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An Essay on Beauty Standards, Angelology, Physiognomy, and Phenotypes in Art
I believe studying beauty ideals throughout time not only in the West but also in other cultures and linking them to anthropological phenotypes and taxonomy might spark the interest of some. For that, one could try understanding the looks of Angels, seen as representations of beauty and purity.
1 - Archangel Gabriel – Anonymous, c. 13th century, Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt.
2 - Madonna del Magnificat (Madonna of the Magnificat, aka Virgin and Child with Five Angels) – Botticelli
Angels & Angelology in the Middle Ages, by David Keck:
It appears that there has not always been a consensus on how they should be represented.By the thirteenth century, angelology had become a required, formal part of the theological curriculum at the University of Paris, and Bonaventure, Aquinas, and their fellow scholastics were required to develop complex angelological systems. So pervasive were angelic matters that a manuscript for a medieval miracle play provides stage directions for portraying an angel "teleporting" a man from one place to another. In the Middle Ages, angels were ubiquitous.
[...] The great investigations of the thirteenth-century scholastics into the nature and character of the angels come from the encounters between Abraham, Jacob, and others and the angels. What do angels look like? Do they have bodies? How would medieval Christians have imagined an angel? Do they have personalities or emotions? How many of these creatures are there? In the Middle Ages, both Scripture and iconographic traditions provided the clues for answering such questions.
[…] The illiterate person's image of how an angel might appear would have been molded less by the words of Scripture directly than by the art and architecture of medieval Europe. The second Council of Nicea, meeting in 787 to end the iconoclastic controversy in favor of the veneration of images, had addressed the question whether angels can be represented in art. They responded that since angels were finite in their form, and since Scripture revealed that angels appear as men, then artists were to portray angels. Although this council formally legitimated the depiction of angels, Christians had seen angels in art for centuries. Initially represented as young people without wings, angels began to have wings after the conversion of Constantine.4 As classical art and images began to exert an even greater influence on Christian art, Christian artists used the Greco-Roman figure of Nike, the winged goddess of victory as a model for their angels. The wingless angel of the tomb of Christ, for example, soon came to have wings; the description of the winged seraphim and cherubim superseded the literal gospel account. As an iconographic tradition, wings were a useful means of distinguishing angels from saints or other humans. (The angular shape of the wings also made their form appealing to artists seeking a subject to decorate spandrels in arched galleries.) An other guideline for the depictions of angels in the Gothic period concerned footwear. The Son, angels, and apostles would be distinguished by their bare feet, whereas the saints traditionally would have some sort of shoe or sandal. Further, in the thirteenth century, angels, like women, regularly had small chins.
In his On Beauty, Umberto Eco suggests that for Ancient Greeks beauty might not had been rigid and immutable, but something dependent on perspective and which involves opposing concepts:These principles, like most artistic principles, were not universal. A perusal of the images preserved in the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University illustrates the diversity of angelic iconography. Some angels, for example, were depicted with beards; some had wings, others did not. Depictions of the angels who appeared to Abraham sometimes followed the Genesis account, which says nothing of wings. The Book of Tobit also does not mention wings, but some portrayals of Tobias and Raphael include the angel's wings. Thirteenth-century France witnessed the first "smiling angels" (suggesting a kinder, gentler angel than the Romanesque angels of judgment and punishment), and in the following century German and French artists began to depict angels as children. Chaucer humorously evokes the red faces of the cherubim of his day when he describes the pimpled face of the Summoner in the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales as being on fire like the cherubim's faces. The familiar bodiless cherubim who have only infantile heads and wings appear in the fifteenth century. As ideas about God, sin, salvation, and religious practices changed, so did the depictions of the angels in medieval art. Because ideas about angels remain subordinate to beliefs about the fundamental relationship between God and humans, transformations of images of angels are dependent on this primary relationship. Nevertheless, while the art produced during a particular period embodied characteristics particular to that period, the buildings, sculpture, and glass of earlier periods often remained in later periods, creating a diverse world of images. Thus, Romanesque images of harsh, castigating angels at the Last Judgment coexited with the more varied depictions of angels in later eras.
