The Male Beauty Canons And Their Historical Evolution
The beauty is relative. You have surely heard this maxim many times; And, in fact, it is true. There is no, let’s say, “official” beauty, and the concept of what is beautiful and what is not has been varying, depending on the culture and the historical moment.
It is often thought that beauty standards fall mainly on women and, however, this is not true. Men have historically been tied to different ideals as much as women and, in fact, continue to be; What happens is that, due to various variables, this tends to go unnoticed.
How has the masculine ideal evolved throughout history? In this article we will try to briefly summarize the evolution of canons in male beauty through different historical eras.
Male beauty standards and their evolution in history
Practically since human beings have existed, there has been a canon of beauty. The first human communities (and also our closest relatives, the Neanderthals) already exhibited certain aesthetic customs that reflected specific ideals of what was and was not beautiful.
From ritual tattoos to body adornment with jewelry made from shells, stones and bones; All of this is a clear manifestation that, beyond its possible ritual connotations, men and women have been keenly interested and from the beginning in feeling beautiful and attractive.
The beauty of the body
But the variables in the idea of beauty are not limited simply to external adornments. The first aspect to take into account is our primal envelope, that is, the body. Indeed, the human body has been the object of multiple appreciations over the centuries, appreciations that have depended on the various cultures that have examined and valued it. Even today, when globalization hovers without any type of barrier over the world, we find human communities that resist the “official” canon of beauty and that continue to adhere to their tradition. This is the case, for example, of the Bodi, a tribe that lives in Ethiopia.
The masculine ideal of the Bodi is considerably removed from what we in the West would call “beautiful”. And this culture has a curious ritual: for months, the men of the tribe are locked up and fed a high-calorie diet, made up of cow’s milk and blood, which makes them triple their body weight in a short space of time. time. On the last day, a big party is held, in which the men display their abdomens bulging from excess fat. The one with the biggest stomach is the one who wins the hand of the most beautiful girl in the tribe
For the Bodi, male beauty involves fatness, an idea closely connected to the concept of status: a bulging abdomen indicates a diet rich in fat that guarantees survival in a world in which sufficient food is not always available. Even today, at a time when the Bodi can access food, we see that this ancient idea has survived to this day and has adhered to their culture as the prototype from which the beauty of a male is valued.
Muscular and athletic bodies
At the antipodes of the ideal of masculine beauty of the Bodi we have, of course, the classic ideal (which, in a certain way and without too many changes, survives today). In ancient Greece, the canon of men’s beauty was taken mainly from the world of athletes and gymnasts ; The ideal body, therefore, had to be proportioned and properly toned, without being excessively muscular.
Greece proposes a man who, although he is directly extracted from reality, presents in his idealized form a series of proportions that are not always found in nature. It can be said, therefore, that the Greek male beauty canon is a perfect balance between a real body (that of athletes, warriors and gymnasts) and a specific ideal canon, which varied over the centuries. Thus, for Polycletus (480 BC – 420 BC) the ideal body had to measure seven times the head. His most famous work, the Doryphorusis considered the marble representation of the masculine ideal of the time: we see a man, of an indefinite age between youth and maturity, with an athletic, well-formed body and exquisitely drawn muscles.
With the Hermes of Praxiteles (4th century BC) we find an evolution of this ideal, since, although the god presents the same athletic body as his predecessor, we see that his silhouette retracts into a contraposto which causes its volume to oscillate slightly. We are looking at the typical “S” silhouette that will be so common in the Hellenistic era; a man equally muscular, but much more subtle and lighter.
The stylized medieval man
Obviously, we cannot summarize the evolution of the male beauty ideal in so few lines. But we will talk about key moments, from which we can extract a fairly complete vision of the whole.
Much has been said about the exacerbated medieval spirituality and the oblivion into which the issue of bodily beauty fell during these years. Could not be farther from the truth. A time or culture cannot be conceived without a specific ideal of beauty, and the Middle Ages is no exception.
It can be stated, even at the risk of falling into reductionism, that In the Middle Ages beauty is color and light The beautiful must necessarily be luminous, since beauty emanates from God, and God is light. Thus, the medieval centuries are colored by an extraordinary range of colors, each one more intense and brilliant. The brighter a shade is, the more beautiful the object it adorns will be considered. Thus, the mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), when she speaks of Lucifer before the fall (when he was the most beautiful angel) describes him adorned with gems, whose brilliance can only be compared to the stars.
Thus, the masculine ideal of the time involves a decidedly resplendent wardrobe. It is not at all strange to see a gentleman dressed in a red doublet, a blue cape, a green stocking and a yellow one. Likewise, jewelry adorns the subject and surrounds it with beauty: rubies, emeralds and sapphires, all designed to cast an aura of light and majesty around the interested party.
On the other hand, from the 13th century onwards the canon of bodily beauty varied considerably. Fashion emphasizes parts of the body such as the waist (which should be very narrow) and the shoulders (which, on the contrary, should be the wider the better). So, The masculine ideal of the time resembles an inverted triangle, whose shape is reinforced by the use of hard shoulder fabrics (in the manner of modern shoulder pads) and narrow, extraordinarily short doublets. The similarity of this masculine canon of the last centuries of the Middle Ages with that of ancient Egypt is surprising, according to which men should also have wide shoulders and very narrow waists.
