Читать книгу Fearing the Black Body - Sabrina Strings - Страница 10
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Plump Women and Thin, Fine Men
Peter Paul Rubens was a dapper sort. Tall and good-looking, he was known by many women as il fiammingo, or the Fleming. The nickname was less a testament to the figure cut by Flemish men in general than to Rubens’s preeminence among them. He dressed like a gentleman and had a certain grace and ease when he galloped about town, a stallion on his steed. His own good looks aside, Rubens was revered for his ability to turn any woman into a “Venus.” His sumptuous paintings of full-bodied nudes were taken as a celebration of real women’s curves, and they made the name Rubens synonymous with the voluptuous aesthetic of the late Renaissance. Even today a full-figured woman is often described as “Rubenesque.” Yet what scholars have often failed to note is that not just any robust woman could fit this description. Along with Rubens’s attraction to fleshiness was a predilection for whiteness. As the artist was to state in his own treatise on beauty, he preferred women whose skin was, as he put it, as “white as snow.”
Rubens’s story helps us to understand the unfolding preference for full-bodied white women in art and literature from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, particularly in the Dutch Republic and England. The seventeenth century represented a seminal period for each of these states. Each experienced a Golden Age during the era, which coincided with, and was supported by, their emergence as the world’s most powerful slave-trading countries.
Herein, I show that as the slave trade expanded to areas where Africans had been largely absent, the sudden and proliferating presence of black people sparked a simmering and often vocal discomfort. The germinating anti-black sentiment had ramifications for the way black people were represented in art and literature. That is, in the seventeenth century, a “proto-racist” discourse emerged that marked black women and men as unattractive, hypersexual, and diminutive in both size and social status.1 White women were idealized as pure, chaste, and stately.
Figure 2.1. Peter Paul Rubens, The Honeysuckle Bower, 1609. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Curiously, at the same time that full-figured white women were ascending to the pinnacle of beauty, a visible cadre of well-to-do Englishmen were starting to openly abhor fleshiness in men. Fatness, for English intellectuals, was progressively linked to irrationality. Thinness was seen as more befitting the intelligent, self-possessed white male.
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Rubens was the sixth of seven children. He was born in Siegen, Germany, in 1577. At that time, his father, Jan Rubens, was under house arrest. An avowed Calvinist, Jan had once been an alderman for the city of Antwerp. But nine years earlier, he had fled Antwerp under the threat of religious persecution, landing in Cologne, Germany, in 1568. There he became the chief counselor for Anna of Saxony, a Lutheran princess and wife of governor William of Orange.2 The close relationship between Jan and Anna first drew suspicion, then later charges of sexual indiscretion. Jan was found guilt of adultery and imprisoned in a fortress under royal watch before being released to live in confinement, and under supervision, with his family in 1573.3 He died in 1587, and his long-suffering Catholic wife returned to Antwerp with her four surviving children.4 By the time they arrived, the once vibrant city was a shell of its former self. Jan Rubens’s fear of persecution was apparently warranted: a year before Peter Paul’s birth, the city had suffered a siege. Soldiers working for the Spanish crown had started a riot, setting homes ablaze and massacring tens of thousands of residents.5 A decree reminiscent of those common during the Spanish Inquisition less than a century earlier demanded that those who remained either renounce Protestantism or pick up and leave.
It was in the midst of this social upheaval that the young Peter Paul Rubens found his calling. In Antwerp he was introduced to the Mannerist style, which still maintained its grip on the art world. In 1600 he took his budding talents to Italy, and upon his arrival in Mantua he was promptly retained by the Duke, Vincenzo Gonzaga (great-grandson of Isabella d’Este), and his wife, Eleanor de Medici, as their court painter. But this was not the Mantua of Isabella d’Este’s day. When she was a young woman in the 1490s looking for a young girl “as black as possible,” black people were a novel sight.6 Now, a hundred more years into the African slave trade, they were much more commonplace.7
Rubens had little time to reflect on the African presence in Italy. Shortly after taking up the post of court painter for the Gonzagas, he was sent on a mission by Vincenzo to deliver copies of Raphael’s masterworks to Philip II, king of Spain.8 The stated aim was to put the Mantuan court in the good graces of the fickle young Spanish king. But there was a furtive little side project that made Vincenzo giddily await the artist’s return.