And he continues, further detailing the opinions of different schools of thought of the era.In their architecture and in their pictorial representations, the Egyptians gave no consideration to perspective, an aspect that was subjected to abstract and rigidly respected canons. But Greek art attached primary importance to subjective perspective. Greek painters invented foreshortening, which does not respect the objective precision of beautiful forms: the perfect circularity of a shield can be adapted to the point of view of the observer, who sees it in flattened perspective.
[…] Contrary to what was later believed, Greek sculpture did not idealise an abstract body, but rather sought for an ideal Beauty through a synthesis of living bodies, which was the vehicle for the expression of a psychophysical Beauty that harmonised body and soul, in other words the Beauty of forms and the goodness of the soul: this was the ideal underpinning Kalokagathia, the noblest expressions of which are the poems of Sappho and the sculptures of Praxiteles.
[…] According to mythology, Zeus assigned an appropriate measure and a just limit to all beings: the government of the world thus coincides with a precious and measurable harmony, expressed in the four mottoes on the walls of the temple at Delphi: 'The most beautiful is the most just', 'Observe the limit', 'Shun hubris [arrogance]' and 'Nothing in excess'. It was on the basis of these rules that the common Greek sense of Beauty was based, in accordance with a world view that interpreted order and harmony as that which applies a limit to 'yawning Chaos', from whose maw Hesiod said that the world sprang. This was an idea placed under the protection of Apollo, who is in fact portrayed among the Muses on the western façade of the temple at Delphi. But on the opposite, eastern side of the same temple (dating from the fourth century BC) there is a portrayal of Dionysus, god of Chaos and the unbridled breach of all rules.
Relevantly, he also delves into the definitions of Ugliness:For the early Pythagoreans, while harmony consisted not only in the opposition between odd and even, but also in that between limited and unlimited, unity and multiplicity, right and left, male and female, straight and curved, and so on, it would seem that Pythagoras and his immediate disciples thought that, when two opposites are in contrast to each other, only one of them represents perfection: the odd number, the straight line and the square are good and beautiful, the elements placed in opposition to them represent error, evil and disharmony.
Heraclitus was to propose a different solution: if the universe contains opposites, elements that appear to be incompatible, like unity and multiplicity, love and hate, peace and war, calm and movement, harmony between these opposites cannot be realised by annulling one of them, but by leaving both to exist in a state of continuous tension. Harmony is not the absence of but the equilibrium between opposites.
Later Pythagoreans like Philolaus and Architas, who lived between the fifth and the fourth centuries BC, accepted these suggestions and introduced them into the corpus of their doctrines.
This marks the birth of an idea of equilibrium between two opposed entities that neutralise each other, a polarity between two apparently contradictory aspects that become harmonious only because they are in opposition to each other. And, once these aspects are transported to the level of visual relationships, the result is symmetry. Pythagorean speculation therefore expressed a need for symmetry that had always been alive in Greek art and went on to become one of the finest canons in the art of Classical Greece.
3 - Venere Dormiente (Sleeping Venus) – GiorgioneVarious aesthetic theories, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, see Ugliness as the antithesis of Beauty, a discordance that breaks the rules of that proportion (cf. Chapter III) on which both physical and moral Beauty is based, or a lack of something that a creature should by nature possess. In any case a principle is admitted that is observed almost uniformly: although ugly creatures and things exist, art has the power to portray them in a beautiful way, and the Beauty of this imitation makes Ugliness acceptable. There is no lack of evidence regarding this concept from Aristotle to Kant. If we go no further than these reflections, the question is simple: the Ugliness that repels us in nature exists, but it becomes acceptable and even pleasurable in the art that expresses and shows 'beautifully' the ugliness of Ugliness. But up to what point does a beautiful representation of Ugliness (or of monstrosity) lend it some degree of fascination? Medieval man had already set himself the problem of a beautiful representation of the Devil, a problem that was to resurface in all its intensity in the Romantic period.
