Venus of Orbino, Titian, 1538
They're considered the "fair sex." What comes across as a simple attribution is in fact and truth an imperative: since the Renaissance, the pleasure and burden of representation have been predominantly with women. While courage and farsightedness, bravery and intelligence were admired in men, a cultural production arose in the matter of "beautiful women" that is second to none - from fine arts, literature, opera and cinema to practical guidebooks, support clothing and the cosmetics industry. It is a game of showing and concealing, of emphasizing and concealing, an "unproductive expenditure" (Georges Bataille) that tries to imitate what seems desirable and yet could never be conclusively defined by anyone. This is the paradox of beauty: over the centuries, collective obsession has not only produced quite different ideals of beauty, but this beauty has always existed only as an idea and concept - that is, as a phantasm. "What one sees at first sight", wrote the philosopher and sociologist of culture Nicolaus Sombart about the "beautiful woman", "is to a certain extent only an optical illusion, a 'trompe-l'œil'".
Something
is perceived as beautiful, which is symmetrical and balanced in proportions,
but already here the problems begin, because the absolute symmetry is again
unaesthetic, every beauty needs the small flaw. The more precise the attempt to
describe beauty, the more poetic and metaphorical it becomes, until the
definition finally contains what is to be defined: Beauty is what pleases.
"Beauty is not real, it cannot be made unambiguous; it has no fixed
meaning, it is apparent, fleeting, irresistible and incomparable," Dietmar
Kamper and Christoph Wulf wrote in 1989 in Der Schein des Schönen. They
capitulated verbosely before any insight into the essence of this beauty.
"The attempt to seize it destroys it," it continues. "It forms a
world that cannot be reduced to other worlds, is useless and plays with erotic
desires on the edge of chaos and the hope of imperishability. As early as 1930,
the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had nothing but ridicule for such beauty prose,
which mythologizes and evokes the incomprehensible: "The science of
aesthetics examines the conditions under which beauty is felt; it has not been
able to explain the nature and origin of beauty; how common is the lack of
results concealed by an expenditure of full-sounding, meaningless words".
This
dilemma cannot be overcome by simply reducing female beauty to its function of
reproducing the genus. "I for my part reject this way out," says the
young philosopher in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
to his friend. "He leads into eugenics instead of aesthetics." One
can thus go from the labyrinth of different ideals of beauty directly into a
pimped-up lecture hall, where the professor, "one hand on the origin of
species [by Charles Darwin] and the other on the New Testament, tells you that
you admired the sweeping hips of Venus, because you felt that she would give
birth to strong offspring. To understand beauty, you have to look away from the
object and toward the viewer. In other words, it's about the aesthetic
conventions of society.
Social
conventions, i.e. pronounced and unspoken norms and rules, shape the way in
which we talk about and feel about the body, how we dress, what image we create
of ourselves, what ideals we orientate ourselves by. They not only tell us
something about the transience and changeability of the ideal of beauty, but
also something about social differences. Beauty has always been a
distinguishing feature. It is the small (or large) difference from which one
can tell whether someone wanted to be beautiful in an aristocratic or peasant,
bourgeois or proletarian way and what techniques were available to someone to
manipulate their own body. The word "manipulate" should not be taken
too negatively. "Has there ever been a time when bodies or primeval human
bodies were not influenced by any rational manipulation," asked historian
Barbara Orland. What we call natural has always been socially transformed. From
the consumption of organic food to the "no poo" hair wash to the
pedometer for the purpose of minimal movement in spite of an office job,
"naturalness" is actively produced today, and we should beware of
imputing to earlier societies a naturalness that already then never existed
independently of human ideas, concepts and actions. Even putting on a fur is a
cultural achievement.
And so beauty always remains both: something that is attributed to a person as nature and at the same time something that only reveals itself as beauty in a certain situation and staging, from a certain perspective and above all in the gaze of others. It was the Renaissance artists who discovered and celebrated this situational beauty as never before. In the 15th and 16th centuries, for the first time, paintings were created of women who were neither the Mother of God nor a worldly celebrity, paintings whose sole purpose was to depict female beauty. In 1536 the Venetian artist Titian painted the portrait of an unknown beauty in a blue dress, called La Bella, and two years later, probably with the same model, the naked Venus of Urbino on a couch. They were the expression of a new taste in art. The wealthy patrons of these paintings no longer collected exclusively images of religious scenes, historical events or noble family members, but became interested in the principles of beauty itself: in the new still lifes of beautifully arranged flowers and fruits and in the intensity of a beguiling feminine presence captured on canvas.
