the outstretched arms) is equal to the height (of the body).”19 Using these calculations, he believed, Vitruvius had rendered human perfection: “He has brought human limbs together in a perfect proportion in so satisfactory a manner that neither the ancients nor the moderns are able to overthrow it.”20 Dürer used his adapted Vitruvian standard to create his idea of a “normal” male and female form, as would be described in his Four Books on Human Proportion.
Figure 1.3. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” man and woman, Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
The intense attention to detail in the precise calculation of the idealized length and breadth of each body part drew the respect of his contemporaries. Dürer, moreover, added something to the equation that Vitruvius had not: variety. After drawing a “normal” man and woman, he sketched several men and women with the necessary and proper proportions but of different body sizes. Among these sketches there were a disproportionate number of images of plump women.
It is unclear from the manuscripts why there was a preponderance of fleshy, rounded women among the artist’s sketches in Four Books on Human Proportion. Surviving reports suggest that Dürer worked with two hundred to three hundred live models in the formulation of his canon of proportions.21 Therefore, it could have been simply that more voluptuous women had made themselves available as models. But that interpretation belies his dedication to the project of empirically fleshing out the parameters of perfect proportionality and thereby beauty. Because he worked on this project for over a decade, a more likely reason was a personal predilection for rounded women. Many of the women he drew, including Katharina and his own wife, Agnes, were fleshy and curvaceous.
Dürer anticipated that his canon of proportions would offer new insights that would separate his work from the canon of perspective current in Italy.22 As it applied to feminine loveliness, this difference was found largely in the means, not the ends. For if Dürer’s mathematical theorizing led him to calculations about perfect proportionality with a seeming predilection for plumpness, a similar standard was in fashion in the most important centers of Renaissance Italy.
Figure 1.4. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” woman (front and profile), Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
Figure 1.5. Albrecht Dürer, image of “normal” woman (back), Four Books on Human Proportion, 1528.
Urbino is a case in point. A thriving center of the Italian Renaissance, Urbino was distinct from other centers of the Renaissance such as Antwerp and Venice in one critical respect: its involvement in the slave trade was minimal. For this reason, the question of black aesthetics was not a topic that many artists or philosophers considered, and Africans were less commonly represented in art from the region. Urbino was, however, an important place for the discussion and dissemination of ideas about female beauty. It was also the birthplace of Raphael, one of the most influential painters of the High Renaissance. Raphael devoted less energy than did Dürer to waxing intellectual about method. Nevertheless, as an artist, he remained deeply invested in the craft of representing true beauty.
In 1514 Raphael drafted a letter on the topic to his friend Conte Baldassare Castiglione. The letter served as one of the few instances in which the artist delineated, in writing, his approach to portraying feminine loveliness. In it, Raphael confided to Castiglione that “in order to paint one beautiful woman, I’d have to see several beautiful women.”23 The statement was reminiscent of Dürer’s claim that God dispersed beauty over the whole world and that an artist needed a diversity of models to comprehend beauty in all its richness. Indeed, the two artists were colleagues; while the German artist was older and already celebrated by the time of Raphael’s rise to fame, by 1514 the two were part of something of a mutual admiration society, exchanging prints and praising one another’s work.24
To Raphael, as to Dürer, no one woman could have it all. In order to comprehend and later represent beauty in a woman, he needed to work with as many women as possible who were judged to be attractive by the casual male observer. Sadly, due to what Raphael described as a shortage of both beautiful women and competent male judges, he explained that instead he usually relied on his own best judgment: “I make use of a certain idea which comes to my mind.”25 This may have been something of a half-truth. The Renaissance represented a rebirth of ancient Greek and Roman art and philosophy. Italian high society at the time was saturated by a rediscovery of the art and ideas of classical antiquity. Urbino itself was teeming with neoclassicists, many of whom were members of the Florentine Academy, a center for the discussion and dissemination of neoclassical, and especially Neoplatonic, ideas.
The “idea” that came to Raphael’s mind was at least partially inspired by current neoclassical theories about true beauty, which described beauty as requiring symmetry, harmony, and perfect proportionality.26 His own work is extolled in part for its achievements in enlivening these classical ideals, even if he was perhaps unwilling to articulate the extent to which he was conversant with them.
The friend to whom he divulged his process of depicting female beauty, Castiglione, was by contrast an open and ardent Neoplatonist. Nearly fifteen years after Raphael sent him a letter with his mini-treatise on beauty, Castiglione’s tome, The Book of the Courtier, appeared in print. In it, he used fictionalized versions of what he claimed were real conversations to reveal the aristocratic ideal of feminine loveliness at the court of Urbino.
In one conversation, a man by the name of Giuliano de Medici is urged to explain exactly what qualified as “beauty.” Giuliano offers the generally well-respected neoclassical view shot through with Christian idioms, stating that “there are divers [sic] sorts of beauty.”27 When this definition proves unsatisfying, he becomes more specific. Differing from the likes of Dürer, Giuliano betrayed a decided preference for a lady who is neither “too fat” nor “too thin”:
Since women may and ought to take more care for beauty than men—and there are divers sorts of beauty—this Lady ought to have the good sense to discern what those garments are that enhance her grace.… Thus, if she is a little more stout or thin than the medium, or fair or dark, let her seek help from dress, but as covertly as possible.28
Giuliano’s preference for women he describes as “medium,” a term that was seemingly self-evident and yet maddeningly unspecific, was part of the Italian neoclassicists’ understanding of beauty. As with Dürer, harmony and proportionality were integral, a point Giuliano underscores when he states, “If the form of the whole body is fair and well proportioned, it attracts and allures anyone who looks upon it.”29 But whereas Dürer calculated proportionate physiques in a manner that separated the concepts of “proportion” and “size,” the Italian humanists of the Florentine Academy had a slightly more exacting standard of female beauty, one derived from the ancients. Their model was a Roman goddess, resurrected in the Florentine Academy in the late fifteenth century. Her name was Venus.30
Giuliano did not use the name “Venus” in The Book of the Courtier. He didn’t need to. Giuliano de Medici carried the family name that was synonymous with the goddess’s return to glory. His father was Lorenzo de Medici, celebrated fifteenth-century Florentine ruler, patron of the arts, and sponsor of the Florentine Academy. In the 1460s, Lorenzo became friends with a young artist whom his own father (Piero di Cosimo de Medici) had taken in shortly before his death, the famed Alessandro Botticelli.
Figure 1.6. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, c. 1482–1485. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Botticelli’s