Before his appointment as court painter for the Gonzagas, Rubens had been largely known for his altarpieces, expansive religious mise-en-scènes that were majestic in their depiction of tragedy. Vincenzo was no doubt pleased to have Rubens’s services to animate biblical allegories or dignify members of the court. But the duke was also interested in having Rubens help him round out what was known as his “Gallery of Beauties.”9 The duke had filled his gallery with portraits of young women who had been anointed the best-looking ladies of the court. Part of Rubens’s mission on his circuitous route through Madrid and Paris was to find and set to canvas additional pretty young ladies for the duke’s private collection.10 Rubens did not disappoint on his primary mission, and it is doubtful that he failed to complete his secret side assignment.
That his considerable talent would be devoted to painting handsome young ladies did not deter Rubens from reveling in his new appointment. Lacking the pedigree of the average court official, the artist was pleased to have been given the position, not to mention its attendant salary. Over time, however, his role as one of the many contributors to the duke’s collection of what some deemed “high-end soft-core pornography” would come to distress him.11 In the end, fatigued by his missions and commissions, and dissatisfied with his life in Mantua, Rubens successfully petitioned the duke to be relocated to Rome. There, disillusioned with Vincenzo’s prurient whims, he returned to painting the altarpieces that were the launching pad for his early career.12
Despite his expressed disdain for the duke’s libidinous interest in painted lovelies, it may have been his time in Mantua that led Pietro Paolo Rubens—for his time in Rome led him to Italianize his name—to become fixated with feminine beauty. After his return to Antwerp in 1608, he became more invested in its articulation and portrayal. Arguably, the performance of his duties at Mantua triggered a latent desire to celebrate (or objectify) women’s bodies. And while Rubens was becoming publicly recognized as a gentleman and a scholar, his side commissions contributed to local speculation that he could turn any dowdy duchess into a “Venus” with just a few strokes of his brush.13
Sometime after 1609, when he officially terminated his service in Mantua and became court painter for the Archduke Albert of Brussels, Rubens returned to painting beautiful women. These portraits, however, had the cultural sanction of being elevated. Instead of painting the young maidens he came across at court, he now, like the masters of the High Renaissance, painted ancient goddesses and biblical queens. This was the sort of high art that inspired an admiration of one’s talent.
One work he painted upon his return to Antwerp was The Four Rivers of Paradise (1615). The portrait features four male river gods peacefully relaxing with water nymphs, as nearby children make merry with earthly creatures.14 There is also clear biblical symbolism, as the gods and nymphs recline harmoniously at the intersection of four rivers named in the Bible: the Nile, the Ganges, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.15 Rubens created this work during the twelve-year truce between the Spanish Netherlands and Flanders. The painting celebrated the peace between the two sides and offered an allegory of the abundance made possible through unification. It also contained the artist’s none-too-veiled hope that his own river town of Antwerp might, in these tenuous times of peace, return to its prewar glory.16
The Four Rivers of Paradise, inspired by Rubens’s return to Antwerp, was one of two portraits he painted that year to feature an African woman. The woman in The Four Rivers of Paradise is an Ethiopian nymph, the consort for the river god of the Nile. Her body is largely obscured by the deep blue cloth adorning her frame. But what is visible of her upper torso indicates that she has the same enviable undulating curves as the fair-skinned nymphs.
Rubens’s portrayal of an African woman in The Four Rivers of Paradise reveals the influence of Renaissance masters a century earlier. But unlike many earlier artists, Rubens portrayed an African woman who bears no marking of an inferior social status. On her head she wears not the simple headdress that would have been given her by Titian or Dürer but a tiara with glistening jewels. She is not wearing bedraggled clothes nor clutching a humbling dustcloth. Instead, she is covered with a luxurious blanket and held lovingly by the (white) god of the river Nile. In all these respects, this African woman is the physical and social equivalent of the white women depicted.17
The Four Rivers of Paradise in many ways represented a typical artistic portrayal of African women in the Low Countries at the time. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, artists from the region typically lacked access to live models and had taken to making black women appear simply as dark-skinned Europeans.18 In this respect, the portrait did reflect the era and environs, but it was not representative of Rubens’s overall take on black women.