How different,
on the other hand, were the pictures of beauty that were made in the Middle
Ages. Even then there had been an ideal of beauty, but people were interested
above all in the surface on which a person's moral beauty was reflected - and
that applied equally to men and women. For the church teacher and philosopher
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), beauty was essentially based on three things:
Integrity, harmony of proportions and clarity. Above all clarity
("claritas") was important: the "splendour of beauty" was
evident in the "brilliant colour of beautiful people". Thus beauty
was associated with a transcendent idea: in it a cosmic order was revealed.
What is not true and not good is also not beautiful.
Plato
had already described the good, the true and the beautiful as identical. In the
Middle Ages this triad was embedded in a theocentric world view: God was beauty
itself. This metaphysical attitude does not necessarily have to have been
ascetic and hostile to life. Medieval man, as Umberto Eco wrote, often found it
difficult "to distinguish between the pleasure of the senses and the
pleasure of the soul. He had "a much more highly developed sense than we
for the clear, well primed, luminous colours, he loved the brilliance of gold,
the sparkle of gemstones, the radiant bursting of light". In the triumph
of colour and light, however, he saw "at the same time an expression of
the omnipotence of God".
No
matter how much people loved the bright colours at that time, cosmetics and
applied splendour were frowned upon, as they were mere deceptive manoeuvres
within the divine order. Even in minnesong, the beautiful one had above all a
virtuous soul. The poet Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230) described the
ideal woman as pleasant, but without plaster. "Mistress, you have put on a
noble shell, the chaste body," he wrote, "Truly I have never seen a
better dress: You are a beautiful woman.
The new
sense of beauty that emerged in the Renaissance manifested itself not only in
the fine arts, but also in language. The simple terms used in the Middle Ages
to describe beauty - a symmetrical face, white skin, small, firm breasts, a
narrow waist - gave way to a new terminology that increased everything to a
metaphorical level. It was the poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) who first
invented a completely new language for the beauty of his adored Laura in his
Canzoniere. The unreachable was no longer simply pleasant to look at and of
noble character, but had "hair of gold", the "sweet light"
of her eyes "burned" beyond measure, she could no longer be grasped
at all with earthly terms, she was a "heavenly being", of
"angelic nature", even her ornament seemed "made in
paradise". Petrarch set standards for European love poetry until the 17th
century. It was finally named after him ("Petrarchism").
It is
paradoxical: in the Middle Ages, with its metaphysical idea of beauty, people
were still able to talk about the concrete shape of the object - the real
bodies - while at the beginning of the modern age they "seemed to lose
their sense of matter" (Umberto Eco). Where language failed in the face of
flesh, the effort was now on flowers, gems, pearls, ivory, moon and stars. The
women had "breasts as bleaching as alabaster" (Pierre de Ronsard), a
"high forehead of smooth ivory" (Louis le Jars) or a mouth "that
carries roses and holds pearls" (Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau).
The exaggeration of female beauty by comparison with cosmic phenomena and
precious materials became such a widespread topos that William Shakespeare
already took countermeasures in 1609. The eyes of his loved ones are not like
sunlight, he noted in his Sonnet 130, corals are much redder than their lips,
he likes to hear them speak, but it doesn't sound like music, and he can assure
that he has never seen a goddess step in, "my darling stands firmly on the
ground with both legs when he walks".
As in
the Middle Ages, in early modern times the outer beauty could not be separated
from the inner beauty. In the beautiful form, however, there was no longer a
cosmic order, but a spiritual constitution, no longer the divine, but the
individual. Beauty gained depth and inwardness. The essence of a person became
visible in the movements, the gaze, the whole behaviour. The Florentine
philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote in 1544 in his work On Love or Platon's Banquet: "Let us therefore,
if not the spirit but only the body is beautiful, love it as the fleeting
shadow image of beauty only little and only superficially! But where the spirit
is beautiful, let us love this constant ornament of the spirit ardently".
The outer and the inner beauty were interrelated or, as the French writer and
mathematician David Rivault de Fleurance wrote in 1608 in his work on the art
of beautification (L'art d'embellir): "The spiritual qualities "shine
through the body". The invisible is visible, the wisdom of a person
"embellishes his face".
