Rumours of the demise of page 3 and news of the Royal Academy’s Rubens exhibition have inspired considerations on the concept of beauty in art and text.

Rubens in the popular mind is associated with a particular female type, though he seems only to have had an adjective of his own since 1834:

Characteristic or suggestive of the paintings of Rubens; esp. (of a woman’s figure) full and rounded.  1834 J. Landseer Catal. Pictures in National Gallery 243: If not picturesque, however, according to the modern construction and present use of that term, the subject is Rubensesque.  (OED)

The curious thing to me is that there seems to be no parallel between word and image in Rubens’s time.

For the earlier period it’s simple enough to illustrate from art the verbal descriptio puellae laid down in the medieval arts of poetry:

let her arms be pleasing, as slender in their form as delightful in their length.  Let substance soft and lean join together in her slender fingers, and appearance smooth and milk white, lines long and straight [...] Let her breast, a picture of snow, bring forth either bosom [sic] as if they were, in effect, uncut jewels side by side.  Let the circumference of her waist be narrowly confined, circumscribable by the small reach of a hand.  I am silent about the parts just below [...] But let her leg for its part realize its length in slenderness [...] (tr. Murphy p. 54)

Thus this description by Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Chaucer calls him Gaufred) c. 1210 can be illustrated by this picture of Bathsheba c. 1485.

         David and Bathsheba, from  French Book of Hours, ca. 1485. British Library MS Harley 2863

But when Góngora writes of female beauty and the urgent need to enjoy it, he’s closer to Geoffrey than to Rubens:

Mientras por competir con tu cabello,
oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano;
mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello;
Mientras a cada labio, por cogello,
siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano;
y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello:
Goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,
No sólo en plata o viola troncada
se vuelva, mas tu y ello juntamente
en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada.

While burnished gold gleams in vain in the sun to compete with your hair;/ while in the middle of the plain your white brow gazes on the fair lily with disdain;/ while more eyes follow each lip to kiss them [each lip] than [follow] the early carnation;/ and while your slender neck triumphs over gleaming crystal with self-assured scorn: enjoy your neck, hair, lips and brow, before what was in your golden youth, gold, lily, carnation, gleaming crystal not only turns to silver or to drooping violet but you and all of it together [turn] into earth, smoke, dust, shadow, nothing. (tr. at Spain Then and Now).

The arts of painting and poetry were commonly said to be sisters.  But only to a point.  When he said ‘Ut pictura poesis’, Horace didn’t actually mean that the arts were analogous in a general way.  In context – and context is all –  he says ‘A poem is like a painting; the closer you stand to this one the more it will impress you, whereas you have to stand a good distance from that one; this one demands rather a dark corner, but that one needs to be seen in full light, and will stand up to the scrutiny of the art critic; this one only pleased you the first time you saw it, but that one will go on giving pleasure however often it is looked at.’ (Dorsch, 91-2).

And the pleasure of the eye is not the pleasure of the ear.

 Barry Taylor, Curator Hispanic studies

References

Three medieval rhetorical arts, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley 1971) X.981/2867

Wesley Trimpi, ‘Horace’s Ut pictura poesis’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 36 (1973), 1-34. Ac.4569/7.

Classical literary criticism, tr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth, 1965)  W.P.513/155.