275.)
An occasional development of the idea of sexual beauty as associated with
developed hips is found in the tendency to regard the pregnant woman as
the most beautiful type. Stratz observes that a woman artist once remarked
to him that since motherhood is the final aim of woman, and a woman
reaches her full flowering period in pregnancy, she ought to be most
beautiful when pregnant. This is so, Stratz replied, if the period of her
full physical bloom chances to correspond with the early months of
pregnancy, for with the onset of pregnancy metabolism is heightened, the
tissues become active, the tone of the skin softer and brighter, the
breasts firmer, so that the charm of fullest bloom is increased until the
moment when the expansion of the womb begins to destroy the harmony of the
form. At one period of European culture, however,--at a moment and among a
people not very sensitive to the most exquisite aesthetic sensations,--the
ideal of beauty has even involved the character of advanced pregnancy. In
northern Europe during the centuries immediately preceding the Renaissance
the ideal of beauty, as we may see by the pictures of the time, was a
pregnant woman, with protuberant abdomen and body more or less extended
backward.
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