Despite
all the praise for female beauty, there was a clear hierarchy of body parts:
Above was much more important than below. The gaze was directed. Overhanging
skirts concealed everything that should not be seen and therefore one did not
have to worry much about its appearance. "Why worry about your legs, when
they are nothing to show?," says writer Marie de Romieu in her
Instructions pour les jeunes dames (1573). In his Dialogo delle bellezze delle
donne in 1548, the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola also advocated that the
higher parts of the body should naturally be exposed, while the lower parts
should be covered "because the former should be made visible as the actual
seat of beauty and it is not the same with the others, because they are only
the foundation, the base and the support of the upper parts". The upper
part of the body was modelled so that it could rise elegantly from the
foundation: The corset was invented in the 15th century. With cords and rods,
the chest was flattened and the upper part of the body was pressed into a
conical shape so that it tapered towards the waist.
The
short, stiffly erected upper bodies became the outstanding feature of cultivated
beauty at court, where the ladies, when tied up too tightly, now regularly
fainted. The ideal body shape changed over the years, sometimes the skirt was
worn so high that not much remained of the conical shape, but from the middle
of the 17th century onwards at the French court the breast was no longer
flattened but lifted into the décolleté, and at the time of Louis XIV the waist
was laced as narrowly as never before. Already Anne de Beaujeu (1461-1522), a
daughter of the French king Louis XI, had made fun of a woman who was "so
tightly tied up" in her clothes that her "heart failed". The sceptic
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) also mocked the cramped women in his essays.
"What kind of inconvenience do they not suffer to have a pretty Spanish
body, stiff and constricted with thick forging tongs on the sides, up to the
raw meat?
The
corset was only one aspect of a comprehensive beautification art that was now
completely legitimate. As soon as beauty no longer simply corresponded with the
universally good and true, but manifested itself in a certain expression and
behaviour as a sign of inner constitution, efforts were made to actively shape
it. The aristocracy and the rich merchants demonstrated their social position
with their hats and dresses, their "countenance" and their way of
walking. The streets and squares became public catwalks, where people
promenaded with the sole aim of seeing and being seen. When Princess Sophie of
Hanover, daughter of Elector Frederick V of the Palz, made a journey through
Italy in 1664/65 - a famous grand tour for Bildung - she systematically
recorded what female beauty could be seen in the cities. In Verona she was
amazed to see only "ugly faces" in the places where the ladies were
promenading after dinner, while on the Grand Canal in Venice she stopped
gondolas to see the beauty of the women. Not only the women, but also the king
and the powerful men at the court powdered their hair, wore complicated clothes
and walked on high heels.
The art
of making mirrors had a considerable influence on the new cult of beauty. In
the Middle Ages, convex mirrors were made from glass spheres, in which one only
recognized oneself distorted. Around 1516, flat mirrors were first made in
Venice: a thin tin foil was stuck to a glass surface and mercury was poured
onto it. The amalgam then became a reflective surface that gave the person
looking in a picture of himself more clearly than ever before. This picture was
now heavily retouched. Ointments, pomades and creams were used and the face was
brightened with poisonous lead white. In the 17th century the range of make-up
was considerably extended. Powder, oils and talcum were used, and rouge was
added to the previously exclusively used white. As the use of make-up increased,
so did the criticism. Everywhere one saw too much of the good. In
Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules
(1659) daughter and niece of the good citizen Gorgibus have just disappeared
again. Gorgibus asks the maid where the two are. "In their rooms,"
she replies. "What are they doing there?" "Lip balm."
"To the hangman with the eternal pomade!"
If
make-up was tolerated in public space for purposes of representation, it had,
if used at the wrong moment, quickly the smell of insincerity, deception, even
prostitution. Conversely, women from lower classes could now also dress up like
ladies, which led to new problems. If everyone can disguise themselves in
everything with a little effort and a sense of taste, how can one distinguish
between virtue and vice, between honourable ladies and a lewd half-world? In
many places, clothing regulations were issued. In Catalonia, prostitutes could
dress as they wished, but they were not allowed to cover themselves with a
scarf or cape; the veiling was reserved exclusively for married women. In
Castile they went even further. In 1623 a law was ratified stating that
"women who are publicly bad and thus earn money may not wear gold, pearls
or silk".
