Rarer even than feminine culture, Personal Beauty appears to have been
throughout the Middle Ages. Most of the portraits of women and men, as
well as the ideal heads and figures in paintings and sculpture, are
repulsively ugly and inexpressive of higher traits. The general causes
of mediæval ugliness—neglect of personal hygiene and sanitary measures,
hard manual labour, prevention of love-matches, etc.—will be considered
elsewhere. In this place only one cause need be alluded to. The old
Church Fathers, it is well known, were not only unæsthetic but
positively anti-æsthetic. Everything pleasing to the senses was
denounced by them, especially the physical beauty of women, which they
looked upon as a special gift of the devil. Such an attitude on the part
of the leading social class could hardly tend to encourage the
cultivation of personal charms; and during the trials for witchcraft
special efforts appear to have even been made to eliminate beauty
forcibly; for the mere possession of unusual beauty sometimes sufficed
to bring a poor girl to trial, outrage, torture, and death.
It may have been due partly to a natural reaction against asceticism,
partly to the rarity of spiritual beauty, that the mediæval poets in
enumerating the charms of their mistresses, confine themselves almost
exclusively to their physical features. Professor Scherr, after quoting
Ariosto’s description of his heroine Alcina in _Orlando Furioso_ (vii.
11, _seq._), for comparison with similar efforts of German poets,
observes: “It is very remarkable that, as in this female portrait
sketched by Ariosto, so with mediæval poets in general, including those
of Germany, the principal accent is placed on the bodily charms of the
women. Almost all sketches of this kind are purely material.
Intellectual beauty, as expressed in the features, is barely mentioned.
These old romanticists were much more sensual than modern writers would
have us believe.”