Figure 2.2. Peter Paul Rubens, The Four Rivers of Paradise, 1615. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
A very different treatment of black femininity can be seen in another work depicting a black woman, Venus in Front of the Mirror. Produced during the same year as The Four Rivers of Paradise, Venus in Front of the Mirror is one of his most iconic works. In the portrait, a voluptuous Venus sits in a garden with her back to the viewer. The dimpled flesh of her ample backside is partially covered by a shimmering white cloth. On her left is an impish winged cupid, who holds up a mirror so that Venus might admire her own beauty. In looking at herself, she meets the viewer’s gaze in an unabashed recognition of our presumed approbation. On her right is her black maidservant. Her kinky hair is visible under a white cap. A single braid from the left side of her head barely stretches over the cap to connect with the other braid from the right. Her short curly hair is contrasted with Venus’s long, straight blonde hair, which the maidservant holds in apparent admiration. And, while caressing Venus’s sleek locks, the handmaiden lifts the flaxen hair to give the audience a better view of Venus’s hindquarters.
Figure 2.3. Peter Paul Rubens, Venus in Front of the Mirror, 1615. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
The message of Venus in Front of the Mirror and that of Bathsheba, completed in 1635, are in striking contrast to that of The Four Rivers of Paradise. In the former two, black women serve as a mirror for white women’s beauty. Their small, lean frames and short, coiled hair are used to communicate not just difference but destitution, a sense of something wanting. By contrast, the well-apportioned physiques and abundant locks of the white Venus communicated plenitude and blessedness.
Rubens’s depictions of black women in Venus in Front of the Mirror and Bathsheba signal a clear shift from the status-based social distinction that was common during the High Renaissance. These renderings were indicative of the growing aesthetic distinctions being imposed between black and white women. Black women were no longer deemed the bodily equals but social inferiors of white women. Now, black women’s very being was intended to evoke inferiority. In other words, whiteness stood not just for social supremacy, but general superiority.19
Rubens’s changing representations of black women might be better understood if we examine the context in which these works were created. Antwerp, his adopted home, had been a cultural and economic powerhouse and a key port for the lucrative slave-trading industry since 1490.20 But the fall of Antwerp in 1585 destroyed the city’s position as a center of trade activity, slave or otherwise. Throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the majority of slave traders were from Portugal. Once on amiable terms with the residents of Antwerp, Portuguese merchants cut a wide arc around the city during the war, cutting the port off from valuable resources.21
Figure 2.4. Peter Paul Rubens, Bathsheba, 1635. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
There is little surviving evidence to indicate the number of Africans in the city after the siege. Although many other major port cities were seeing an increase in their African populations, it is very likely that the black population in Antwerp would have plummeted. Fewer slaves were coming in. In addition, in an Inquisition-style decree, the Spanish mandated that Antwerp’s Jewish and Protestant populations convert to Catholicism or vacate the city. Tens of thousands fled, heading north to Amsterdam, the pulsing new hub of the Low Countries. At the time, many of the city’s Africans were slaves or domestic servants to the city’s large population of Sephardic Jews.22 Perhaps owing to the diminishing populations of black people in Antwerp, Rubens did not appear to have worked with black female models. His eclectic approach of representing black women as dark-skinned Europeans and small young servant girls to goddesses and high-born women appears to be a result of the lack of live models to work with.23
Regardless, Rubens did appear to have his mind made up about one thing: white women were the most beautiful women in the world. Rubens wrote a treatise on beauty and proportionality, one that contained an entire chapter devoted to the specific good looks of women. The manuscript, Theory of the Human Figure, was reminiscent of the late Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer’s Four Books on Human Proportion in its studious return to classical theories of art and beauty. Indeed, while Rubens never took to mathematical calculations of perfect proportions, he wrote a statement on female beauty that could have easily been borrowed from the Renaissance master, claiming that “the body must not be too thin or too skinny, nor too large or too fat, but with a moderate embonpoint, following the model of the antique statues.”24 Moreover, like Dürer and other masters of the prior century, he paid homage to Venus and the classical ideal while also describing in detail the value of added padding in the proper places.25 According to Rubens, “The hip, or the tops of the thighs, and thighs themselves should be large and ample, … the buttocks should be round and fleshy, … the knees should be fleshy and round.”26
Where Rubens differed from Dürer was in his admiration of a peculiarly “white” kind of beauty. In his descriptions of the proper amount of flesh and fat that should be present on a woman’s body, he also states, “The skin should be solid, firm and white, with a hint of a pale red, like the color of milk tinged with blood, or a mix of lilies and roses.” Of the voluptuous backsides he fetishizes, he prefers that they remain “white as snow.”27
Rubens made only one reference to a black woman in the text. In a section titled “How the Ancients Represented Their Goddesses,” he notes that “Venus was represented by the Lacedaemonians being armed for battle. In Arcadia, she was black. In Cyprus she had a spike, a masculine air, and feminine garb. In Egypt, the goddess of love was represented with wings.”28 The point of mentioning the legend of the black Venus in Arcadia, it seems, was to diminish its stature or perhaps even discount it. Rubens effectively relegates the black Venus of Arcadia to a footnote in the history of Venus statues, a cultural curiosity, comparable to a winged goddess or one wielding a spike. He makes this position clear when he claims that “there are 100 other statues” he could mention, “but suffice it to say that each one represents the region it comes from.”29
There is scant evidence from surviving texts to suggest that Rubens actively harbored a disdain for black women. Rather, he was working during a period of profound cultural change, a shift in the way Europeans saw Africans. Artists in the Dutch and English Golden Ages were less likely to gush about the beauty of Africans and more likely to note their social—and now also embodied—distinctions from whites.30 Importantly, Rubens’s work throws into relief the historical moment in which distinctions between African and European women came to increasingly rely on the physical body. For Rubens, and a growing number of artists and philosophers, white skin was necessary to elevate a woman to the height of bodily beauty.