This shortness in the garments that cover the torso is designed so that men exhibit two parts on which the sexual focus falls at that moment: on the one hand, the legs; on the other, the genitals. The masculine ideal not only has broad shoulders and a narrow waist, but also has long, toned and stylized legs whose profile is accentuated by the use of tight stockings. As for the genitals, there was a real furor for exaggeration at the time, which would last for several more centuries; It is the time of the so-called “phallic case”, a kind of hard covering that served to protect the male genitals, since, since the doublets were so short, they were only covered by stockings.
In summary, At the end of the Middle Ages we find a muscular but graceful man, with a stylized silhouette reminiscent of Gothic cathedrals and with properly marked masculine attributes, a symbol of “masculinity” and “power.” A curious balance between an almost ethereal ideal and the image of the fierce warrior who bravely (and often crudely) faces battles and tournaments.
Refinement and delicacy in the Renaissance
The Renaissance is the time of the great princes. Although the Neoplatonism of the 15th century defends a type of almost symbolic beauty, beyond canons and proportions (a “supersensible beauty”, as Umberto Eco would say), in the 16th century the established masculine ideal is that of the powerful prince, with a strong and robust body, often thick, the best example of which can be found in the portraits of Henry VIII, considered one of the most beautiful monarchs of the time. The rotundity of the forms is a symbol of power, and slenderness comes to be seen rather as a symptom of weakness or cowardice.
But since the canons are there to be broken, overcome and changed, from the second half of the 17th century we find the opposite. You only need to take the portraits of Louis XIV and his court at Versailles to attest to this. The ideal man has ceased to be “masculine,” and beauty becomes exclusively related to grace and “femininity.”
Thus, the “effeminate” man, even androgynous, is enhanced. Male beauty involves the use of curly wigs, profusion of makeup and lipstick, as well as lace, bows and high-heeled shoes. We are facing the extinction of the warrior ideal and the appearance of a rather courtly, refined and exquisite ideal. The baroque man is a delicate, fine and courteous man, and any expression of extreme “masculinity”, which years before was a status symbol, is now seen as something vulgar and vulgar.
Thus, this elegance and delicacy and “savoir faire” are related to adornments that, much later, will be considered inappropriate for men.
The disease is beautiful
The 18th century is the century of the Enlightenment and, as such, the prototype of a man is someone who is reserved, judicious and sober, with moderate habits and very intellectual. The ornaments of the baroque go out of fashion and, especially after the French Revolution and the advent of its ideal of the “republican man”, the austere and frugal became fashionable. It is the return of classic ideals: harmony, proportion, containment.
The arrival of the romantic movement once again shakes the aesthetic landscape. As Romanticism promotes the sublime, that is, that which escapes reason and is beyond the finite, a type of taciturn, dark and, above all, melancholic man becomes fashionable. Melancholy (which, on the other hand, is nothing new in history), is the state par excellence of the romantic artist. So, The beautiful will inevitably be everything “sick”, the decadent, the incomplete, that which could have been and was not
The man of Romanticism is an individualistic man full of rebellion. He shows himself in his long, messy hair, in his somewhat disheveled appearance and, above all, in the fire in his gaze. The male beauty ideal of the Romantic era is a man with a pale, haggard face, which highlights the intense look in his eyes. We are again faced with the sickly as a source of beauty: the greater the pallor and thinness, the greater the attractiveness. And, if the subject is “lucky” enough to have a fever, much better; The high body temperature will accentuate the strange glare of the gaze and will create “beautiful” furrows under the eyes.
The beauty of androgynous
Probably the complete opposite of this ideal is the famous dandy, of which Oscar Wilde is the best example.
At the end of the 19th century, the concept of “art for art’s sake” was an authentic way of life for many men, who observed existence as a work of art that must be lived to the fullest. The dandy, therefore, is a man who cultivates his image to the extreme, who wears strange but exquisite clothes, and who is enveloped in a refinement and opulence that makes him contrast tremendously with the “official” masculine ideal, the gray and correct one. bourgeois.
The dandies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are expressly effeminate, and even androgynous. They take care of their body and their appearance with a precision that, at the time, they would call “feminine.” Some of this remained in the first decades of the 20th century, although in this case women were the protagonists, who left behind their traditional “femininity” to seek new ways of expressing beauty. It is the time of androgynous beauty.
We cannot summarize here all the masculine ideals that occurred in the 20th century, but we can ask ourselves: what ideal prevails today? A man close to Doryphorus of Polycleitus, or rather a stylized and androgynous man?
The ideal of beauty is constantly changing We are heirs of multiple cultural manifestations, so our prototypes combine a little of all of them. The interesting thing is to verify that there is no absolute truth, and that what we may consider “beautiful” or “ugly” may not be so in other latitudes or in other social and historical contexts. Because what is more different than the men of the Bodi tribe and the athletes of ancient Greek? And yet, both are considered beautiful in their context, proving, once again, that beauty is relative.
