canny granny

Painting : Venus at the Mirror: Rubens. 1615

Is Venus beautiful? Is the woman modeling for the artist beautiful? Back in 1615 she was.

The model is Hélène, wife of the artist.

Peter Paul Rubens was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish and European painter, a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasised movement, colour, and sensuality. Rubens is known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. And for paintings of his young wife.

In 1630, four years after the death of his first wife, the 53-year-old painter married 16-year-old Hélène Fourment, an acknowledged beauty. She inspired the voluptuous figures in so many of his paintings from then on.

I still say that Cleopatra was beautiful. I know there’s been disparaging remarks made about her nose before, but this coin reveals that she had a pointed chin, thin lips and sharp, aquiline nose. (Somewhat like myself in fact.)

Better than Marc Antony anyway, with his bulging eyes, thick neck and nasty-looking hook nose.

This tiny coin shows the head of Marc Antony, while Cleopatra is on the reverse. The image on the coin is far from being that of Elizabeth Taylor, but old Marc bears a strong resemblance to Richard Burton.

Roman writers merely said that Cleopatra was intelligent, sharp-witted, possessed of good humour and with a wonderful laugh. No one ever said she was beautiful.

How is beauty defined anyway? Would a voluptuous beauty like Hélène Fourment, wife of the artist Rubens, be judged less attractive than one of the emaciated super models of today? Is gaunt beautiful?