In fact, he positively rejects such theorists. Marwick argues that compared with changes in politics, culture and fashion, beauty is a ‘relative constant’. Observing that artists have painted women with corpulent frames (as Rubens did) or with plucked foreheads — neither of which modern society finds attractive — he disagrees with the idea that such pictures can be taken as representing the standards of beauty for their periods. Rubens’s portrayal of fat women, he argues, was highly idiosyncratic — a contemporary beauty book warned that breasts should ‘not be too big, pendulous, or too droopy’ — while paintings of apparently plain women simply reflected the looks (and fashions) of their noble subjects, rather than that society’s ideal of beauty.
What really counted, says Marwick, is how the bulk of a woman’s contemporaries reacted to her looks — ‘the sentiments and reactions of flesh-and-blood beholders towards flesh-and-blood individuals’. Thus Samuel Pepys ‘glutted’ himself with looking at Barbara Villiers, mistress to Charles II. And in case after case — which, naturally, become steadily more provable as we move toward the 19th century, when photographs can show us how a woman really looked — the evidence is that a woman considered ‘beautiful’ at the time would indeed be considered ‘beautiful’ today, at least once such variables as fashion differences are taken into account.
Marwick does not claim that nothing has changed in 500 years. But it is beauty’s value, rather than beauty itself, that has changed. Before the rise of the mass media, the only way a woman could exploit her beauty to achieve wealth or social advancement was to trade sexual services for it, whether as a mistress to a nobleman or as a courtesan. By the late 19th century, however, and particularly after the coming of film, a beautiful woman could trade her sex appeal for fame and riches without ever having actually to trade sex. This represented, he writes, ‘the march of female beauty out of the boudoir [and] into the wide public world where it is gawped at, and paid for, not by princes and bankers but by the masses’.
Marwick rightly notes that mass media also brought a wider range of human beauty to the world’s attention: the near perfection of women as different from each other as Audrey Hepburn, Naomi Campbell or Twiggy. While beauty may come in many types, it’s neither random nor subjective. Hard though it may always be for academic theorists like Eco to define, the rest of us will simply continue to know it when we see it.
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