It is no accident in the late Classical period and above all in the Christian period, that the problem of Ugliness becomes more complex. Hegel puts this very well when he remarks that with the advent of the Christian sensibility and of the art that conveyed it central importance is reserved (especially as far as Christ and his persecutors are concerned) for pain, suffering, death, torture. Hell and the physical deformations suffered both by victims and their tormentors.
4 - La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja) – Francisco de Goya
5 – Lady Lilith – Dante Gabriel Rossetti
On the other hand, in Hatzaki’s Beauty and the Male Body in Byzantium some concrete examples of human beauty are provided.
It also gives some insights on the Byzantine perception of what is ugly:Anna notes that Emperor Alexios, though not tall, was well proportioned and symmetrical in body, radiant in countenance and blessed with a brilliant gaze. His cheeks were red, his shoulders broad, his build mighty. Empress Eirene was similarly well proportioned, with a face that gleamed like the moon, skin both white and rosy, and joyful eyes. Of Maria of Alania, readers are told that she was slender like a cypress tree, white skinned like the snow but also ruddy like a rose, with luminous eyes and arching golden brows. As for the foreign Robert Guiscard, he too is described as tall and of a height surpassing other men. He was rosy skinned, blond haired and broad shouldered, with eyes that shone like fire and a perfectly harmonious body.3 The beauty of the seven-year-old Constantine Doukas is similarly described despite his young age: his hair was blond, his skin white, his cheeks rosy and his eyes brilliant. As her descriptions record the details of the appearance of her characters almost from head to toe, the image of physical beauty that emerges from Anna’s writing is that of a list of specific, beautiful features, which were ascribed to beautiful bodies. Features such as considerable height, a good, sturdy build, well-proportioned limbs, a white and rosy complexion, radiant skin, brilliant eyes with arching brows and blond or ruddy hair appear to constitute a concrete image of physical beauty in Anna’s history.
The evidence of Byzantine writing suggests that this view of physical beauty that appears in the Alexiad fitted in with contemporary attitudes: from historical writing to fiction, from real characters to imaginary heroes, the ‘beautiful’ appear to possess a set of identifiable, easily recognizable characteristics many of which match those identified in Anna’s writing. In the twelfth-century romance of Drosilla and Chariclis (c.1157?), as Niketas Eugenianos creates the characters of the two young lovers, the protagonists of the narrative, he bestows upon them exceptional beauty. Chariclis, whose beauty and glowing countenance, we are told, surpasses the stars, sports golden hair, a ruddy complexion and a broad chest. He has blond, curly hair which reaches down to his back and fine slender hands with white fingers. Drosilla too has golden-blond curls, fine beautifully shaped fingers and a complexion resembling a rose but also the whiteness of the snow. She has beautiful black eyes, perfect arching brows, a cypress-like posture and pearl-like teeth.4 In the ‘proto-romance’ of Digenis Akritis, written in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, and telling of the exploits of the great warrior Digenis, the noble guard of the border lands, the hero is described as a beautiful young man.5 He has ‘a graceful appearance, with fair curly hair, large eyes, a white and rosy face, deep black eyebrows and he had a chest like crystal, a fathom broad’.6 The object of Digenis’s affection, the unnamed Girl, possesses a luminous countenance, beautiful eyes, ‘deep black eyebrows, the black undiluted’, fair curly hair and a face white like snow ‘with a tint at the centre like the choice purple which emperors honour’.7
In Michael Psellos’s (1018–c.1078) eleventh-century historical text, the Chronographia, the handsome young Michael IV is described as having a well-proportioned body, a blossoming complexion, bright eyes and truly red cheeks that became ever more ravishing when he blushed.8 The beauty of Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, praised as rivalling that of Achilles and Nireas, also receives an elaborate description: Psellos describes the symmetry of the emperor’s body, his perfect analogies, his ruddy hair which shone like rays of sunlight, his white body which appeared like clear and translucent crystal.9
[…] What this underlines is a key aspect of the Byzantine perception of beauty as a notion: physical beauty appears to have been regarded not an abstract, indescribable quality, as ‘a certain something in one’s air’, but as something concrete and tangible which could be read on the body of the bearer through a series of visual signs; as a list of identifiable, often-repeated, even stereotypical physical features
Yearning to have at least a glimpse of historical beauty ideals in other cultures, I have a look at Bloom’s and Conrad’s Early Islamic Art and Architecture to understand the standards of other Caucasoid cultures/races. According to them, we’d better rely more on books and some other forms of art than paintings for that task:In the story of Velthandros and Chrysandza, the hero is called upon to judge a beauty show held in the Castle of Love and charged to bestow a golden rod upon the fairest maiden of all. He is thus faced with a contest of beauties, from which the perfection of Chrysandza will emerge triumphant, after defeating the imperfect beauty of all other contestants. In doing so, the story sets the blond-haired, gleaming eyed, white-skinned beauty of the heroine against the flawed bodies of her rivals, which are dismissed in a manner that sets excellence against physical fault and ultimately beauty against ugliness. This juxtaposition, however, of beauty and ugliness poses a broader question. If ugliness, like beauty, is written on the body, what can it tell us about the bearer and what does it reveal about itself as a quality on its own right?