It is not for nothing that the Netherlands would have been one of the earliest places to witness this evolution in the relationship between skin color and beauty. In the early seventeenth century, Dutch provinces were still embroiled in a costly war with Spain. What they desired, in addition to their independence, was a viable presence in the lucrative market of international trade. To that end the enslavement of Africans, while inhumane, was to prove intensely profitable. In 1602 the Dutch government decided to throw its support behind homegrown merchants determined to enter the trade. Established in Amsterdam, a mere hundred miles from Antwerp, the Dutch East India Company (also known as the VOC) was made up of local merchants and investors.31 It was backed by the States General of the Netherlands, which offered the chartered company a trade monopoly in trade routes between parts of Asia, South America, and South Africa. It became, by many accounts, the world’s first multinational corporation.32 Gaining a foothold in the spice industry after Antwerp had been cut off may have been one of the VOC’s key directives, but it did more than dabble in the slave trade. Scholars have shown that by the 1650s, envoys with the VOC set down roots in the Cape of Good Hope, enslaving innumerable members of the indigenous Khoikhoi, or as they became known to the Dutch, the “Hottentot.”33
If the VOC made slavery only one of the tools in its trading arsenal, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) made the traffic in human commodities its main directive. Founded only a few years after the VOC, the WIC had as one of its primary objectives what has been euphemistically described as establishing “direct relations with indigenous people in African coastal regions.”34 While the VOC operated largely on the Indian Ocean, the States General granted the WIC a trade monopoly on the Atlantic between Africa and the Americas. Between the 1630s and the 1650s, the WIC became the dominant force in the African slave trade.35
While these developments may seem tangential to the question of aesthetics, they were, in fact, integral to the issue. As Simon Gikandi has noted, the slave trade was fundamental to the development of the bourgeoning “culture of taste.”36 Within this culture, the objectification of black bodies and labor through the slave trade turned black people themselves into the shadow figures of modernity, appearing to exist outside of and in opposition to it.37 Black people thus increasingly came to represent différance, or a perverse primitivity and backwardness, a “polemical otherness.”38 Black people became, in other words, aesthetic counterpoints within the budding culture of taste. This had a visible impact on the representations of black women, given the centrality of appearance to the assessment of a woman’s worth.39 Once accorded a measure of dignity and desirability, black women were progressively represented as small, low, and foul. White women dominated the landscape of statuesque beauties.
