Florence & My Experience With Beauty
Florence & it's beauty
When you think of Italy you probably think about a few places.. Rome, Venice, and Florence. Florence is known for it's culturally amazing architecture and of course the renaissance art! When you arrive in Florence it feels like you've been immersed with the best parts of its history in the modern world. When surrounded by things like the Duomo and all of its religious glory its one of the things that catches the eye quickly. The cobblestone, the ancient architecture, and of course all of the food are only a few things Florence has encompassed in it's community. Beauty can be seen in so many different ways when you're in Florence wether its the street art, the architecture, the display of the inside of churches, or the most obvious of all the Uffizi!
What is Beauty in the Renaissance?
In todays age girls want to be like all of the girls on the cover of the magazine who are so thin, that she was probably photoshopped. What if I told you women didn't always want to look like that? Well, in the age of the reniassance they didn't look towards thinness as a virtuous or beautiful thing. First of all, Women weren't liberated or celebrated in a sensual way for a very long time, they were seen as mothers more than anything else. A thin body figure might even suggest she didn't have the body shape for birth delivery. Medici's poetry had shown a lot of how they as royalty felt about beauty.“Poetry of the Medici circle presented idealized women with much in common: they had blonde hair with shiny curls, pale skin, dark sparkling eyes, a long neck, round shoulders, a slim waist, long elegant arms and legs, and small feet. The ideal woman was virtuous, intelligent, and pious”(Andreja Rakovec). It was also very representative of class and how much money you made. The sentiment was the more money you had, the more food you could afford.
Renaissance Art & Beauty
The art movement that pushed this forward was the start of Realism which was founded by the famous Botticelli. This was when Botticelli started creating artwork that was more realistic, rather than what was previously an imaginary image. His most famous piece of art is "The Birth of Venus" where you see a woman in a realistic yet very vulnerable state. This is where you can really see a contrast in what we see today. Today women both in Italy and in the United States are portrayed with a thin and arguably slightly unhealthy state. According to a journal “Commodification of women as a sex object has been relentlessly portrayed in audio- visual media.” Today, it is a belief to many that thin means that somebody is healthy and beautiful. In addition, Those who are wealthy and high of class are criticized by the way they hold weight. This is an obvious shift from the way people viewed beauty and class in the age of The Renaissance. The point of the matter is, due to society shifts the way beauty is defined in a woman has changed drastically. Beauty can be defined by multiple factors, What I've learned is that beauty has a lot to do with perspective and what your definition of beauty really is.