“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