* * *
England had been a relative latecomer to the traffic in Africans in both art and commerce. The country had not participated in the slave trade during its entire first century. But in the late sixteenth century, England was transformed from underdog to dominant global power. As a nation, England appeared to have skipped the honeymoon phase of infatuation with African slaves witnessed elsewhere on the Continent during the early years of the slave trade. The first slaves had appeared in England in 1555.40 That same year, damning representations of Africans cropped up. In one book from 1555, the authors described Africans as “animals … [who] would fall upon their women.” Moreover, Africans were described as “utterly free from care because they are always sure to have plenty of food.”41
The stereotype that black people were sexually and orally indulgent quickly gained traction.42 By the early seventeenth century, the perception that Africans freely gratified their animal appetites was expressed by some of the most elite members of English high society.43 The celebrated statesman and author Francis Bacon issued a two-part condemnation of African appearance and character that incorporated these two stereotypes, among others. In it, Bacon parroted the view, also popular in the Low Countries, that “Ethiopians,” as he called them, were “little, foul, and ugly.” He added to this the now familiar English view that black people were libidinous, writing that they embodied the very “Spirit of Fornication.”44
Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, that in seventeenth-century England, as in the Low Countries, as blackness was linked to unattractiveness so was whiteness increasingly linked to beauty. Turn-of-the-century England, known as the Golden Age of English art, philosophy, and culture, was distinct in the tenacity of these color-based associations. For starters, while whiteness had long been associated with purity, goodness, and beauty in the country, the reign of the virgin queen, praised for her glowing alabaster skin, codified the association for the citizenry.45 Poets produced song and verse in homage to their Christian ruler, such as the following:
Her hand as white as whale’s bone
Her finger tipt with Cassidone
Her bosom, sleek as Paris plaster
Held up two bowls of Alabaster.46
If the queen’s skin was indeed “white as whale’s bone,” it wasn’t attributable so much to God as to the milk-colored lead paint she was known to be fond of applying to her face and arms.47 Nevertheless, the whiteness of her skin, even if owing to cosmetics, elicited positive feelings among her countrymen. The praise surrounding her eventually reached cult status. Historians have shown that her whiteness was a focus for her subjects’ sentiments.48
There was a second reason that the fetish for whiteness reached a fever pitch in seventeenth-century England. Artistic representations had been severely restricted in the country as a result of the Protestant Reformation a century earlier. As a result, images that did not appear to accurately reproduce biblical lore, including those featuring black people, were forbidden and in some instances destroyed.49 The pigeonholing of visual imagery effectively stunted the growth of British painting until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.50 For this reason, representations of black people by domestic painters were nearly nonexistent for the country’s first century of involvement in the slave trade. When they did make appearances prior to 1660, it was less in the visual arts than in official court records, poetry, literature, and court masques.51 The first black women in the court record, for example, arrived as maids in the retinue of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. Catherine appeared on official business, an arranged marriage to the English Prince Arthur. Very little information survives about her cortege, but we do know that her black female servants were ridiculed by Sir Thomas More, key counselor to Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, as “hunchbacked, undersized, and barefoot Pygmies of Ethiopia.”52
Sir Thomas More’s evaluation of black women as small and deformed was a prelude to the linking of black femininity and the grotesque in Elizabethan art and literature. William Shakespeare often featured tortured black characters in his plays. In Othello, the title character despaired over being treated as a “lascivious Moor.”53 Less frequently, however, have scholars commented on Shakespeare’s dismissal of black femininity, as appears in his famed Midsummer Night’s Dream.54 In the play, Hermia is spurned by her suitor, Lysander, who rejects her in favor of the fair Helena. In the aftermath, Helena and Lysander attack Hermia. Lysander demands that she take her leave, yelling, “Away you Ethiope!” and “Out tawny, tartar, Out!” When Hermia still refuses to leave, the trio have the following exchange:
HELENA
O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd!
She was a vixen when she went to school;
And though she be but little, she is fierce.
HERMIA
“Little” again! nothing but “low” and “little”!
Why will you suffer her to flout me thus?
Let me come to her.
LYSANDER
Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.55
In a neat jumble, Shakespeare makes Hermia at once a “vixen,” capable since a young age of luring men with her sexual charms, as well as a grotesque and “low” dwarf. For her sexual and physical transgressions, she is discarded. Helena, Lysander’s newly chosen lover, is by contrast depicted as tall, white, and slim, like a “painted maypole.”
English ladies weren’t only painting themselves white to enhance their beauty. They were also painting themselves black to reveal, through contrast, the alleged hideousness of black women. In 1605, shortly after the death of Elizabeth, an infamous court masque known as The Masque of Blackness was presented by Jacob I’s queen, Anne of Denmark, and her court. The Masque of Blackness, by Ben Jonson, presented the tale of King Niger and his twelve daughters. While the king tries to convince his daughters that they are beautiful, they despise their black skin. An oracle (Aethiope) tells the girls that if they wish to remove their blackness, they should go to the land with the name ending in -TANIA (that is, Britannia), also known as “Albion the Fair.”
