Each person has his own ideas about the beauty of the body. For some, curvaceous forms are the standard, others prefer clear lines. At the same time, the proportions of the body of all people are different and even the greatest minds of all mankind have not yet been able to find the exact formula. Along with the changes in the world, the views about the ideal also change. Let's try to trace how these ideas have changed throughout history.
The first images of a woman belong to the Paleolithic era, it was at that time that the first figurines made of stone appeared. A short torso, a swollen abdomen, hypertrophied breasts, massive hips, small arms and legs - these characteristics testify to the cult of female fertility. However, on
images that refer to the period of Egyptian civilization, women are noted to be slender, and the ideal of their beauty is represented by a tall, slender brunette who has an athletic physique (broad shoulders,flat chest and hips, long legs).
In the 5th century BC, the sculptor Polycleret developed the canon, a system that described the ideal proportions of the human body. According to his calculations, the head is 1/7 of the height, the hand, the face is 1/10, the foot is 1/6. However, the image described by the Greek had rather large and square features; at the same time, these canons became a kind of norm for the ancient period and the basis for Renaissance artists. Polyclertus embodied his image in the statue of Doryphorus, in which the ratio of body parts shows the power of physical strength. The shoulders are wide, practically the same as the height of the body, ½ of the body height is pubic fusion, and the size of the head can be laid 8 times according to body height.
The author of the golden rule, Pythagoras, considered ideal the body in which the gap from
crown to waist referred to total length 1:3. Recall that according to the rule of the golden section, a proportional ratio, where the whole is related to its larger part, as well as the larger to the smaller. This rule was used, creating ideal proportions, by such masters as Miron, Praxiteles and others. These ratios were observed in the embodiment of the masterpiece "Aphrodite of Milos", created by Agesander.
For more than one millennium, scientists have been looking for mathematical relationships in human proportions, and for quite a long time, separate parts of the body, such as the elbow, palms, were the basis of all measurements … Studying the ideal proportions, scientists found that body sizes for women and men are different, butthe ratio of body parts to each other are approximately the same numbers. So, in the middle of the 20th century, a scientist from England - Edinburgh took a musical chord as the basis for the canon of the human body. The ideal proportions of the male body corresponded to the major chord, and the female - to the minor.
It is also curious that the navel of a newborn divides his body into two equal parts. And only then, as they grow, the proportions of the body reach their apogee in development, which corresponds to the rule of the golden ratio.
At the end of the 20th century (in the 90s), professor of psychology D. Singh, as a result of long research, found a kind of beauty formula. According to him, the ideal proportions of the female body are the ratio of the waist and hips from 0.60 to 0.72. He proved that it is not the presence of fat deposits that is important for beauty, but how they are distributed throughout the figure.
Thus, depending on the time, era and culture, the ideal proportions of the body were represented by different indicators. Therefore, the question of whether there is an ideal figure remains open.