In the
middle of the 18th century, in the Age of Enlightenment, beauty moved from
practice to theory. Sensual perception was upgraded philosophically, even with
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica (1750-1758) aesthetics was founded
as an independent philosophical discipline. At the same time, the notion of the
"one flesh" of the sexes was transformed into a model of strict
oppositeness. Already in the centuries before women had done more
representative work, but the alternative of the beautiful man had at least
still been debatable. The novel Joseph Andrews by the English author Henry
Fielding, published in 1742, can be read as a swan song to this era of
far-reaching equivalence. The title-giving attractive Joseph is already rather
a parody of male beauty. Repeatedly he slips into unwanted erotic situations,
from which he then has to beat himself free again with fists. From the middle
of the 18th century onwards, the beautiful man largely disappeared from social
and literary life as a figure of identification. Starting from medicine, a
binary gender model developed which culminated in the " weibliche
Sonderanthropologie” (Claudia Honegger) of the 19th century. From now on, women
were the beautiful and men the sublime. Grace here, dignity there.
The
Irish philosopher Edmund Burke was one of the first to design an aesthetic
directly linked to gender in his influential work A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). In daring voltes
he interwove the female beauty with the female weakness and both again with the
male desire. "The beauty of women is largely due to their weakness or
delicacy, and it is heightened by their shyness," Burke says. Highest
female beauty always transports an idea of fragility, of imperfection. Women
are very aware of this, "for this reason they learn to lisp, to walk with
a staggering gait, to pretend weakness, even illness". The female gender,
which is already naturally more beautiful, thus helps to increase its beauty
with a little theatre. Burke described the female senses as simple and
immediately physical, her sensations were self-sufficient, accordingly the
beautiful woman had no desire. Her beauty served only the male passion, namely
both the sublime individual love as well as the genus-preserving lust, which
now had to be actively restrained. Already by her simple presence and passive
seductive power the beautiful woman was dangerous. In the best case, the man
relaxed towards her. In the worst case she drove him into melancholy, despair,
suicide.
Edmund Burke Mary Wollstonecraft
However,
there could be no talk of passivity in the consumption of beauty products: In
the 18th century, the cult of beauty was popularized. A wide range of
boutiques, hairdressing salons and tailor's shops were created in the
atmosphere of the famous perfumers, where one could be prepared according to
the latest fashion. However, not everyone had a sense for the individual
measure and the composition adapted to the type, which now increasingly
constituted the small difference between elitist and ordinary appearance.
"The terrible women of the butchers' boys, sitting on the kerbstone, wear
rouge", wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier in 1781 in his Tableau de Paris,
"it has the colour of blood".
The
beautification techniques, such as those used in the Manuel de la toilette of
1771, were still mainly related to the face. But the triumph of the senses, the
occupation with bodily fluids, the irritability of the skin and the
temperaments led to the increased use of tinctures, infusions and compresses,
warm and cold baths to promote beauty and health. In general, the lower half of
the body was brought into focus. What used to be the base in the first place,
started to move. With Romanticism the bodies gained in form and contour, in the
whole form and posture a beauty revealed itself, which was no longer studied
academically, but to which one devoted oneself contemplatively. A movement, a
smile, a glance were enough, and the viewer was gone. " Sie sprach zu ihm, sie sang zu ihm, / Da
war’s um ihn geschehn“, wrote Johann
Wolfgang Goethe in 1779.
In
numerous variations, the tragedy of the man who perishes on the beautiful woman
was created, by far not only on the femme fatale, but with preference for this
passive, ethereal being, whose dreamy gaze went into the distance, even into
infinity. This beauty seemed disastrous not only to others, but also to itself:
the beautiful women were now sick or dead in an astonishing frequency. The
female corpse was erotically charged. Painters and poets sublimated female
beauty into nothingness. As the literary scholar Elisabeth Bronfen noted, it was
about a transformation of the female body "into inanimate aesthetic
form". In Heinrich Heine's Florentine Nights (1837) Maximilian tried to
pass the time of Maria, who was suffering from lung disease and only listened
to passively, until she died. Edgar Allan Poe also proclaimed in 1846: “The
death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the
world.” Were the female corpses the admission that lasting beauty could never
be achieved in this world, that it could never be embodied in any human being
through all circumstances of life? Was the staging of the beautiful corpse the
only way to make female beauty harmless and at the same time to preserve it as
a projection surface for eternity?
