“But NORMAL People’s Bodies Didn’t Look Like That!” …right?
Some of you may have seen my post about Baroque artists and their realistic depictions of human bodies as having skin and fat.
I’ve had a lot of negative and frankly fatphobic comments on that post, calling the people in the paintings “fat” and “obese,” mostly along the lines of this:
“It’s because the artists are depicting rich people, who were fat and lazy. Normal people didn’t look like that!”
The idea, of course, is that these artists wouldn’t have ever drawn bodies that looked like those in the Baroque paintings, if they weren’t painting super-rich people that stuffed themselves with food all day.
Supposedly. We’ll see how well that holds up.
Today I was in the library looking at a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer, and learned that in the early 1500’s, Dürer tried to put together essentially a “how-to-draw” book, showing how to draw people. His work was controversial, because of his technique of “constructing” figures using rules about proportions. (A quick and easy method of inventing realistically proportioned bodies out of thin air? Cheating!!)
However, in his “constructed” drawings, Dürer had to figure out how to handle the range of variety in bodies, and ended up breaking down how to create a variety of body types in correct proportions.
I’m showing the women, to contrast with the post on Baroque paintings. Here are some of his drawings that I thought y'all should take a look at.
These are a couple of his more “average” women—the one on the left is from his drawing book, and the one on the right is one of his drawings.
Here’s a “strong woman” and “A very strong, stout woman”
This is what he refers to as a “stout woman.”
Here’s where it gets interesting: this is what Albrecht Dürer refers to as a “peasant-type” woman
^That. That’s what a “peasant” body type looks like.
He labeled this one “A peasant woman of 7 head lengths”
in case you missed it: this figure drawing by a guy in the 1500’s is literally labeled as being of a peasant woman! this is what a “peasant woman” body type looks like!
He did draw similar amounts of thinner figures, but they’re not particularly emphasized over the “Strong” and “Stout” figures. Nor is there exactly a “default” figure. He’s just…going over the range of variations that there are?
Here’s another “stout woman,” covered in notes on how to draw the proportions:
now that’s too technical for me to make any sense of but
this was in the 16th century!! This body type was apparently not incredibly rare in the 16th century. This body type was important enough for you to be able to draw, as an artist, in the 16th century to be handled in detail in a 16th century artist’s drawing advice
In conclusion: yes this is just what people look like, yes it’s important to know how to draw fat bodies, even this dude from the early 1500’s is telling you so, Die Mad About It
all of this is from “The complete drawings of Albrecht Dürer” by Walter L. Strauss
I will do more proper fanart when I’m less busy but I did a chibi of Jezal that I edited as I went through each book and this was the final incarnation I had by the last in the first trilogy-
not everything bad that happens in the world is because of an oppressive conspiracy actually
“the 40 hour work-week is deliberately designed to keep workers exhausted and downtrodden –” no the forty hour workweek was negotiated by labor power to block the eighty hour workweek. “american food is full of corn syrup in order to make people obese and sick and weak and unable to revolt against the government –” there are a lot of reasons why Corn is the way it is in the US and this is not any of them. “the concept of ‘coming out’ is a straight conspiracy designed to murder queer people –” please stop
stop assuming that every bad thing that exists is the result of active malice. there is so much in the world that’s bad just by accident, or as an unintended consequence of something else – maybe even something with good intentions. please don’t turn yourself into a conspiracy thinker just with shinier woker labels
