There is no concept in the world more elusive from formulations than beauty. Anyone who wants to designate it with exact canons is doomed to failure, because the images of ideal beauties from different eras sometimes completely contradict each other.
Proportionality or tenderness?
The ancient Greeks were seriously concerned with achieving harmony everywhere, they also looked for it in the appearance of their sisters, wives and daughters. Greek scientists constantly tried to "believe harmony with algebra", and meticulously calculated the proportions that characterize true perfection. And if the distance between the eyebrows of a lady was not equal to the size of her own eyes, she would not be the queen of antique beauty. In general, a face was considered ideal if it could be conditionally divided into three or four equal horizontal parts. A Greek woman was recognized as a beauty if she also had fair skin, blue or gray eyes and blond hair. The latter gave the inhabitants of the ancient world a lot of trouble, since by nature most of them were brunettes. I had to lighten the curls,for which a variety of remedies were used, from sour milk and lemon to sheep dung and ash.
There were strict canons for the female figure. For example, the distance from the waist to the edge of the heels had to be related to the length of the body as 2: 3. The harmonious waist of the Greek woman was twice the circumference of the neck, which in turn was supposed to be equal to the thickness of the lower leg. Interestingly, a woman's foot was considered the more beautiful the larger she was. The fact is that, like many other peoples, the earth personified the original power for the Greeks. And the more a woman came into contact with the soil while walking, the more powerful her connection with these divine forces was.
Centuries passed, and in ancient China the opposite image of ladies' charm developed. It was based on the creation of an artificial creature like a doll. All naturalness was considered vulgar and remained the lot of the lower classes of Chinese society. The beautiful Chinese woman had to look like a fragile porcelain figurine, otherwise no one would find her attractive.
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Her face in any situation remained impassive, like a mask, laughter showing teeth, a loud voice and imperious intonations were completely excluded. The ladies shaved their hair on their foreheads to make the face oval more elongated, used whitewash and blush, painted eyebrows in the form of smooth lines, and made their lips look like a scarlet circle with lipstick. The nails on the hands of the Chinese woman diligently grew, the longer they became, the more they corresponded to the ideal. To prevent these ideal claws from breaking, they wore golden thimbles, which served as both protection and decoration.
To create a "harmony of straight lines" of a female figure, girls, at the age of 10, began to tightly bandage their breasts to stop her growth. The greatest sacrifice for the sake of beauty was made by Chinese women for the sake of gaining the famous "lotus legs" - tiny deformed hooves not exceeding 8 centimeters in length. In order to get what they want, from the age of three, the little ones were bandaged in a special way, and as a result, a decade later, a grown girl could flaunt triangular feet bent in the form of an onion, which, in the eyes of a European, were completely crippled. It was possible to move on such limbs only very slowly and smoothly, which was also considered very sophisticated in the Celestial Empire. Interestingly, the brutal tradition of leg bandaging remained popular among wealthy Chinese people until the middle of the 20th century.
Angel or Bacchante?
The Middle Ages gave humanity another version of the ideal appearance - created by Christianity. The woman, like Eve's daughter, was appointed in this era as a vessel of sin and a center of temptation for a man. The only way to avoid censure from the church and society was to observe absolute modesty and bashfulness.
It was not supposed to take care of the body, even the usual washing was considered a sin, and the ladies got out of the situation in different ways. There is, for example, the testimony of a nun who sewed bags of fragrant herbs into her armpits to avoid the smell of sweat.
The image of the Mother of God with an elongated face, an incredibly high forehead, large eyes and a narrow small mouth was considered the absolute ideal of female beauty.
Numerous medieval treatises on beauty, however, represented the weaker sex with flowers - fragile and delicate plants that need the care and guidance of a man.
The proportions of a teenager became the canon of a beautiful figure: a slender body, a narrow waist and hips, a small chest (which, if necessary, was bandaged with a thick cloth), a rounded, protruding belly, as if hinting at the woman's fertility.
