Renaissance Men Beauty Ideals

This essay will look at female beauty ideals during the Renaissance and how these beauty ideals condition the position of women in relation to men. Particular attention will be payed to the paradox of physical beauty and spiritual virtue being represented in works of art for male sexual gratification. The role of beauty in the representation of women in Quattrocento art is indicative of the way they were perceived by men: cannons of beauty (what made a woman beautiful, but also what it meant for a woman to be beautiful), and the way they were perceived and treated by male artists and male viewers participated in the objectification and fetishization of women through their bodies. If the physical beauty of a woman is the expression of her inner virtue, if a body can only be beautiful if it is virtuous, and it can only be so if the woman's mind is pure, then women's value is reduced to their bodies. Their physical appearance had to conform to certain commonplaces, and meet specific standards. Women were objects in the eyes of men, even unconsciously, and they were deprived of a personal identity and, became part of a homogeneous group. These ideas were supported by contemporary poets, more specifically because they did not praise the individual qualities of their lovers, but rather common, physical, attributes thought to belong to the 'perfect woman'. This led to the creation of a trope, a female ideal to be aspired to in artistic representations of women. More than objectified, Renaissance women were fetishized, their virtue being overtly …show more content…
What does representing a body mean? What meanings were invested in the body, and particularly in the female body when it was represented? How did representations of male and female bodies differ during the Renaissance and what does this tell us about social