WHICH IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ?

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 15, Issue 30, 15 April 1904, Page 2

WHICH IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ?

•* Pearson’s Magazine ” discusses the question : "Is the male form more beautiful than the female ? At first blush such a question seems to answer itself, for do not the majority of painters and sectors choose a female model ninety-nine times out of every hundred, from which we may argue that people are agreed that the female form divine is more attractive and therefore more beautiful than the male ? But the answer to the question is not the foregone conclusion it would appear, and there ore many painters, and still more sculptors, who arc prepared to maintain that the male is more beautiful than the female, judging the question as one purely of aesthetics. For the most perfect expreseion of .the sculptor’s art—and it is in a representation in the round that we can batter thresh out the question raised — vre must turn to the Greek work of the be*»t period, that which is typified by the name of Phidias, circa 500 B.C. The Greek mind took a delight in rendering ideas in a concrete form, and sculpture, therefore, was the meet perfect expression they could have. This gave encouragement to sculptors, and, as the Greeks were an athletic people, and their athletes ran the races and performed their feats of strength and skill unclothed, the finest models an artist could desire were all around them. The result is that the best Greek sculpture seems to be the last word on the subject. This being so, the conclusion these Hellenes reached to a great extent settles the question wo have raised, and there can be no doubt that Greek sculptors preferred the male to the female as models. The liths and supple beauty of a young athlete was the neareet approach to abstract perfection he could realise, and we find in the work that has come down to us comparatively few nude female figures. The modeller saw in an athlete grace, symmetry, lissomnese ; the body poised firmly on the legs, the legs swelling out as it wore from the ankles, suggesting strength combined with elegance, the head set finely on the shoulders, in short, balance a quality he missed to a great extent in the female figure, which by the side of the male looked heavy and lifeless, the play of the muscles in the male giving life to the modelling. A woman, by reason of the width across her hips and the general fleshiness of her figure, does not move with the same swing and alertness as does the male ; in fact, the female figure suggests repose, while' the male suggests action, and action ia what all artists are fond of portraying. An attempt was made to combine the qualities of the two sexes, in many of their figures of Apollo, but they strike us now as nondescripts, and to use a vulgarism, neither flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring. One can well understand that in modelling a figure, the more muscular development of the male offers a sculptor greater opportunities than the smooth, rounded forms of the female, and wo find that Lord Leighton in the only two bronze statues he modelled, giving us "an athlete struggling with a python and the sluggard,” both male figures, though in his pictures he painted women for oftener than men. I should not like to draw any hard and fast conclusion from these premises for while it is Impossible'to get the strength of the male allied to the grace of the female, as we saw in the Greek Apolloe, it may be said, and here justice is meted out to both sexes, that the female form is more beautiful painted* because the artist can dwell on the color and exquisite soft texture of a woman’* skin, while a sculptor has a better subject In a young athlete, because in modelling the muscles and sinews of a male figure he has more to catch on to, more definite forms to suggest ; angles rather than subtile curves to deal with, which gives his marble or bronze a more interesting surface, and at the same time suggests life and movement.