The twelve daughters were played by Queen Anne and her ladies in blackface. Their faces and their arms up to the elbows were painted black, leading the English art collector Sir Carleton, who once sat for a portrait by Rubens, to cringe, claiming the “lean-cheeked Moors” they invented to be a “loathsome sight” indeed.56 Neither Sir Carleton nor the twelve painted black ladies were to find any relief until Ben Jonson finished the sequel, which was performed in 1608. At that time, they arrive at the Throne of Beauty in Britannia, where they bask in the sun’s (less scorching) glow while chanting, “Yield night, then to the light, as blackness hath to beauty.”57
Such was the double signification of fairness in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. After the Restoration, black women were seldom represented in painting, and when they did appear, they were not miraculously re-christened in England as the beauties they had been in other places at other times. Being commonly retained as pages and sexual conveniences for men from the rising world powers, they remained in the popular imagination as little, base, and licentious.
* * *
The rise of the slave trade also had a direct impact on changing ideas about the good qualities associated with being fat among the English people. Perishable goods reaped from slave labor began arriving from the colonies that would forever change the English way of life, one of which would go on to have a curious impact on the English diet and body size: sugar. Sugar production had been developing at breakneck speed in late sixteenth-century Brazil, then a colony of Portugal. In the 1620s the Dutch Republic attempted a hostile takeover of the northernmost Brazilian territories. The war that ensued was fought in a series of skirmishes in which the Dutch captured a key port in 1630, only to lose it again in 1654.58 In the meantime, sugar production in Brazil dropped precipitously, a shift that allowed the British and their colony of Barbados to step into the void.59
The mind-boggling profits the English reaped from sugar plantations were one obvious benefit of this trade. Another was the widespread availability of a commodity once deemed so rare and enticing that it was dubbed “white gold.” In 1660 England imported 1,200 barrels of sugar from Barbados and other key West Indian holdings. By 1700, that amount had jumped to 50,000 barrels. When it came to the sheer volume of sugar sent to the mother country, the British were rivaled only by the Dutch.60 As sugar imports soared, prices plummeted, making what was formerly a luxury item readily available to the average citizen of England and Holland.61 Teahouses and coffeehouses sprang up on fashionable London thoroughfares. Sugar was creating whole new industries in centers of European social life and culture, along with delicious new opportunities for daily delight.
But with the improved standard of living came the dissipations of the high life. While malnutrition remained the prevailing concern for most of the population, a mounting number of the moderately well-off were growing fat. Doctors in England eyed the swelling number of fat people with consternation. In 1620, for example, the Oxford-trained English physician Tobias Venner lamented the rising rates of corpulence among the English.62 Using for the first time the word “obesus” to describe excess fat, Venner argued that “obesity” had adverse health consequences. He offered a treatment “to make slender such bodies as are too grosse.”63
The changes in the English diet enabled by sugar plantations in the colonies also led to rising rates of a purportedly related illness: gout. With the introduction of sugar and sugar-sweetened alcoholic beverages such as sack (a sugar-sweetened wine), gout was becoming an epidemic in England, particularly among men, who are more susceptible to the illness. Known previously as the disease of kings and the king of diseases, by 1683 the sweeping problem of gout prompted Dr. Thomas Sydenham to write A Treatise of the Gout and Dropsy in an effort to detail the etiology of the disease and offer practical advice to its sufferers.64
In Sydenham’s estimation, gout overwhelmingly struck those “who happen to be of a robust habit, who lead an indolent life, and are used to live very full.”65 The “robust habit” referred to a rich diet paired frequently with wine and beer. This behavior, he claimed, was particularly common among the male sex, since women rarely exhibited such a “voracious appetite” and “immoderate” drinking behavior.66 And, believing that overindulgence was the cause, Sydenham added that gout typically beset the “gross and corpulent,” although it occasionally befell lean and slender folk as well.67 Sydenham was himself a gout sufferer. He believed himself to be speaking both as a medical authority and as a fellow, fat, gout-afflicted man. Interestingly, while Sydenham and Venner pointed to diet as causes of corpulence and illness, neither recognized sugar as a potential cause. Sydenham, in the denial typical of a sugar addict, actually suggested that a concoction using brown sugar and the syrup of marshmallows be used as a cure.68
Sugar was rarely if ever recognized by seventeenth-century English physicians as the culprit driving both gout and what was described as “gross” corpulence. But this was largely because many doctors didn’t quite understand how along with the quantity, the quality of the food consumed, affected a person’s weight. This situation was to change in the coming century. Still, in Holland, the other country where sugar consumption, corpulence, and gout were on the rise, at least one seventeenth-century physician was making the connection among the three. In the same year that Sydenham published his Treatise, the Dutch doctor Stephen Blankaart wrote that the ubiquity of sugar in Amsterdam was associated with the marked increase of cavities, corpulence, and gout.69
Fatness was becoming more common, but it remained a condition common among the relatively well-off. Regardless, Western doctors were making nascent arguments about the link between fatness and ill health.70 Still, concerns about the physical health of the fat man as he partook of white gold and port wine was not the foremost concern of the high-minded Englishman. For the English intellectual, fat bodies had a different, pernicious association.
