The Presentation of Obesity

Abstract

By today’s standards the Venus de Milo was fat . . . or at least “pleasingly plump.” The subjects of the great painter Rubens were definitely overweight. It is an art historian’s bromide that “No artist ever immortalized a skinny woman until Modigliani came along in the 19th century.” The history of art shows us that thin has become beautiful during periods of upheaval, periods of transition, periods or war, and when new knowledge becomes important. Plumpness is seen as more attractive during periods of stability. During the Renaissance, a period of great change and upheaval, thinness was accepted as more attractive. Following that was the period of mercantilism, a period of relative stability, when plumpness was more attractive. More recently, the world has been involved with the industrial revolution during which men and women tended to be thinner. As the industrial revolution became stabilized, plumpness became more frequent. In the twentieth century, thinness and hemlines seemed to have correlated with wars and periods of rapid change while in the interval periods weight tended to increase while hemlines would fall. At this time we are moving from the industrial revolution to the stage of information gathering and processing, and thinness and higher hemlines are the vogue.