seem strong and seem to have some flesh on them; and again you can see the slight rounding of their lower abdomen.
If we move up to the Roman Empire we see that the standard for beauty stayed much the same; a healthy, natural looking body.
Having said that, it doesn't mean; of course, that every woman achieved this "natural" look easily or often. After all the Roman women had all those incredibly delicious Italian foods to contend with!
They also had some truly TERRIBLE hair to contend with:
Yep - THAT'S a woman, and that is her CHOSEN hairstyle!
If we look to medieval times it's fairly tough to get an acurate representation of what the beauty ideal was because...well because they painted like this:
There did appear to be a kind of cultural interest and desire for women to have a kind of pot belly, as can be seen in the painting below. This was likely because it made the woman look pregnant and thus - fertile. The fashions of the time also tended to thrust the woman's pelvis forward, again likely to do with the cultural predilection for finding fertility very desirable.
The Renaissance gives us a much larger pool to draw from when trying to understand their idea of body beauty. One of the most famous images for Renaissance beauty is this:
Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" shows us the "birth" of the ancient Roman Goddess of Love and Beauty. Thus the Renaissance artist put down on the canvas, the cultural ideal of what she would look like. She's pretty fleshy. But she also has some lovely upper abdominal muscles and her arms look a bit muscular as well.
The penchant for fleshy curves, but muscular arms can be seen in these Da Vinci and Raphael paintings as well.
In this Raphael painting we see evidence of the rounded, sloping, feminine shoulder often portrayed in Renaissance portraits. Perhaps this was to contrast with the idealized, "broad shouldered man"?
Moving into the Elizabethan era, the most important part of body image seemed to be that the natural body was to be hidden completely. Fashion and clothing was used to COMPLETELY change the body shape. Women were meant to have long necks and very wide foreheads and did everything they could to achieve a TINY waist and completely flat stomach.
As we can see from these two portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, society had abandoned all attempts to look "natural" and had begun to use all manner devices and contraptions like corsets and farthingales (an early predecessor to the crinoline and bustle) to create the body image they wanted.
It wasn't until the early nineteenth century that people finally began to desire a more natural silhouette once again. At the beginning of the 1800's, in a kind of rebellion against the excesses and "false" beauty of royalty like Marie Antoinette...
...people moved completely away from body shaping devices and began to espouse a kind of bastardized Greek and Roman ideal. Women were encouraged not to wear anything under their gowns besides a couple of simple undergarments. The natural body was once again the ideal. That lasted for a couple of years...
...but eventually women who couldn't achieve that "natural" look um, naturally, began to slip corsets back into the mix. Slowly all the previous excess associated with being beautiful returned and by the 1830's women were back to looking like this:
The exaggerated sleeves are meant to create an illusion to help make the tiny pinched in waist appear even tinier; which was one of the biggest bodily desires over the rest of the 19th century. Women pulled their corset laces so tight they would faint. This was seen simply as womanly fragility. Some women went as far as to have their bottom rib removed to achieve the ultimate "wasp waist".
19th century women went from resembling nothing so much as a bell...
...to needing to resemble the prow of a ship.
The Victorians would NEVER dream of talking about it, but it can be gathered, from the somewhat naughtier pictures of the time, and from pictures of the 19th century sex symbol, Lillian Russell...
...
that women of the time were meant to be fairly fleshy. Gone are the renaissance interest in abdominal or bicep muscles. Thicker thighs and arms, with the obligatory curved waist and hip along with medium sized breasts seem to be the beauty norm of the time.
This ideal carried forward into the first two decades of the nineteenth century but changed radically in the 1920's.
We will take a look at this change in tomorrow's post:
History of Fat: Part 2 - Not a Repeat! - 20th Century Beauty Concepts.
That's a pretty long title. Maybe I'll work on that.
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