As Velthandros proceeds to dismiss the thirty-nine comely maids that make up Chrysandza’s competition, he addresses a number of candidates in turn and explains his decision by naming the physical fault that ruins their beauty and makes them ugly (aschimizei). He identifies, in other words, the ugly part that damns the otherwise beautiful whole, thus providing his audience with a list of undesirable physical features that make a body ugly. Blurry eyes, large, excessively fleshed and poorly shaped lips, dark skin, brows that join in the middle of the forehead, a slumping posture, excessive weight or crooked teeth deny each candidate in turn the golden rod, bestowing fault (psogos) upon their otherwise fine appearance. In its elaborate detail, Velthandros’s speech is evocative of attitudes towards ugliness in Byzantium. As with beauty, ugliness too is made up of features, and a single ugly characteristic can evidently mar the beauty of the whole. More importantly, perhaps, Velthandros’s account also indicates that to the standard, repetitive ideal of beauty, ugliness proposes varied alternatives. Whereas ideal teeth look simply like a row of pearls, Velthandros describes how ugly ones protrude and recede at will, some sticking out, others coming still forward. Imperfect eyes, similarly, can be either hot and blurry or watery and appearing as if at risk of drowning.2 Whereas the beautiful body in Byzantium is easily summed up by the dictates of the ideal and made up of standard, often repeated, beautiful features from blond hair and white skin to gleaming eyes, the ugly body seems defined mostly by its diversity.
[…]Evocative of Byzantine perceptions on the unsightly body, the physical characteristics that make up the varied world of ugliness in Byzantine writing appear to apply equally to both sexes. When the third contestant in Velthandros and Chrysandza is dismissed for her dark skin, for instance, she is condemned for a feature that appears often in physical descriptions of (ugly) men and women alike. It appears as the defining attribute of Anna Komnene’s much-disliked younger brother in the Alexiad where she describes the future Emperor John as a dark-skinned infant, in pointed contrast to beautiful children in the Alexiad like the blond, white (milky-)skinned and rosy-cheeked Constantine Doukas. In the writings of John Zonaras in the Epitome Historion, the author quotes the unflattering nickname Antzypotheodoros ascribed to the ‘dark Theodore’ who joined John Tzimiskes in the murder of Nikephoros Phokas. The nickname, which translates as ‘Gypsy-Theodore’, was an open reference to the bearer’s dark complexion (melagchrous) and thus related explicitly to Theodore’s physical shortcoming.4
A dark complexion was generally seen in an unfavourable light in Byzantium, with black skin in particular associated also with the appearance of demons, who are habitually described as the dark figures of Ethiopians in Byzantine writing.5 In the Life of St Andrew the Fool, for instance, written in the mid-tenth century but enjoying popularity and continual readership in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the figure of the black man, whether Ethiopian or Arab, serves almost as a shorthand for a demon.6 A woman who consulted a sorcerer is punished by being pursued in her dreams by a lustful Ethiopian, a figure that she promptly interprets as an evil demon. The Arab merchant who verbally abuses St Epiphanios is also a demon envious of the saint’s virtue. With dark skin bearing such negative connotations, it is no surprise to find a dark complexion featuring among the list of negative attributes outlined in Velthandros’s story, or to see it transformed into a nickname for the unfortunate ‘Gypsy-Theodore’.
