Rubenesque

Rubenesque figures

Those of us this week who will be hitting the Christmas ham, cookies, eggnog, fruitcake (yuck), and candies a little two hard may be well on our way to developing what has come to be known, both kindly and unkindly, as "Rubenesque" figures. My students in school used to get a hearty laugh when reviewing the work of Peter Paul Rubens and others at the "massive" proportions some of his nude female figures assumed. "Why'd he paint such fat women?" I was often asked.

 

 

 

 



The Three Graces, 1639, Peter Paul Rubens

Well, there are two, somewhat inter-related answers to that question. First, ideals of feminine beauty are notoriously fickle, even within the span of a few years (take the twelve-year period 1959 to 1971 for instance). Second, during the baroque period, and for centuries before, women with some "meat on their bones" also were women who could afford "meat on their plates". That is to say, they were born to some wealth, hence "upper-class". Thin meant poor and underfed as in peasantry. This is difficult for teens to understand in this day an age when exactly the opposite is true. Thin is "in" and takes more than a little effort on the part of those with the wealth and leisure to "work" at it. Fatty foods are cheap, plentiful, and their effects on our "Rubenesque" bodies the result of working our minds to the point we are too tired at the end of the day to work our bodies.



Hermes Bearing the Infant
Dionysus, ca. 364 BC,
Praxiteles

The strange irony in discussing this subject is that with some minor exceptions (the work of Michelangelo for example, below) "Rubenesque" proportions don't seem to permeate the nude or semi-nude depictions of men down through the history of painting (or in Michelangelo's case, painting AND sculpture). Figures from Medieval art straight through the Baroque era and beyond have been almost rigidly modeled after male anatomical proportions hearkening straight back to the Greek statuary of Praxiteles (left) and Polyclitus. Is it merely sexism or is there some greater, perhaps ageless sociological factor at work here? 

The Last Judgment (detail), 1534-41,
Michelangelo, no Greek proportions here.