* * *
In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, the king of Navarre and three of his oldest friends swear an oath of austerity. As part of the oath, they promise to remain celibate, fast one day each week, and eat only one meal per day the remaining days of the week. The pact was to last for three years.71 The character Longaville explains,
I am resolved: ’tis but a three years’ fast.
The mind shall banquet though the body pine.
Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.72
Longaville here describes a mind and body in conflict. When a man plies his body with food and drink, developing “fat paunches” and “rich ribs,” he is also bankrupting his wits. But when a man fasts, starves his body, makes it “pine,” now he is offering his mind a “banquet,” one that makes possible higher intellectual pursuits.
This quote, particularly the couplet that begins, “Fat paunches have lean pates,” was widely circulated in seventeenth-century England. Many believe it was originally penned by Shakespeare, but there is also evidence that he cribbed the idea from Saint Jerome, the fourth-century Roman priest. Jerome himself was thought to have translated the Greek expression “A fat belly does not produce fine senses.”73
Even if Shakespeare is not the ultimate source of the expression, it is consequential that several of his works propagated the view that slim men had sharp wits, whereas fat men were insipid. This was to be found, for example, in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, when Caesar states,
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.74
The view of fat men as too self-indulgent to be particularly intelligent was embodied in the character of Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays, was creative and resourceful in some respects, but too much of a gluttonous, drunken, braggart and a thief to be taken as a thoughtful nobleman. He cops to this in Henry IV when he cries, “If I do grow great, I’ll grow less; for I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.”75
Coming from one of the most important artist-intellectuals of the English Golden Age, these and other works by Shakespeare make a broad cultural statement. They suggest that greater than concerns about the potential relationship between fat and health during this era was the dread of fatness as indicative of weak character and dullness of mind. Indeed, it was not only artists and poets who made such connections. Many important scientists and natural philosophers shared the perception that full stomachs were correlated to empty heads.
Figure 2.5. Eduard von Grützner, Falstaff, 1910.
The writings of René Descartes are a case in point. Though he was not an Englishman, Descartes’s ideas were incredibly influential among English intellectuals. He too claimed that base sensual desires, especially for food and drink, could stand in the way of higher pursuits. Condemning the animal appetites, Descartes offered counsel to those who might otherwise be prone to overindulgence in food and drink. In a series of letters on the topic to his friend Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, the granddaughter of King James I, he advised Elisabeth to regulate her food intake so as to ensure the best exercise of her mental faculties, urging “a good diet, taking only food and drink that refreshes the blood and purges without any effort.”76 Elisabeth countered: “As for the remedies against excessive passions: I agree that they are hard to practise, and indeed that they aren’t sufficient to prevent bodily disorders; but they may suffice to prevent the soul from being troubled and losing its capacity for free judgment.”77 These correspondences underscore the belief that eating too much stymied rational thought. Freeing oneself from the whims of sensual desire created space for intelligent thought and action.
Elisabeth was not the only English person privy to Descartes’s discourses on the appetites.78 His ideas about the relationship between appetites and intellect spread like wildfire in England. Those who did not identify as Cartesians respected his import, even reproducing similar notions, particularly when it came to questions of overfeeding.79 Walter Charleton, a natural philosopher and court physician to Elisabeth’s uncle, Charles I, was one such intellectual. Charleton published his own treatise on the perils of overindulgence. The “finest wits,” Charleton wrote, were not “the custody of gross and robust bodies; but for the most part [are lodged] in delicate and tender constitutions.”80 As a physician, Charleton was likely aware of the growing medical concern regarding portliness among English men. But, in keeping with many intellectuals at the time, Charleton’s own concern seems to have been less about the effects of excess fat on the body than about what corpulence indicated about the mind. When he wrote about the ill effects of fatness, he was concerned with what obesity revealed about the character and mental capacity of the man who might so openly flaunt his rotund body.
