Why are Women so "Manly" in Classical Art?

[00:00:00]Picture this.

[00:00:02]It is a suffocatingly hot afternoon in 1512.

[00:00:06]You are standing in the very middle of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

[00:00:11]There's an overwhelming historical weight of absolute Catholic authority.

[00:00:16]You look up.

[00:00:18]Right there, staring down at you from the cracked plaster, is Michelangelo's [music] Delphic Sybil.

[00:00:26]She is a classical prophetess. [music] She is fully clothed in heavy draped robes.

[00:00:32]She projects a flawless vision of divine inspiration and grace.

[00:00:37]But, hold on.

[00:00:40]Look closer at her arms.

[00:00:43]Those are the arms of a heavyweight bare-knuckle boxer.

[00:00:47]They are massive, imposing, and undeniably brutal.

[00:00:52]Her biceps are practically bursting through the delicate fabric of her mantle.

[00:00:57]She has the sheer physical build to snap a fully grown man's spine over [music] her knee without breaking a sweat.

[00:01:05]And suddenly, a jarring realization hits you.

[00:01:09]You've been looking at classical Renaissance [music] art your entire life.

[00:01:13]You've walked blindly through grand museums, stared blankly at expensive prints, and nodded along to incredibly boring audio guides.

[00:01:23]But you've never actually stopped to notice this incredibly bizarre, entirely obvious gender-bending detail hiding in plain sight.

[00:01:34]These artists operated under the strict, watchful, and highly paranoid eye of the Renaissance church.

[00:01:41]A single misplaced shadow or a slight mistake carried the risk of rapid accusations of heresy.

[00:01:48]The stakes were terrifyingly high.

[00:01:51]Reputations, commissions, and sometimes literal lives were on the the They calculated every single brushstroke.

[00:01:59]They planned every bulging deltoid.

[00:02:03]So, why are women painted muscular in classical paintings?

[00:02:08]The answer is deeply unsettling.

[00:02:11]And to understand [music] it, we have to look past the ceiling.

[00:02:26]We need to completely [music] forget our modern understanding of biology.

[00:02:31]To grasp this, we have to recognize [music] that the Renaissance possessed a wildly different concept of gender boundaries than we do today.

[00:02:39]During this era, there was only one recognized [music] canonical body in existence.

[00:02:45]And that body was male.

[00:02:48]Female bodies were viewed as imperfect, entirely incomplete versions of the male form.

[00:02:55]This deep-seated belief seeped into every single corner of visual [music] culture.

[00:03:00]If an artist needed to paint an angel, they would strip away distinct characteristics [music] entirely.

[00:03:06]Angels would be painted androgynous to clearly indicate their absolute [music] lack of a bodily autonomy, encouraging that same piousness in the viewer.

[00:03:16]This is the absolute [music] core of the mystery.

[00:03:19]When a Renaissance artist needed to paint a human woman, they looked at a man.

[00:03:26]Let us jump forward [music] a bit to Michelangelo's Medici Chapel in Florence.

[00:03:30]Look at his famous marble sculpture, Night.

[00:03:34]She is a reclining woman with an elongated chest and a stomach that looks like a shapeless trunk cut across with deep horizontal furrows. [music] Her visible knee is sharply angular and highly masculine.

[00:03:47]Her muscles are tight, taut, and visibly stringy.

[00:03:51]Her chest looks like strange artificial appendages awkwardly glued onto a male torso.

[00:03:58]Why does she look like this?

[00:04:00]Because her anatomy and proportions were drawn [music] straight from a male model.

[00:04:05]We have the historical receipts.

[00:04:07]The preparatory drawing [music] for this exact statue, currently sitting in London, literally proves he used [music] a male model.

[00:04:15]He looked at a muscular man, sketched him out [music] in exhaustive detail, and then casually tacked on female traits as an afterthought.

[00:04:23]It feels entirely lazy.

[00:04:26]You might assume he could not be bothered to find [music] a female model, or perhaps he simply ignored anatomical accuracy.

[00:04:32]And that is exactly what I thought, too.

[00:04:35]But, wait.

[00:04:43]This points to a deeply intense philosophical obsession.

[00:04:49]The Renaissance was defined by a massive revival of classical learning.

