Savannah Lee

I was over at Shapely Prose and read fillyjonk's "Everyone's an expert and nobody's right." It attacks the perspective of people who think that weight control is simple (this is often called "calories in/calories out"), that overweight means a lack of self-discipline, and that fatness is somehow unhealthy or unnatural.

The "calories in/calories out" perspective, like most simplistic dogmas, lacks a sense of history. I spent years of my life sitting in art history classes, and by today's standards, pretty much everyone was a "fattie."

Raphael's "The Nymph Galatea" of 1512-14 is a freaking SEA of flesh. If those little putti flying around had to come down, put on clothes, and go to school today, their parents would get fingers pointed at them for letting them be "fat." And look at the fleshy arms, rounded stomachs, and ripe apple-faces of the women. As for the men--they're muscular, but they ain't skinny; they've got heft and belly.

Believe me, that is not an exception.

Feast your eyes on the perfectly rounded face and deep, smooth flesh of Caravaggio's "Bacchus."

I must warn anyone with a fear of "fat" that they might want to avert their eyes from Rembrandt's Artemis.

Similar warnings in effect for his Danae. This one was always one of my favorites--look how Rembrandt, the *real* master of light, shades and illuminates Danae's form.

Titian would never have been able to render the texture of Europa's flesh like this if this wasn't what people really looked like then, if he hadn't *seen* what he depicted. Photorealism, eat your heart out.

I could go on. Believe me. If you sit in an art history class, you learn that the well-upholstered body was the *norm.* Not the exception. The artists of the past took for granted the rounded arm, the rounded cheek, the rounded chin, the rounded stomach. This is how people *were* back then. These artists *saw* flesh as soft, and you can see they loved it for its softness, its depth of texture, its ability to curve to the light and hence create shadow. Flesh gave these painters something to *do.*

And as the images click by, hour after hour, class after class, you inevitably realize--this is our natural state. This is how humans are. We're not skinny. We're like otters and seals, we're voluptuous.

(Yes, guys too.)

So the next time you see something about the "obesity epidemic," just consider it a return to normal.