Saturday, June 09, 2007

Chubby "Afrodite"

It's all running together....I can't remember where I took this picture...I want to say Ostia Antica, at their mini museum. But it might have been Naples...Or was it on one of our self-guided museum tours?!? So unless anyone knows different? Let's call it umm, somewhere in Italy.
This was not the only "chubby" Aphrodite (Afrodite in Italiano) that I ran across. But I believe it was the first one I could take a picture of -- many museums have a no-picture no-movie rule.

I think I mentioned this when I posted "on the ground" in Italy, but I shall restate it with some visual today. Skinny was SO NOT IN during the height of the Roman empire. The beauty queens were chubby! I am so down with that.

Pale was also in fashion. Women, well WEALTHY women who could afford such a luxury, would bathe in donkey's milk and the like to try to bleach their skin. I was reminded of one of the "Dracula" stories I found when I was in school. I can't remember which crazy queen it was, but she used to bathe in the blood of virgins or somesuch nastiness to keep her skin young, and pretty, and porcelain-esque.

There's this one beautiful sculpture of Hades and Persephone in the Borghese gallery (no pictures allowed, scroll down a bit here and you can get a fuzzy picture) that depicts the moment where Hades is dragging Persephone with him to the Underworld. Once you are finished being simply in utter awe of the mastery needed to show Hades' strong god-fingers digging into Persephone's supple flesh? And it does look SOFT! You start noticing that Persephone is soft all over! She too has a couple places where maybe she had one pomegranate too many. I LOVE IT!

All of this makes me laugh and laugh as, wasn't it the Italians that recently put out that law that their super models can't be too thin or something? Aside from just being rational, I think it might come from the idea of what beautiful was to their ancestors. And that beauty included a little chub!

Okay, time to pack up the computer. See you all (my three loyal readers :)) sometime next week...or whenever the cable gets installed.

PS: I will be in the middle of moving but wherever I find myself with a spare moment, I will gladly pull out my mom's mom-day-gift and at least knit a few stitches. How did this day sneak up on me?!? Follow the link on my sidebar for more info!

3 comments:

Bezzie said...

I love the grip-marks in sculpture like that. Blows my mind!

Chubby and pasty huh? I was born in the wrong time.

Anonymous said...

Yea, think about those painters that painted the naked chubby ladies reclining on couches. Apparently artists have more accurate perception of reality than the rest of the world. We need more artists around. :)

Anonymous said...

Yea? I meant to say "yeah." :)