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Rubens 'Venus Before a Mirror', is a piece that represents the Renaissance's love for fuller-figured women. In this case, Ruben has shown a girl with love handles and rosy cheeks, using common symbolic imagery for the Renaissance period such as Cherubs and Mirrors. The mirror represents vanity and desire. The mirror and vanitas are written about by many feminist art theorists, including John Berger who wrote in Ways of Seeing, 'You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting 'Vanity,' thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your pleasure.'(Berger, 2008) This John Berger quote is referring to Diego Velazquez's infamous nude, The Toilet of Venus (Fig 4). Where we see a woman entranced with her reflection. Lynda Nead also discusses this vanity in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, 'woman looks at herself in the mirror; her identity is framed by the abundance of images that define femininity. She is framed - experiences herself as the image of representation - by the edges of the mirror and then judges the boundaries of her form and carries out any necessary self-regulation.' (Nead, 1992) The woman in the painting is engaging the audience in the spectacle of herself as an object of desire, making it acceptable for viewers to admire her, as she is already looking at herself.
Due to paintings like Fig 3, the word 'Rubenesque' has now come to be used to describe a woman of a certain size and softness. Rubens's work has had incredible significance in the lives of many fat women, including Dawn French, who in an interview for The Sunday Times (2006), joked: 'If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? She'd have been the paintbrush.'(BBC, 2015) In contrast to Rubens's more muted colors, we look at Niki De Saint Phalle. Often being described as a renaissance woman, dabbling in activism, architecture, film, and acting, and what she was best known for, her sculptures. Her art is heavily inspired by her past trauma and mental health, as she writes in her memoirs, 'My mental breakdown was good in the long run because I left the clinic a painter.'(New Yorker, 2016) De Saint Phalle's most well-known works are her 'Nana' sculptures, translating to 'Girl' in French. These sculptures (fig 5) were voluptuous, intricately decorated psychedelic figures of the female form. These sculptures we created in the 1960s, at a time when body image issues were very prevalent in the media, with slim models like Twiggy, thin was very much in, as discussed in an article for Greatist about body ideals, 'The swinging 60s brings the pendulum back in the other direction. Thin is in. And Jessica-Rabbit proportions are out. The look is now fresh-faced, girlish, and androgynously trim. Models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton (aka 'The Shrimp') represented a new ideal: doll-faced, super slender, and petite.'
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