What a delightful article--humorous, but not disrespectful. How encouraging to find a contemporary writer (a full-figured woman herself) reconsidering her own body image, when confronted by this example of ideal beauty from a nobler, healthier culture than our own.
When the writer asks, and answers,
"Does that make me and my fellow size-14 women goddesses, too? I would like to think so," one discovers how profoundly visual presentations of beauty (be they magazine photographs or Classical sculptures) affect viewers' self image.
If modern women were surrounded by the Classical ideal of full-figured beauty that this sculpture represents, rather than by today's androgynous skeleton-models, they too would view their plus-size figures as goddess-like. As they should.
The statue even offers a fine bit of fashion advice for present-day voluptuous vixens. The writer describes the statue's "
wind-blown garments clinging to her body" as being "
characteristic of Aphrodite." The Ancients knew that well-fed figures are best exhibited by closely-fitting, body-embracing fashions which reveal every soft curve and contour; not by loose, formless apparel.
The writer's witticism about Aphrodite's craving for
"a large slice of pizza" is also refreshing. It suggests that even across the millennia, she feels a kinship with the model who posed for this statue. She knows that only a considerable appetite, freely indulged, could have endowed the model with her generous proportions--the proportions worthy of Venus herself.
If only young women today could become similarly comfortable with their natural desires, and equally confident in their appearance. A wider dissemination of the beauty ideal that this statue represents would make such a change in perception possible.
The same ideal, two millennia later--
Venus, Mars, and Two Cupids, by the Baroque master Padovanino (1588-1648):
(Note the soft curves along the model's back.)
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