21 May The Size of Certain Body Parts in Art
One of the fun things to look at in the Metropolitan museum is the way artists portray women’s breasts—because while you might imagine that the modern obsession with large breasts is universal, in fact ideal breasts vary from cultural moment to cultural moment. In particular, it is pretty clear that the Renaissance favored small breasts. The corsets in fashion at that time created an upper body shape similar to the shape of a man’s chest in armor. It seems the women’s corsets squashed their breasts out sideways to create this effect. And Renaissance nudes’ breasts are influenced by the way women looked when clothed: their breasts are not large, sit low on the chest, and are quite far apart. In the 18th and 19th centuries, by contrast, women’s breasts reflect a different kind of corset: they are larger, higher, and closer together.
But what about *male* body parts?
Everyone knows that the male member, in art—especially Greek art—is smaller than average real-life genitalia. Why is that, you might wonder. Well, several newspapers have interviewed me about this question in the last few years. Most recently, NPR’s Studio 360, with host Kurt Andersen, did an interview with me about this, called “Unhung Heroes.”
Jan Steen’s Music Lesson and jokes about body parts
The Diadoumenos, ancient Greece’s beau idéal
Because there are a lot of male members to see in the museum, and a lot of fun information about them. In some cultures, they are huge, in some small. In Greek art, actually, there are both, and they have different meanings: the small ones on heroes and athletes indicate the most important masculine virtue (to the Greeks), self-control, while the big ones on Satyrs and Silenus etc. indicate wildness. But other cultures have had different aesthetics and different reasonings: in some parts of New Guinea, for instance, the tribes think that masculinity is transferred through sperm, and they portray the delivery system as huge.
But there are many more works on this theme to see in the museum. There is a painting from Baroque Rome that pretty directly references castration! There is a Golden Age Dutch joke about *size*. There is even a 19th century sculpture where we know the sculptor reduced his model’s manhood to make him look more “Greek”!
In short, as with breasts, our modern idea that bigger is better is not universal in history. Different cultures have had all kinds of ideas about the size of certain body parts, and though of course you can’t do anything about it in real life, they could portray their ideal body shapes in their art. So there is (as so often) no place better to learn about it than the Metropolitan Museum, that vase storehouse of art and culture—even the sillier, sexier parts of culture….
