href="#ue676fa3c-6a8a-58d6-acb9-f7c0d1714818">chapter 4, “Birth of the Ascetic Aesthetic,” I focus on the developing relationship between Protestant Christian identity and self-abnegation. I show that abstemiousness in England during the eighteenth century laid the groundwork for moralizing surrounding the oral appetites that would be seen in subsequent eras, particularly in the United States. I also show that some devout Protestants viewed fatness—the purported evidence of intemperate eating—as immoral. Slenderness, by contrast, was viewed as closer to godliness. In chapter 5, “American Beauty: The Reign of the Slender Aesthetic,” I show that American Anglo-Saxon women adopted the ideals surrounding eating and embodiment that were popularized in eighteenth-century England. In the context of religious health reform movements and the massive immigration of Irish racial Others, Anglo-Saxon women used strict diets and slimness to convey religious enlightenment and racial uplift. In chapter 6, “Thinness as American Exceptionalism,” I reveal how the presence of the next wave of immigrants—southern and eastern Europeans—contributed to the mainstream consolidation of the aesthetic of slenderness. Following the trail of race science, I show that a new eugenic discourse of racial amalgamation among northern and western Europeans circulated widely in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This rhetoric promoted the desirability of women from these racial groups. It also intimated that the American melting pot created exceptional svelte beauties drawn from these superior races.
Part 3, “Doctors Weigh In,” examines how the American medical establishment viewed fatness and thinness from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In chapter 7, “Good Health to Uplift the Race,” I profile the life and works of the esteemed Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. I show that he, like many medical men of his day, regarded poor diet and excessive slimness, especially among elite American women, as a threat to the nation. Kellogg and others hoped to encourage women to gain weight to demonstrate the vigor of the nation. In chapter 8, “Fat, Revisited,” I explain the growth of anti-fat attitudes in the medical field. Due to the rise of actuarial tables that identified excess weight as a health risk, doctors became increasingly concerned about overweight. While the transition was slow at first, the standardization of “normal weight” and an intensified concern about “obesity,” especially among women, were firmly established within the mainstream of medical science by the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book’s epilogue, “The Obesity Epidemic,” I highlight the swing from one epidemic, that of the too-thin American woman, to the other, that of the too-fat American woman, in the span of a century. And I underscore the role that race, aesthetics, morality, and medicine continue to play in the so-called obesity epidemic.
PART I
The Beauty of the Robust
1
Being Venus
I have seen some amongst them whose whole bodies have been so well-built and handsome that I never beheld finer figures, nor can I conceive how they might be bettered, so excellent were their arms, and all their limbs.
—Albrecht Dürer on the African physique, 1528
Her name was Katharina. In her portrait, drawn in 1521, she wears a simple headdress with a single jewel in the center. Her youth is skillfully captured in the roundness and fullness of her cheeks. Her plump body is covered by an unadorned V-neck shirt and a modest, high-collared frock. The entire effect is one of demure and unassuming beauty. Katharina’s eyes are downcast, giving the twenty-year-old an air of solemnity and gravity that might have seemed out of place were she not a slave.1
Katharina lived in Antwerp, Belgium. She was one of two slaves owned by João Brandão, the trade representative to the king of Portugal. Albrecht Dürer, the renowned Renaissance artist, happened to be passing through Antwerp in 1521, creating sketches and woodcuts that he sold around the city. On a brief visit with the Brandão family, he encountered Katharina, and was sufficiently moved by her comeliness to immortalize her in silverpoint.
The artist’s decision to draw the young African woman may have seemed inconsequential at the time. Hers was one of many sketches of Africans that Dürer completed during his lifetime. Nevertheless, his depiction of Katharina was a momentous event. Portrait of an African Woman, Katharina became the first known portrait of a black person in Antwerp. And it was produced at a time in Dürer’s illustrious career during which, after years of studying the human form, he had come to the conclusion that what made something beautiful could never be fully comprehended or definitively laid out. For reasons he could not describe, Katharina too was a beauty.2
Figure 1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of an African Woman, Katharina, 1521. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
A great deal has been written about the aesthetic standards for women that prevailed during the Renaissance. While much of this literature shows that larger, fleshier physiques were prized, it also shows that what was considered attractive was not just about the size of the body, but also its shape. Proportionate and well-rounded physiques were revered, as they were believed to reveal something of the beauty and mystery of divinity. A woman might find herself being considered “too thin” or “too fat,” given the prevailing preference for proportionate—often implying “medium”—physiques. But if a lady had to err on one side of the scale, a fat woman was generally preferred to one who might be derisively labeled “lean” or “bony.”
Comparatively fewer works, however, have explored how the growing population of black women who came to Europe as part of the slave trade affected representations of female beauty during the High Renaissance (late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries). This is not a minor oversight; the most famous artistic expressions of female beauty during this period derived from northern and western Italy and the Low Countries. The major cities in these regions simultaneously served as key ports of the expanding slave trade. Consequently, black women often appear in meditations on beauty by the era’s most important artists.
The burgeoning population of African women as slaves and domestic servants in northern and western Europe between 1490 and 1590 frequently led to the incorporation of black women into the lexicon of what was defined as “perfect female beauty.” The inclusion of black women as beautiful in both high art and aesthetic discourse was neither simple nor without problems. African women were described as well-proportioned and plump, and consequently viewed as physically appealing. Yet the burgeoning discourse about Africans suggested that their purported distinctive facial features made them facially unattractive. Black women were further denigrated due to their servile status. Therefore, despite black women’s reputation as well-formed beauties, their purported African physiognomy and status as slaves became the early basis of “social distinctions” between low-status African women and their high-status European counterparts.3
What follows is a discussion of notions of perfect female beauty in three of the most trafficked centers of artistic ingenuity: western Italy, northern Italy, and the Low Countries. In all three, the correct model of female beauty was a central topic of conversation. Well-apportioned female figures were venerated throughout these areas. However, in two locations—Antwerp, Belgium, and Venice, Italy—the mushrooming population of black women led to their inclusion as beauties of low status and questionable facial allure, but having the right proportions and just enough embonpoint to titillate European sensibilities.
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Katharina was known by
