European art boobies

I was looking through a book on Rubens earlier today, and was reminded of an apparently common tendency for women in European art nudes from the 1500s-1800s to have very small or pale areolas. Some nudes like Rubens’ Porträt der Hélène Fourment even have nipples that are the same colour as the rest of their bodies, which doesn’t seem very common in reality. Were small/pale areolas an aesthetic ideal in Renaissance Europe? Or were they often kept to a minimum just because more prominent areolas would have been seen as too blatantly titillating for respectable artwork?

you left out the possibility ofpigment fade.

Remember also that smaller and paler areolas are characteristic of women who haven’t been pregnant, so they would signify to the viewer virginity and nubility.

Of course, that wasn’t literally true of Helene Fourment (Rubens’ wife), but he wasn’t under contract to paint everything exactly as it appeared, either.

Pigment fade might be part of it, good idea. But even in old European paintings where you can clearly see the outline of areolas, they tend to be towards the smaller end of natural variation. There are some pretty obvious examples I want to cite here, but my mind is blanking on them… Even Eve in the Ghent Altarpiece, appears to be depicted as pregnant but has kind of smallish areolas for the size of her breasts. I don’t seriously know if this is even a trend, or just a confirmation bias on my part.

No cite for this, but I have heard that since it was often difficult for painters to find women willing to pose nude for them, plenty of famous artists had to work with either a clothed female model or a nude male model and do the mammaries from memory. I’ve seen any number of old paintings in museums where the women’s breasts seemed oddly shaped or positioned, and while some of this may be due to deliberate artistic choices I think many were the work of artists who hadn’t seen many bare breasts “in the flesh”.

When I saw an exhibit of Edward Burne-Jones’s work a couple of years ago, I was struck by the abs on Andromeda in “The Rock of Doom”. She looks like she hits the gym a lot more often than the average damsel in distress. Since she also has rather odd looking small, high breasts and very slim hips, I’m thinking this is a case where Burne-Jones had a female model for the head and a male model for the body and just did the best he could at approximating a nude woman.

This seems difficult to believe. Surely, even if the artists had no female lovers or professional models to choose from, there were prostitutes or other ladies down on their luck who’d be willing to sit for a ducat or two.

Wow that is an odd picture. I agree she looks pretty off, but so does the character I’m assuming is Perseus. He has no… weight to stance, you know what I mean? He looks as if he’s floating in mid-air above the waves, rather than having one foot perched on the higher rock while stepping off of it with the second foot. For a painter of that era I’d expect a much better sense of physics.

Maybe he was the Rob Liefield of his day.

Ahem, very pale women have very, very pale nipples and aureola. Some still have embarrassing memories of a boy teasing them in high school about not having nipples at all. The only color visible is the tiny blue veins.

Sigh.

Sure, but men were easier and cheaper to find: the students in an artist’s studio were male rather than female, for example.

I think it’s generally accepted that many female nudes in Renaissance art were based on male models, both for economic reasons and because of an aesthetic fashion for androgyny.

Rubens, of course, is post-Renaissance, and we know he used female models.

I would say that’s because of the winged sandals, and you do sort of see wings in the vicinity of his feet, but I don’t actually see the sandals themselves.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s supposed to be flying down to save Andromeda, not just walking on the rocks. At the exhibition I attended the different paintings from this series were displayed together, and Perseus is shown putting on his winged sandals in one of them and is clearly flying in others.

Yes. Some fair-skinned women simply do look like that. I can vouch that there are women out there who have had children and whose aureolas are still almost indistinguishable from the surrounding skin.

I’ve seen more than one pair of blonde, Scandi breasts where the areola is the same color as the skin surrounding it. Some even have no discernible nipple at all, unless aroused or cold. Perfectly realistic, although not especially common even among blonde Scandi women.

What’s more disturbing is, Eve appears to have three nostrils.

Unless this is a whoosh, she looks fine to me.

Some breasts just look like that. I was looking forward to the supposed darkening of the nipples that was supposed to be part of pregnancy but it never happened.

Just to the left of her nose is a dark circular something that, in the original image of Eve, appears to be a third nostril. Obviously, it is not, but it kinda LOOKS like one.

Cocaine is a helluva drug.

Getcher extreme closeups of Eve here (and use the split screen controls for infrared comparison) Closer to Van Eyck

Not just an extreme closeup, but I suspect a much better job of color matching … the original image of Eve has a very strong bluish cast to it … and the fine cracks in the paint are not visible (especially obvious near the left eye). It’s also obvious the artist screwed up the nose … the line is just WRONG, and result is a strangely misshapen lump on the right side (her right) of her nose, which probably contributes to the third nostril effect. The effect is not nearly so evident in the new image, so I’d guess it’s an artifact of the first image’s photography.

Yes, it’s not so much that you actually see a third nostril as that the lump on the wing of her nose makes it look like she has two septa.