"A common argument used to support the claim that standards of beauty vary across cultures and time periods is the assertion that Europeans considered plump women to be attractive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost exclusively, the evidence presented to justify this widely held belief contrasts Peter Paul Rubens’ (1577–1640) paintings of fat women with present-day idealization of thin women. Swami,Gray, et al. (2006), for example, challenge previous research showing a WHR of 0.70 to be universally attractive, citing as evidence a mean WHR of 0.77 across 30 nude women depicted in paintings by Rubens. We argue that this conclusion is unwarranted for two reasons: (1) An analysis comparing the fatness of women depicted by Rubens and other Baroque artists suggests that Rubens was unusual in his predilection for heavy women (detailed below) and (2) there is nothing special about a WHR of exactly 0.70. Other than the fact that 0.70 happens to fall at the low end of the distribution of feminine WHR values in many modern cultures, there is no systematic reason to expect this WHR to be more attractive than other feminine WHRs. The key point is simply that because WHR distributions overlap very little between the sexes, WHRs that are more clearly in the female distribution should be perceived as optimally attractive (Singh, personal communication).
One of us (J.M.C.), in collaboration with Singh, empirically tested the validity of the claim that plump women were considered attractive in the Baroque era by assessing the proportion of Baroque artists who shared Rubens’ penchant for fat women (Confer & Singh,2009). If Rubens’ paintings represent a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European ideal of beauty, a significant proportion of Baroque artists should have also portrayed women as heavyset. If, instead, Rubens portrayals of women were atypical for that era, his paintings may simply reflect his personal taste rather than an overall societal trend. To examine this issue, independent judges (23 men, 29 women) compared 30 European paintings from 1500 to1650 with a classic Rubens painting (Die drei Grazien; 1639) to determine whether his contemporaries painted women as fat as or fatter than Rubens did. The WHR of the women in each painting was also measured to assess whether Baroque artists preferred a body shape different from an hourglass figure (Singh,1993).
Figure7.2 presents the percentages of paintings depicting women with varying degrees of fatness relative to the women depicted in Die drei Grazien(ranging from definitely less fat to definitely more fat). For each 50-year interval between 1500 and 1650, the majority of artists depicted women as less fat than those in Die drei Grazien. These findings indicate that like Picasso’s (1881–1973) unusual depictions of the human form, Rubens portrayed atypical characterizations of women for the Baroque era. The fact that the preponderance of Baroque artists did not idealize a female figure as considerably different from the figure preferred today calls into question the most prevalent example for the argument that standards of beauty are culturally defined.
In addition, this analysis corroborates the research described above documenting a preference for women with low WHR. Every portrait selected, including the women depicted in Rubens’ paintings, exhibited WHR values within the feminine range (<0.80; see Fig.7.3). Thus, despite idiosyncrasies with regard to a woman’s body size (weight), women were never depicted as possessing a masculine body shape (WHR). The results of this study provide further evidence that preferences for some traits (i.e., BMI) may be more culturally malleable than preferences for others (i.e., WHR). Yet even for BMI, a trait that shows relatively high levels of cultural dependency, the disparity between Baroque ideals of body weight and those of modern day appears to be less extreme than originally thought.
One final point regarding the plasticity of attractiveness judgments is simply that minor fluctuations in the optimum value of a trait (e.g., 0.68 vs. 0.70 WHR; Freese & Meland,2002) do not provide prima facie evidence against evolutionary explanations of attractive-ness. As stated earlier, there is nothing “magical” about a 0.70 WHR (Singh, personal communication). Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that WHR values of 0.68 or 0.72 are any more or less strongly associated with health and reproductive outcomes than a WHR of 0.70. A much more relevant comparison is between two starkly different WHRs, one from a female distribution and the other from a male distribution. Women with WHRs closer to the male range should be predicted to experience more adverse health and fertility effects than women with WHRs more solidly in the female range. After all, many variations in a woman’s health and reproductive status cause dramatic (not minor) fluctuations from a feminine baseline (except for the possibility that WHR slightly decreases at ovulation; Kirchengast & Gartner,2002). For example, soon after a woman becomes pregnant, her WHR increases not from 0.70 to 0.72, but from0.70 to well above 1.00. A similar change in WHR occurs after a woman enters menopause(Singh,1993,2006; Singh & Singh,2011). It is no surprise then that extreme fluctuations in WHR influence judgments of attractiveness more strongly than minor fluctuations, and thus small differences in preferred WHRs across time and space should not be considered incompatible with an evolutionary explanation."
--- Bodily Attractiveness as a Window to Women’s Fertility and Reproductive Value / Jaime M. Cloud and Carin Perilloux in Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Sexual Psychology and Behavior Evolutionary Psychology
The chapter also provides information on women and a low WHR being attractive and bodily vs facial attractiveness in short and long term mating.
