(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
New Day Cafe: The Arbitrariness of Female Beauty Standards [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-04
The BBC recently took a look at something interesting: www.bbc.com/…
Some historic paintings of women have, it’s been recently discovered, been altered over time as beauty standards have changed. Figures who were famous for their beauty in their day were found unattractive by later standards. The feminists were right---conventional beauty standards are socially manufactured to a large degree.
“It is tempting, of course, to believe that technology is to blame, that we fix our faces because, for the first time in history, we can. But there is a history to falsifying beauty – a long one. In recent days, a glimpse of that tradition became visible when it was revealed that conservators for English Heritage, while cleaning a 17th-Century portrait of the great-granddaughter of one of Queen Elizabeth I's closest friends, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, discovered that Diana Cecil's likeness had had a beauty filter of sorts applied to it in the years after it was completed.
While regarded in her own age as a stunner, Cecil's steepening hairline and slim lips – as initially captured in 1634 by the prominent English portraitist Cornelius Johnson when she was 31 years of age – were no longer up to scratch when restorers went to work on her at some point before the end of the 19th Century. Aggressive overpainting of the portrait, which goes on display at London's Kenwood House on 30 November, was revealed when English Heritage removed a layer of old varnish. The retouch had plumped Cecil's lips and dragged her curly fringe down to cover more of her forehead, bringing her appearance and reputation as a legendary looker in line with changing attitudes to beauty.
The forging of Cecil's face was not the first instance of counterfeiting a sitter's appearance – of prioritising faddish attitudes to attractiveness over physiognomy. That distinction likely belongs to a retouched likeness from a century earlier: the portrait of a tragic member of the powerful Medici family, Isabella de' Medici (daughter of Cosimo I de' Medici), who is rumoured to have been killed following a scandalous affair with the cousin of her husband, the Italian nobleman Paolo Giordano Orsini.”
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/4/2209057/-New-Day-Cafe-The-Arbitrariness-of-Female-Beauty-Standards?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
