Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

Many of these characteristics remind the artist voluntarily of the languid
damozels of the pre-Raphaelites, of the “stag-like” Dianas of the Fontaine-
bleau school and, above all, of the graceful visions of female beauty as depicted
by the early Florentines. These resemblances are not a mere coincidence.
If works of art could be measured like human beings, a Bertillon might
prove by facts — what the eye has told the art-student long ago — that the
dimensions of ancient Hebes and Rossetti's Anglo-Italian types, “around
whose sultry lips the breath of sin is blown,” of a lithe Diana by Skopas or
a Botticelli angel festooned with flowers, a St. Gaudens caryatid or a Dewing
woman in modern décollete have a striking similarity of form, and that they
could be identified as belonging to one sisterhood. They have neither the
arms of the Venus of Knidos, the shoulders of Raphael's Galatea, nor the
muscular development of Michael Angelo's“Night.” The beauty is more
primitive, like that of a young girl before having reached maturity. The
muscles are lean and the lines of the body run in long, sweeping curves.
28
prove by facts — what the eye has told the art-student long ago — that the
dimensions of ancient Hebes and Rossetti's Anglo-Italian types, “around
whose sultry lips the breath of sin is blown,” of a lithe Diana by Skopas or
a Botticelli angel festooned with flowers, a St. Gaudens caryatid or a Dewing
woman in modern decollete have a striking similarity of form, and that they
could be identified as belonging to one sisterhood. They have neither the
arms of the Venus of Knidos, the shoulders of Raphaefs Galatea, nor the
muscular development of Michael Angelo's “Night.” The beauty is more
primitive, like that of a young girl before having reached maturity. The
muscles are lean and the lines of the body run in long, sweeping curves.
The expression of the hands and feet have not yet reached the elegance that
we admire in other more robust periods of art, when the spirituality of a
drooping hand has to counterbalance the sensuous charms of the fully
developed body. The lower extremities are elongated to excess, and the
weight of the body seems to rest upon the bend of the knee, whenever the
will, holding the figure erect like a stem, relaxes. It is one of the leading
characteristics, and if the majority of women were really built that way they
would flatly contradict certain “short-legged” sayings of a Frankfort philos-
opher. But Schopenhauer’s statement is only too true; the lower part of a
woman's body (as proven by the anthropometrical studies of Rudolf von
Larisch) is invariably too short for the upper one, they should be equal in
length, but, as it is, the lower part is one-fourth to one-half length of a head
too short. This is a defect of nature, and in this respect the beauty of man
is superior to that of woman, as can be plainly seen in the Adam and Eve
by Hans Memling. In his nai've realism he copied the human figure just
as he saw it, and as both figures are drawn equal in height, the short-legged-
ness in the female figure is very startling. Women have always tried to
overcome this shortcoming by accentuating the waist-line, of placing it
higher than it is in reality (as in the Empire costume) by wearing high-heeled
shoes, and by losing all preciseness of form in wearing stiflF skirts or flowing

28