(Okay, the statue group was made after their deaths, but Harmodius at least was described as very beautiful by classical historians.)
Most people in almost all societies throughout history have been pretty homely, and still are. But there has always been a small minority of beautiful youths and maidens, and I doubt that today’s top candidates really look much different from those of the past few millennia, once you look past cultural differences of clothing and hair styles.
What the OP seems to be after is the name of the first famous beautiful youth/maiden of whom a contemporary portrait survives, in a style that’s reasonably similar to that of modern photography, and shows the subject without culturally alien accessories like huge headdresses that would interfere with our perception of them as “hot” by modern standards.
I think this quest is so culturally biased as to be essentially meaningless, but knock yourself out. What do you think of the 2nd millennium BCE Egyptian queens Nefertiti and Tiye?
When it comes to people in old photographs looking homely - my boyfriend has started doing historical wet plate photography. I always thought people in the past had that “Civil War look” because they had bad teeth or something. Let me tell you - everybody looks like that when you take a wet-plate photograph of them. Something about having to stare at the camera for ten or fifteen seconds just makes you look like that. This was his first ever picture - not our best, but the only one he has online as far as I know. Since I’ve seen a few pictures of myself one would mistake for a young serious male coal miner, I’ve decided that more than teeth and such people look historical in photographs because of the actual process.
Also, there’s plenty of portraits of attractive young women in the past. I think young princess Elizabeth wasn’t bad looking, for example.
How about Nefertiti (the beauty that has come). Supposedly, Egyptian liknesses were fairly realistic at the time and she doesn’t come off looking too bad. I sort of imagine her looking like Kelly Hu in The Scorpion King. I’ve hung out at Nefertiti’s lounge at the Luxor in Vegas and the waitresses are usually pretty hot. I imagine they’re pretty representative of Egyptian women of that era.
Oh, uh, the guy with the beard is obviously not me. (I hope obviously.) That’s one of his roomates. Who doesn’t IRL look as much like some sort of dissipated straw boss on the coffee plantation.
Well, of course the answer is pretty difficult because before the invention of the photograph the only depictions we have are paintings and sculpture, or written attestations.
And of course, there are millions of women who were never painted, sculpted, written about, or photographed. How do we know how hot any of them were? Even if cultural ideas about beauty were different, is it really so hard to imagine that there were attractive women before 1800?
Sure, disease, starvation, and hard work can take a toll on the looks. But just go to places today that are poverty-stricken and tell me you can’t find a single woman in rural China or India or Latin America or Africa who isn’t beautiful and built. Poverty and disease shift the bell curve over, but there are plenty of beautiful women in poor countries.
Helen of Troy was an excuse. I don’t know how pretty she was, but the Greeks had been itching for a fight with the Trojans for a long time…she was just the match that lit the fire.
That nose/chin combination is never going to be good, I think. Wasn’t Anthony attracted to her because of the “grip” named after her or have I just imagined that?
I’d disagree strongly with the idea that people prior to this era were universally unattractive. I’ll confess not to knowing too much about “Bushman” culture or history, but this cursory review of Google Images yields at least some solid 7’s or even 8’s, particularly among the men and I am certain that given enough people, there were certainly more than a few that qualified for “hottie” status as far back as people were overwhelmingly human as opposed to Homo who knows what.
Neandertals probably not, without some beer goggles. But Cro Magnons were fully modern Homo sapiens, there’s no reason a given Cro Magnon couldn’t be as hot as any given female hunter-gatherer.
Again, please read my post carefully. “by today’s standards” can be read to mean: a) Very sexy after one has applied modern cosmetics and hairdressing, and taken pictures which are then digitally retouched to remove all hint of blemish, or b) Very sexy without any such application of cosmetics, et al. By the latter standard, of course, you’d find out that most of those who are “hot” presently would fail; if you don’t believe me, just look at the pics of them that get snapped and printed in the gossip rags.
Since the original post’s statement “by today’s standards” has more than one plausible interpretation, and given that at least one of those interpretations would make the whole inherent underlying premise of the OP (that in the old days, everyone was pretty much ugly) untrue, the OP’s question is inherently flawed. Which only a couple posters here seem to fail to comprehend, given the vastly larger number treating the question with the disdain it deserves.
Since the OP really has no single “factual” answer, this one should have been in IMHO from the beginning. You can still get factual answers in IMHO. But opinions are more welcome there.
Who says there’s even consensus when it comes to ‘today’s standards’ of beauty (really think, say, Jenna Jameson would do well in papua New Guinea? Or in a Vancouver vegan collective?)
Actually I read an article about Colleen McCullough, who is apparently one of the foremost has done a lot of research on Cleopatra and she said that not only was she not hot, she was really quite unappealing with a hook nose (and I think, a single eyebrow), but that she had an incredible charisma that made it easier for her to manipulate people. (I did look for a cite for this that I know of, but I can’t find it on the intarwebs.)
Uh upon reading the entire thread, what Clockwork And Candy said :smack:
Madame Pompadour (circa 1750) was pretty hot. Unfortunately, the best picture I’ve seen of her is not in this collection, but rather in a book I have. I agree with Elendil’s Heir that Emma Hamilton was actually quite breath-taking, if the portraits are to be trusted, and with Zsophia that Good Queen Bess was very attractive in her younger years. There are also some portraits of Renaissance women whose names and titles I can’t remember, but appear to have been highly attractive by today’s standards. But there’s no question that standards of beauty change radically over the years.
