You look like a Renaissance painting

Words by Maria de Feo

Eds. Mistral Zerbi

I remember my wide-eyed, twelve-year-old self walking around the Uffizi and being enchanted by the beauty of the women painted during the Italian Renaissance. I was hypnotised by the softness of their features, by the length of their undulated hair, and by the grace of their bodies. What attracted me the most about Renaissance beauty, though, was its authenticity – every manifestation of it felt real. All the protagonists of these works had common traits but also had individual essences that made them unique and human. The realistic nature of the painted bodies and faces was, in part, what made them so captivating. After my first visit to the Uffizi, I started regarding comparisons to the protagonists of Renaissance paintings as very flattering compliments. Every time somebody reminded me of a girl in a Renaissance portrait, I would immediately tell them. In the past few years, though, I have noticed that what I once considered a lovely compliment has started to become unappreciated. Once, I told a girl she looked like someone Botticelli would have wanted to paint, but she took great offence. I was shocked. At the same time, I noticed that compliments like “Bratz doll” or “Barbie doll” were starting to become more and more common, and I realised they tended to be preferred. I began hearing more people complimenting others’ beauty by saying that they looked “unreal” or “almost fake”. I am not advocating for a return of Renaissance beauty standards. They were, in many ways, exclusive, and not necessarily reflective of the broad spectrum of human splendour.

 It is obvious that the incessant yearning for perfection is not a specific characteristic of our time or our generation. Beauty was sought after constantly in the Italian Renaissance. However, it was a worldly beauty, found in human nature and in the forms that it could take. As author G.B. Rose writes, the Italian Renaissance was the moment in which people's “eyes were opened” and they were able to see light in themselves and in front of them. Their pupils dilated with marvel at what was real and natural, and they strove to capture it, to keep it in the safety of their canvases. In this context, beauty was sought after, but as the flourishing of a person’s natural potential. 

Now, we reject reality as ugly. We airbrush the skins of women in magazines, and we view knives and syringes as keys to unlocking the door to the coveted realm of attractiveness. We want to resemble dolls, shiny and smooth as plastic and perfectly symmetrical. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth that we consider certain features indispensable to every attractive face: big eyes, small button noses, puffy lips, or high cheekbones. To be an individual is to have something different that distinguishes us from everyone else. The thirst to look identical to everyone else is frightening because it comes hand in hand with a desire to lose a fundamental part of human nature: individuality. To reject who we are as individuals, then, is partly to reject our human nature.

Removing flaws also means discarding many elements of our face that communicate our emotions or our stories. Botox inevitably conceals a tremble of the thin wrinkle on the side of someone’s eye, which would have once served as a clue they might be about to cry. Filler renders invisible the little cracks on someone’s lips that once would have told me they had been in the cold, and made me wonder what they had been up to. Nothing is more intimate, to me, than noticing the moles on someone’s body, or tracing their scars, that tell their story.

Before the Italian Renaissance, human nature was viewed as evil in comparison to the Divine, and the solution was found in hatred of the immanent, in rejection of the concrete in favour of the transcendent. Today, natural human beauty is being viewed as inadequate compared to the artificial, and the solution is being found in transforming humans into plastic creatures. It would be lovely if we could open our eyes — with our new awareness of the different forms human beauty can take — to the beauty of being a person.