The dumber, prettier and more dead the women became, the less they were intellectually trusted. “Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.”
says Sir
Henry in Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890). The ardent Enlightenment
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already written in 1758: "Women in
general , do not like any art, know nothing about any, and have no genius. " They were created to please men
and to subordinate themselves to them. The fact that the female weakness
diagnosed everywhere reflected less a nature of gender than the conditions of
possibility which women were now still allowed (or not) to have, even great
thinkers apparently did not come up with this idea.
The
behaviour of women actually proves "that their minds are not healthy
developed", said the English writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft at
the end of the 18th century. Like the flowers that are planted in too rich a
soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty.
However,
Wollstonecraft saw one cause for this in
the "false educational system", gathered from the books written on
this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human
creatures”. If a woman is educated exclusively to please the man, then this
"brutal desire" remains the driving force of all her actions. Wollstonecraft
denies however, that the woman is made only for the man.
Most of
these writings were written by women. The beauty ideals of the 19th century
tended to "naturalize" gender differences, at the same time they
opened up an unprecedented publication market for women - and, building on this,
an increasing commercialization of beauty. It was the beginning of a long and
still ongoing learning process in which the eye was trained, desires channeled
and identification patterns forged in order to finally be served by a mass
production of fashion and beauty products. The beauty business shifted from the
private to the public sphere. It was no longer primarily domestic workers and
other servants who helped dress, tightened cords, draped hair and handed
powder. By the end of the 19th century, an organized market with manicure
shops, cosmetics departments in multi-storey department stores, perfumeries and
beauty studios was established in all major cities, and in the 20th century it
expanded into a global, brand-driven billion-dollar business. Visuals were also
upgraded. The daguerreotype, a photographic process developed in 1860, paved
the way for the mass reproduction of images of dressed and naked women. The
result was a lively trade in portraits and pornography, in which photo studios,
black market dealers, actresses, dancers and self-proclaimed beauties
participated and which culminated in the total visual marketing of the female
body in the 20th century.
While
the beautiful woman - whether dead or alive - attracted attention and became
the object of an extensive industrial production, the beautiful man still
appeared as a problematic figure in the cultural production of modernity. He
quickly came under suspicion of homoeroticism, was a nerd, a victim, and even
more frequently: a perpetrator. The title hero in Oscar Wilde's Portrait of
Dorian Gray (1890) first becomes a madman and then a murderer. In Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd
(1891), too, the beautiful sailor Billy, accused of mutiny, loses control of
himself and, in effect, kills the boatman. The desirable and beguilingly
beautiful heroes in Jean Genet's novels are all shady figures, scoundrels and
murderers, and even in Agatha Christie's crime novels countless attractive men
are exposed as criminals "with an almost problematic regularity for the
genre", as the publicist Wilhelm Trapp noted.
Even
though the beauty market for men, this "impossible body" (Wilhelm Trapp)
of Western modernity, has long been booming as well, still above all it is women who are valued and evaluated with regard
to their appearance and who strive accordingly for their appearance. While in
the 19th century the suit was invented for men's fashion, a uniform that can be
worn at every conceivable opportunity, women today are confronted with a
variety of possibilities that always force them to make decisions: Trousers or
dress? Does the top and bottom fit together and fits the whole the occasion? Do
I show too much or too little leg, is
the décolleté too deep, the shoe too high, the necklace too vulgar?
What the
Renaissance humanist Marsilio Ficino wrote in 1469 is still valid today:
"Remember, dear Socrates, no body is of perfect beauty! " We consider
the bodies beautiful at one time and ugly at another, "and different
people judge them in different ways". Beauty is as complex as the
universe. It does not consist of correctly designed details, but always appears
as a whole. To this day, it is not entirely clear what exactly we buy when we
purchase lipstick, skin cream or an extravagant garment, when we prick a tattoo,
when we correct our nose or when we enlarge our breasts. What is clear is that
we are inscribing ourselves into a world of beauty that has always been
defined, but which with its diverse identification offerings also leaves room
for the individual, for refusal and experimentation. This is probably where the
never-ending pleasure in beauty lies: by designing an ideal of it, we always
also invent ourselves.
Die Macht der
Schönheit. By Lea Haller. Neue ZürcherZeitung , December 13 , 2018.
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