Looking for passages describing their beauty conventions, here’s what I found:In Western art there has been a consensus for over two millennia that painting, sculpture and architecture are the "major" forms of art, which are complemented, but not challenged, by such "minor" arts as textiles, ceramics, metalwork, glass, and the arts of the book. In Islamic art, however, this hierarchy does not hold. Although architecture was just as important in the Islamic lands as it was in the West, painting and sculpture, particularly on a large scale, were hardly known. In contrast, the arts of the book, textiles, and ceramics took on unparalleled importance and must be understood as major artistic vehicles, quite apart from the essential role played, for example, by the trade in textiles, fibers, and dyes in medieval Islamic economies.
[…] Much of the history of Western art has been concerned with the representa_tion of the human figure, but one of the most striking features of Islamic art is the relative unimportance of human representation.
[…] In contrast to the history of Western art, the study of the history of Islamic art and architecture is barely a century old.
Fitting to the subject, Strickland's Saracens, Demons and Jews tells that:The figures at Qusair 'Amra offer the most detailed gallery of feminine beauty which survives from Umayyad times — though the painted plaster belles from Khirbat al-Mafjar, resplendent in lipstick, mascara, and scarlet finger-nails and toe-nails, run them close. It may be relevant to quote in this context the description of the ideal woman which Ettinghausen has extrapolated from the works of the pre-Islamic poets;206 of course many of these cliches remained in vogue in the century of the Umayyads:207
"the ideal Arab woman must be so stout that she nearly falls asleep; that she must be clumsy when rising and lose her breath when moving quickly; that her breasts should be full and rounded, her waist slender and graceful, her belly lean, her hips sloping and her buttocks so fleshy as to impede her passage through a door. Her legs are said to be like columns of alabaster and marble, her neck like that of a gazelle, while her arms are described as well-rounded, with soft delicate elbows, full wrists and long fingers. Her face with its white cheeks must not be haggard, her eyes are those of a gazelle with the white and black of the eyeball clearly marked.208"
And to understand what was considered beautiful, it’s useful to know what was considered ugly:Physiognomical theory rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that mental disposition follows bodily characteristics, and the second asserts that the body suffers with affectations of the soul. This means that a person's character may be determined by correctly interpreting specific physical signs, such as movements and gestures; color of skin, hair, and eyes; facial expressions; growth of hair; skin texture; voice; condition of the flesh; bodily proportions and overall build. In other words, the physiognomical sysstem is a semiotic one, in that parts of the body arc read as signs of moral disposition, such as courage, cowardice, good disposition, dullness of sense, shamelessness, well-ordered behavior, high spirits, low spirits, effeminate nature, harshness, hot temper, gentle disposition, meanness of spirit, gambling instincts, abusiveness, compassion, gluttony, lasciviousness, and good memory. 10
In the physiognomical treatises, each part of the body is described carefully in all of its variants and then interpreted along moral lines. For example, Polemo explains the moral significance of different hair types. Curly hair indicates fearfulness and arrogance, stiff hair is a sign of ineptitude and stupidity, coarse hair signifies a barbarian, soft hair characterizes effeminates, too coarse hair marks a savage, and black hair indicates fearfulness and productivity.1 In the chapter devoted to cars, we learn that big ears mark a man robbed of his senses, small ears are a sign of evil, slightly erect ears (like a dog's) are the hallmark of the foolish, while "sufficiently large" ears belong to the strong and virtuous. 1
