Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, ... Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines

Appendix D

Proportions of Feminine Beauty in Some Classical and Western European Sources

(After Kenneth Clark, pp. 75, 20–21.)

1. Female nude, “Esquiline Venus,” pre-classical Greek bronze (which now exists only in 2 marble copies)

Length of head = 1/7 height of body. Distance between breasts = 1 length of head = distance from lower breast to navel = distance from navel to division of legs

2. Female nude, classical [Greek] canon and its imitators until the first century

Distance between breasts = distance from lower breast to navel = distance from navel to division of legs

[p. 70, 2 wall paintings from Pompeii: “The distance from the breasts to the division of the legs is three units instead of two; the pelvis is wide, the thighs are absurdly short, and the whole body seems to have lost its structural system.”]

3. Female nude, Gothic ideal

Distance between breasts = distance from navel to division of legs¹ = ½ distance from lower breast to navel

“The basic pattern of the female body is still an oval, surmounted by two spheres; but the oval has grown incredibly long, the spheres have grown distressingly small.”