500 Years of the Same Nose in Western Art

With the sound turned down, this video could conceivably be taken as an indictment of artists through the ages for drawing and painting stereotypes of women's faces rather than what artists actually see. But the sonorous cello solo he chose for the soundtrack makes it pre-eminently clear that video artist eggman913 wants us to accept this as a demonstration of the Timeless Verities of Great Art.

Debbie Notkin and Laurie Toby Edison, writing together at Body Impolitic, have pulled some counter-examples off the Web after just a few minutes of googling. Not only do not all women, or even all beautiful women, look like this, but there are and always have been artists who represented a wider variety than eggman913 does.

The film-maker did a great job at two things: his (presumably “his,” the nickname is “eggman”) morphing from face to face is brilliantly done, and his ability to pick similar faces and similar sizes and positions to make the morphing work is superb.

But there’s one catch. By picking the faces that work most seamlessly together, he has neatly excised a huge variety of women painted by the same painters or schools that he selected, and left us with the impression that for the first three hundred and fifty years every woman in Western art was not only white, thin, and young, but had a long nose, dark eyes, and a demure downward gaze. In his last hundred and fifty years, only three-quarters of women fit that description.

In the comments, Lori S. writes, Yes, I think it’s fair to call the video “500 years of the same nose in Western Art.”