So, which phenotypes do you think were favored the most? Both fair and dark hair are represented, same for eye color and deep black eyebrows seemed to be very popular, though the preferred tone of skin was light and even rosy. I’ve got the impression that curly hair was well liked and maybe even overrepresented, but negative associations to it weren’t unheard of either. Could one consider that both Southern and Northern European looks were cherished? I wonder if that would include CM/UP phenotypes too, given the stereotype about overweight Nordic opera singers like Brünnhilde, for instance.Two aspects of demonic physiognomy that deserve special attention are beards and distortions of the nose, both observable in the Troyes and the Huntingfield Psalter images just discussed. Negative interpretations were attached to enlarged or misshapen noses from antiquity onward. We know from the little Book of Physiognomy, copies of which survive from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, 46 that hooked noses signify drunkenness, voraciousness, arrogance, and wantonness; and bulbous noses signify greed, foolishness, and a disregard for the future.47 According to a fifteenth-century version of the Secreta Secretorum, a large nose signifies covetousness, concupiscence, and makes its bearer resemble an ox; while crooked, upturned noses belong to the angry and lecherous, giving them a simian aspect.48
[…] It has been well observed that the prominent, hooked nose was a physical feature transferred to Jews as part of the demonization process.10 This is why the hooked noses so prevalent in pejorative images of Jews should not necessarily be considered only a stereotyped "ethnic" or "Semitic" feature, but rather as carrying more general negative meaning as a sign of evil.5 That this same feature is also observable in images of non-Jewish negative figures, such as executioners and torturers of saints (when these are not meant to represent Jews), is another reason not to see an exaggerated, hooked nose solely as a mark of Jewishness. Noses provided artists with one of many points of contrast in their efforts to physically differentiate the good figures from the evil ones. In any case, it is the demonic identification that remains consistent in both form and meaning in negative images of Jews and other negative figures.
A well-known image that juxtaposes demon and Jewish physiognomy, thereby making the "family resemblance" very clear, is the head of the Roll of the Exchequer for the year 1233 (fig. 28). Represented in this group portrait are Isaac and other Norwich Jews, some of whom are identified by inscriptions. This image, with its many layers of meaning, has already been analyzed in detail,12 so for now our discussion will focus rather narrowly on the noses.
Both the demons and Jews have long, hooked noses. Most notably, Colbif the demon is shown pointing to the hooked noses of Abigail and Moses "as if claiming them for his own."53 That most of the figures are shown in profile-profile positioning in itself being a negative sign in this context-draws even more attention to the form of the noses.14 In this image, then, the hooked nose is a kind of visual shorthand for both demons and Jews, and an important means by which their alliance is visibly established.
Beards, like pointed hats, are not necessarily a negative attribute; after all, Christ commonly wears a beard in later medieval art. However, we will be concerned here with beards that carry negative meaning, normally in combination with other pejorative pictorial motifs. In Classical art, the beards commonly worn by the gods have specific bestial associations, most notably with goats. In the medieval bestiaries, the goat (hircus) is described as a lascivious animal, so full of lust that his eyes look sideways.5 We may therefore assume that the attribute of the goat's beard in medieval art may carry sexual significance, just as it did in Classical depictions of satyrs and other lascivious types. Because demons were frequently involved in the seduction or impregnation of women,56 the attribute of a goat's beard was very appropriate, sometimes in combination with matching goat's hooves, as in the Livre de la Vigne and Huntingfield Psalter images (figs. 21, 27/plate 8).
Like the hooked nose, the beard is another attribute transferred onto contemporary portrayals of Jews, where it may carry double significance as a demonic and sexual sign, in accordance with contemporary beliefs about Jews, their nature, and their allegiances (figs. 39, 44/plate 13, 126/plate 15).57 If we bear in mind its sexual connotations, the prominent, triple beard worn by Isaac of Norwich is especially significant in this context, not only because it is a familiar demonic attribute but also because one purpose of this image was to claim a sexual relationship between Isaac and Abigail, the contemporary Jewish woman pictured and inscribed directly below him.58
Which phenotypes do you recognize in each image?
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Originally Posted by Brás Garcia de Mascarenhas
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