Excess hair was mercilessly destroyed: the beauties of the European Middle Ages shaved their foreheads, backs of heads and even eyebrows to get closer to perfection. And to prevent further hair growth, ointments were applied to the skin, which could include hemlock juice, ash, vinegar, blood of mice or frogs, and other creepy ingredients. How effective these ointments were - history is silent.
By the beginning of the 15th century, the severity of the Middle Ages, which thought only of improving the spirit, was replaced by the Renaissance, which pays much attention to the body. The woman was no longer considered the daughter of the Devil and the embodiment of temptation, on the contrary, beauty was again worshiped as a gift from God. This is evidenced by the canvases and sculptures of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and many other masters singing feminine charm.
Instead of stunted girls who hide the signs of their sex, luxurious mature ladies who have repeatedly learned the joy of motherhood have become popular. It has become fashionable to be healthy, to indulge in carnal excesses with pleasure and to demonstrate all the wealth of beauty presented by nature. The Renaissance woman did not hide the weighty chest, broad hips, lush neck and shoulders - the clothes became more revealing, and rather generously revealed, rather than hid the figure.
Like the ancient philosophers, the poets of the new era again began to calculate the parameters of a harmonious appearance. Their works have survived to this day, where the formulas of the ideal are set out: the area of the auricle was equal to the open mouth, the length of the nose and lips had to coincide, the height of the head was no more, no less, as eight times fit in the height of the body. Along with dry calculations, much more poetic calculations were also in circulation. It was believed that every sign of a beauty is repeated three times: “three things are white - skin, teeth, hands; three black - eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes; three long ones - body, hair, fingers; three short ones - teeth, ears, feet,”and so on.
The worship of external virtues was so all-consuming that it overshadowed the assessment of the spiritual qualities of a woman and her mind. The main thing was the body and only the body, which was paraded as a luxury that could cause not only admiration, but also envy.
Modern Lily or Comrade?
The ideal lady of the Belle Epoque (or La belle epoque, it lasted from the late 19th century to the beginning of the First World War) in the Middle Ages would certainly be considered a witch and the Devil's messenger. The fact is that the collection of beauty ideals acquired at this time a curious specimen - a femme fatale, always fraught with danger for a man. At least, she often turned out to be the mistress of her own destiny (the typical representatives of the Belle Epoque were Vera Holodnaya, Lina Cavalieri, as well as Mata Hari, whose photo you can see below).
This mysterious person paid a lot of attention not only to taking care of herself and maintaining a fashionable style - she created her magical fatal image every minute. By the beginning of the 20th century, the ideal figure of such a seductress was almost girlish and completely excluded the artificial emphasis of forms, so characteristic of the old times. The outfits have also completely changed - they fell in waves, flowed in frills, and once again emphasized the straight, flat silhouette of the enchantress.
Hair color was also intended to complement the image of the fatal temptress: the mysterious red or dark black either went to the lucky ones from birth, or appeared thanks to the latest hair dyes.
The most popular of the ideas at the turn of the century was the theory of gender equality. And the beauty of the Art Nouveau era brilliantly confirmed her, she was not only able to equate with the stronger sex with her mind and strength of character, but sometimes subdued a man and then had every right to look down on him.
Only a couple of decades passed, and in young Soviet Russia, a previously unknown type of female beauty appeared, for the first time in the world created not by nature and religion, but by political ideology.
The ideal Soviet woman became a part of the young state, put its needs above personal interests, for the first time she became completely equal to a man, not only in the family, but also in work and in the political life of society. In the paintings of the artists, a citizen of the country of the Soviets looks like an antique proportionate, strong, with a strong, harmoniously developed body. Idleness and narcissism were alien to her, because she was usually portrayed at work or playing sports. Such was the Soviet era, society was completely absorbed by the idea of building a new world, and it united for the sake of translating the idea into reality.
Over the millennia of world history, a variety of female images have been on the pedestal of the ideal of beauty. And today, some of their features can be guessed in our contemporaries. And this means that beauty will forever delight and delight people, no matter what form it takes.
Ekaterina Kravtsova