Other English intellectuals were more directly influenced by Descartes. And in terms of the presumed relationship between fat and intellect, they resolved to practice what they preached. Robert Boyle, for example, a contemporary of Charleton and a follower of Descartes’s life and work, was nearly as well known for his abstemious diet and delicate physique as for his theories. His body was believed to be a demonstration of his mental fortitude, as he was praised for his “depth of knowledge” and his refusal to allow the vagaries of appetite to derail him: “he neither ate, nor drank to gratify the varieties of appetite, but merely to support nature”; for these reasons, he was deemed “thin and fine”—with the latter term here serving as a synonym of refined—like a typical “hard student.”81
English philosophers, several of whom were influenced by Descartes, treated fatness as evidence of vapidity. Such was the case with the philosopher Henry More. More’s lean physique lent credibility to his intellectual pursuits. Early in his career, More maintained an avid love affair with Cartesianism, which came to an abrupt halt as he matured. But he never escaped the swirling cultural influence articulated perhaps most notably by Descartes on the relationship between sensuality and intellect. More was known to have “reduc’d himself … to almost Skin and Bones.”82 He was praised by his own biographer for his temperance and his “ethereal sort of body,” which served as evidence of his mastery over the animal nature within.83
Figure 2.6. Peter Lely, Portrait of the Honorable Robert Boyle, 1689. Image courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
This is where, unexpectedly, the artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens comes back into frame. Rubens never knew Charleton, who took the post as court physician one year after the artist’s death, but he had frequent dealings with the English. In the early 1620s, Rubens could count King Charles I among his high-class art patrons and protégés. An amateur painter and art collector, Charles I had pestered Rubens for a self-portrait, which the artist reluctantly provided.84
Rubens died before Cartesianism took off. But it is worth noting that Descartes was only an important proponent, and not the progenitor, of the relationship between abstemiousness and intellect. Renaissance artists and intellectuals in England and the Low Countries often harbored a romance for Neoplatonic austerity. Rubens was, surprisingly perhaps, counted in this number. For though he is remembered for painting round and fleshy women with skin “white as snow,” he himself observed a strict diet. Writing to his nephew, Rubens lamented the fatness of so-called modern men:
The chief cause of the difference between the ancients and men of our age is our laziness.… [We are] always eating, drinking and [have] no care to exercise our bodies. Therefore, our lower bellies, ever filled by a ceaseless voracity, bulge out overloaded, our legs are nerveless, and our arms show the signs.85
The strapping Peter Paul would have none of this “flabbiness” for himself. He was known to rise at 4:00 a.m. and eat little throughout the day so that his stomach and its digestion would not get in the way of his intellectual and artistic endeavors.
The affectations of these artists, philosophers, and scientists may not have represented those of the average seventeenth-century man, but they slowly came to represent those of the typical intellectual. By the mid-eighteenth century, the archetype of the thin and refined male student and thinker was widespread, particularly in England. Still, sentiments about male slimness were divided. While some people continued to believe that a lean physique was a laudable display of a man’s ambition and dedication to higher pursuits, others claimed that it represented a moribund seriousness and a complete abandonment of healthy living.86 Thus, during the seventeenth century, when fatness began its slow decline into disrepute, it was concerns over ascetics and not aesthetics that drove the distaste for fat male bodies.
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At the tail end of the seventeenth century came another important innovation by a French intellectual: racial categorization. François Bernier developed the first racial classification scheme in the Western world. Like the ideas of Descartes, the ideas of Bernier were taken up swiftly and with relish among English intellectuals.
The creation of a racial classification system had a palpable impact on conceptions of whiteness and blackness. For while intellectual men had reserved for themselves the vaunted capacity of reason, the new and rapidly spreading ideas about race suggested that rationality was, in fact, an inherent quality of white persons. This rationality was now to apply to all aspects of life, including aesthetic ideals.
As we will see, it was from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century that the inception and specification of ideas about white and black “races” changed yet again the understanding of the relative appearance of white and black women. For if black women were transformed from voluptuous bodily exemplars in the sixteenth century to little, low, and foul in the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century their presumed racial proclivities (including that of irrational and unrestrained eating) would transform them into the unsightly—even “monstrously”—fat.
