This exhibition explores 10,000 years of beauty in art

Walking around the Louvre recently, I began to question how much beauty standards have really changed over the last 10,000 years. I was there to attend the launch of De Toutes Beautés! Rituals, Objects and Representations of Beauty (a collaborative project between the Louvre and L'Oréal Groupe), a major exhibition bringing together 108 artworks in an interactive trail, allowing visitors to experience how beauty and its associated practices have been depicted throughout history and across different civilisations. As varied and diverse as the collection is, it seemed to me that most of the subjects depicted would still be considered attractive now, from the soft, smiling face of an Iranian prince to the ancient Greek statues which wouldn’t look out of place on Grindr, owing to both their rippling torsos and the fact so many are headless. And Titian’s “Woman in the Mirror” (1515) wouldn’t struggle to find work as a plus-size model today. 

But I changed my mind when I arrived at Pisanello’s “Portrait of a Princess” (1449). I took in her vast forehead, deliberately plucked of hair to convey purity and a distance from the animal world; her oddly-shaped skull which, as the tour guide told me, may have been deliberately deformed at birth as an aristocratic status symbol. “My God…”, I thought, “This woman is clapped!”  Beauty standards have always emerged in response to society’s dominant values, not least because artists, throughout so much of history, have been working on commission and with specific instructions from their wealthy patrons (“Please make sure my forehead looks really big or I’m demanding a refund!”). From a modern perspective, those values – and the aesthetic forms they inspired – can appear alien, troubling and downright bizarre. 

As I followed the exhibition’s interactive trail, it struck me that beauty standards for men have changed a lot less than for women over the centuries, particularly in the canon of Western art. The Greeks idealised a muscular, athletic build, which was taken up by the Romans, revived during the Renaissance and continued through the 1800s to the present day. The dominant understanding of what a beautiful man looks like today is remarkably similar to what it was for the ancient Greeks – the biggest difference being that they considered large penises to be uncouth. But according to Gauthier Verbeke, Exhibition Curator at The Louvre, the progression isn’t quite so linear. While Ancient Greece has cast a long shadow over Western art, there were periods where this influence lay dormant and other ideals emerged.

“During the Middle Ages, people had totally forgotten antiquity and its models, and you will see a lot of slight, thin men being depicted during this period,” he says. “The portrait of Louis the 14th, with his high wig and the make-up on his face, is not at all in the standard of the Greek canon. For men, there has always been a hesitation between the viral model of masculinity inherited by antiquity, and a kind of precious and elaborate care.” Other artworks in the collection – such as the Ancient Egyptian “Seated Scribe and Portrait of a Man” (1807- 1810) by Jacob Jordaens -Michel-Adrien Ruyter - show that fatness for men has sometimes been a status symbol – only the wealthy could afford to gain weight.

For men, there has always been a hesitation between the viral model of masculinity inherited by antiquity, and a kind of precious and elaborate care – Gauthier Verbeke

Still, Verbeke agrees that beauty standards for women have fluctuated more over the years, in line with the shifting desires and moral beliefs of men. “There is the force of religion, because women had to be pure, and they had to represent a kind of purity in their beauty,” he says. “But at the same time, they had to be seductive for men, because they were mostly not as free as they are today.” Depending on men for economic survival, women have historically been forced to align their appearances more closely with the prevailing fashions and ideals of the times they lived in. “With the female body there has always been objectification, says Delphine Urbach, Art, Culture & Heritage Director at L’Oréal Groupe, and the precise nature of this objectification has varied over the years.

The idea of beauty has been interrogated a lot in recent decades, so much so that today it often invites suspicion. Rather than accepting beauty as something universal, natural and innate, generations of feminist thinkers have considered its relation to misogyny, racism, and colonialism, and the ways it has been used to perpetuate existing social hierarchies. For some conservatives, the idea that beauty is synonymous with being white, young and able-bodied constitutes a truth as irrefutable as the laws of gravity. But as its title suggests, De Toutes Beautes aims to offer an expansive, civilisation-spanning account of beauty, one in which artworks from non-Western cultures are given equal weight alongside classical sculptures and Renaissance masters. Still, working from the Louvre’s existing collection,  in which some cultures are better represented than others, imposes some limitations on this approach. “The collection of the Louvre has a history, and that history is linked to the conquests of Napoleon. In France, there are definitely questions around whiteness, nobility, purity and aristocracy,” says Urbach. “But there is a value in looking at these questions from the eyes of a historian.”

While some of the Black and brown individuals who feature in the collection are depicted through the gaze of Western artists, this viewpoint can be revealing in itself. “The history of art has always represented the spirit of a society and a period,” says Verbeke, pointing to the example of “Portrait of Madeleine”, an 1800 painting by Marie-Guillemine Benoist which depicts an elegant young Black woman. “This was very interesting for us to include in the collection, because she reveals the spirit of the end of the 18th century when Slavery had been abolished in France – although Napoleon would later reintroduce it in the French colonies.“ While she is partly nude, Madeleine is portrayed as an upper-class woman –  her pose is not unlike the Mona Lisa’s and she is wearing jewellery – which provoked a huge scandal in the salon when the painting was first unveiled. “The portrait reflects the evolution of society, a moment in history where Black people had a new place,” Verbeke explains.

Women had to be pure, and they had to represent a kind of purity in their beauty. But at the same time, they had to be seductive for men – Gauthier Verbeke

While the most recent work in the collection is from the 19th century, seeing it all together did make me think about beauty standards today, how they are portrayed in art, and what aspects of our appearances will visitors to art galleries in a thousand years time point and laugh at (l’m going to guess “sunburn make-up” or “the perpetually crying look”). Will men still be spending hours in the gym to look like Greek statues from 490 BC, or will the scrawny beanpole community finally have its moment in the sun?

While artists today are still often compelled to flatter the wealthy in order to advance, their business model is less reliant on “make me look hot” portrait commissions, which grants them more freedom to represent beauty as they understand it themselves. But while there may be more space for idiosyncratic or emancipatory beauty ideals, we also live in a time of greater aesthetic homogeneity. “There are some links and crossovers, but every civilisation in the collection has its own beauty ideals – Ancient Greece is really different from Ancient Egypt, for example,” says Urbach. Nowadays, with social media and globalisation, it’s completely different – there is a homogenisation of everything.” At the same time, it’s never been easier for people to create and express their personal visions of beauty, regardless of what the dominant culture has to say. If there’s one thing De Toutes Beautés makes clear, it’s that beauty is not fixed or eternal, but something malleable and transient, something we always have the power to reshape.

De Toutes Beautés! Rituals, Objects and Representations of Beauty is open now at The Louvre, Paris.