i can't help but notice that old paintings of people portray them all to be, well, ugly.?

Question

Is this simply the painters at the time? or were our ancestors really this unattractive?

Answer 1

You're looking at the wrong paintings.

Many paintings are of attractive people. Look at the work of Maniscalco, Reubens, van Dyck, Gainsborough or Bellows, for example. All had a wide range of content, including good-looking people.

Answer 2

The painters were portraying them as beautiful in their eyes.

The image of beauty changes over time. For example, dark skin and muscles might be the hot look in girls today, but in the past (and in Asia now) slumped shoulders and light skin were fashionable.

I think in the 18th century women plucked the hair from their forehead and mean wore grey wigs....so sexy baby.

A study of Playboy and Penthouse magazines has found that over the years the models have become thinner and thinner (I would have loved to be on the committee granting money for that project).

Across countries we see the same thing. Japanese see a round face as the most beautiful, and europeans talk about high cheek bones.

I am trying to remember the tribe where they like fat women, and men will display their beautiful fat wives all oiled up.

Answer 3

Humanity's perception on beauty is not static and changes through the passage of time. What a Renaissance painter finds attractive in his day was what society then had in mind about beauty. If one were to compare Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and say, Picasso's potrayal of a woman, the differences are many.

Answer 4

As many people have said already, the ideas of beauty change over time and from person to person.
Alot of the renessance paintings had more pale rounded curvy women because that was considered beautiful at the time.
Besides this, Ugly people especially older weathered faces are much more fun to draw. There's alot more form and personality to them. I find it more difficult to draw a young smooth face then a character filled one because there's nothing there to draw. all the tones are much more subtle.
The lines and bulges and imperfections are what give life to a person and to an image.

Answer 5

Yes, I know what you mean. Perhaps the very rich who could afford to have a portrait painted, were let's say lacking in fine features. However, the ideas of beauty have changed
according to particular decades and even centuries. So, you will find some very striking people both male and female in all ages. Remember, these people didn't have our knowledge of health issues, diet, cosmetics etc. and their life expectancy was quite low. Someone living in the 1500s was considered very old by their mid-thirties.

Answer 6

You have to understand that painters have another duty besides paint beautiful things. They capture history with their talent. They are like "story tellers" with images.
You find them un attractive because your aesthetics (preferences) are different to it was centuries before.
You can't compare the "fashion" at 18th Century with Jessica Alba today. You have to be a little more objective when you look at this type of portraits.
And yes,most of them were ugly.

Answer 7

Portraits may be........but an artist can only work with the raw material he has in front of him. I think many modern portraits of people who can afford to commission them are also generally ugly too.

.........but look at some of the old paintings that aren't portraits and you'll see some gorgeous looking people, who must have been based on real life models.

Two examples for me, both Botticelli :

Venus from "The Birth of Venus" (see link 1)
Flora from "Primavera" (see link 2)

I defy you to say that these two are not real babes.

Answer 8

Henry VIII wanted a new wife and accepted one based on seeing her painted portrait. Once she arrive, he ran off angry that she didn't look as nice as in the painting. That was his shortest marriage.

So obviously, there were a few painters who did some 'glamour portraiture'. hehehehe

Answer 9

future generations will look at current pictures and ask the same thing about us. what is attractive now was undesirable then so painters tend to highlight whatever passes for beauty at the time.

Answer 10

I have just one word for you: John Singer Sargent...no wait, that's three words...or, is it actually one word because a name counts as only one, or do you count each individual name even though it only belongs to one person?