Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker.
- Alexander Walker
- Date:
- 1892
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Beauty in woman: analysed and classified : with a critical view of the hypotheses of the most eminent writers, painters, and sculptors / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![to that conformation. By increasing the angle beyond 85°, they impressed upon their figures the grandest character, as we see in the heads of the Apollo, the Venus, and others whose facial angle ex- tends to or exceeds 90°. In regard to the forehead, then, this afforded their rule for distinguishing beings of a superior kind. How well they observed the tendency of nature to increase that angle with the increase of some of the thinking faculties, we now know. This ideal rule was, therefore, admirably founded. Whoever reflects on the nature of this angle will perceive that its increase tended in no way to raise the forehead, but to throw it forward; and therefore to lengthen the head. This conforms to the meta- phor by which a long head is used for a wise head, and which has not yet given place to a hroad head, preferred by the German craniologists, in compliment to their own organization. With regard to the height of the forehead, it has already been observed that it was, among the ancient Greeks, more considerable than its breadth, as may be seen by the busts of their most illustrious men. Still, neither the natural nor the ideal forehead much exceeded the space from the forehead to the bottom of the nose, or that from the nose to the bottom of the chin. Winckelmann accordingly says, “ The forehead to be beautiful should be low [meaning, as his expres- sions elsewhere show, no higher than the other two spaces just mentioned]; and its lowness was so fixed amongst the ideas of beauty by the Grecian artists, that it serves as a mark to distinguish modern heads from ancient. The reason of this appears founded](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28050964_0326.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