[00:04:53]Along with unearthing Greco-Roman statues, they dug up Platonic philosophy and became incredibly obsessed with the myth of the androgyne.

[00:05:02]This was the classical belief in an original human form where both genders were perfectly joined together in a single body.

[00:05:09]They genuinely believed that merging male and female traits was the absolute pinnacle of human grace.

[00:05:16]The philosopher Marsilio Ficino openly stated [music] that women who possess a masculine character easily attract men.

[00:05:23]In 1525, a follower named Mario Equicola took it a step further.

[00:05:29]He noted that the manly female and the effeminate male are graceful in almost every single aspect.

[00:05:36]A concept visible across several major works.

[00:05:40]Caravaggio's Saint Matthew features an overtly feminine angel, blurring the lines of religious aesthetic life.

[00:05:47]Leonardo da Vinci's famously unconventional St. John the Baptist exhibits gentle shadows and an androgenous effect.

[00:05:55]Donatello's bronze David presents a young boy with a lithe and elegant quality entirely stripped of the muscular development needed to defeat Goliath.

[00:06:04]This brings us to the ultimate tastemakers of the era, Pietro [music] Aretino and Lodovico Dolce.

[00:06:12]Aretino observed copies of Michelangelo's works, specifically Leda and the Swan and Venus reclining with Cupid.

[00:06:19]Aretino absolutely gushed over Venus.

[00:06:23]Why?

[00:06:24]Because the brilliant [music] artist made her with the body of a female, but the heavy muscles of a male.

[00:06:31]Aretino praised this bizarre combination, calling it an elegant vivacity [music] of artifice.

[00:06:37]Meanwhile, Dolce praised the Venetian painter Titian for doing the exact [music] opposite.

[00:06:43]He loved Titian's painting of Adonis because the hero possessed a graceful beauty that, while [music] partaking of the feminine, did not detract from his masculinity.

[00:06:53]Dolce wrote that in a woman there should be something of the man, and in a man, something of the beautiful woman.

[00:07:00]The entire educated elite loved it.

[00:07:04]In their [music] highly patriarchal classical heritage, heroic roles were strictly reserved for male characters.

[00:07:09][music] To give a female figure spiritual preeminence or heroic stature, artists felt [music] they had to strip away her traditional femininity.

[00:07:18]By giving a sibyl or a goddess the physical attributes of a man, she was elevated to the superior heroic realm of prophets.

[00:07:27]They masculinized [music] these women because it was the only way they knew how to make them heroes.

[00:07:33]And that is when I realized we have only been looking at this mystery through the highly distorted lens of male artists.

[00:07:48]But what happens [music] when an actual woman picks up the paintbrush?

[00:07:53]Artemisia Gentileschi.

[00:07:56]She was an absolute force of nature in the Baroque era.

[00:08:01]She established a completely different set of rules for classical painting.

[00:08:06]I've actually just recently made an entire video dedicated to her. Feel free to check it out.

[00:08:11]Gentileschi completely ignored the philosophical posturing of the men around her.

[00:08:16]She threw out the absurd man [music] with breasts ideal.

[00:08:21]Look closely at Gentileschi's terrifying masterpiece, Judith Slaying Holofernes.

[00:08:28]Judith is committing a visceral act.

[00:08:31]She is actively sawing through a warlord's neck with a heavy sword.

[00:08:36]But look at her arms.

[00:08:38]Look at her build.

[00:08:40]She is undeniably, realistically female.

[00:08:44]Her female musculature is grounded in harsh reality, informed by Gentileschi's own very real experiences as a woman.

[00:08:53]She is using leverage, body weight, and realistic physical effort to commit this act.

[00:09:00]The physical exertion is palpable and raw.

[00:09:05]The male artists of the Renaissance painted women as muscular giants because they were terrified of actual female power.

[00:09:13]They masked it in masculinity to make it palatable for their elite patrons.

[00:09:18]Gentileschi, armed with nothing but oil paint and sheer defiance, ripped the mask entirely off.

[00:09:26]If all this talk of hidden historical details has made you want to study these masterpieces up close, you're in luck.

[00:09:33]You can get museum-quality reproductions of famous classical masterpieces at viewcrypt.com.

[00:09:40]I'll see you in the next one.

[00:09:41]Goodbye.