[Illustration: Lady's Dress in the days of Greece.]
The proportions of the perfect human figure are strictly mathematical. The
whole figure is six times the length of the foot. Whether the form be
slender or plump, this rule holds good. Any deviation from it is a
departure from the highest beauty of proportion. The Greeks made all their
statues according to this rule. The face, from the highest point of the
forehead, where the hair begins, to the end of the chin, is one-tenth of
the whole stature. The hand, from the wrist to the end of the middle
finger, is the same. The chest is a fourth, and from the nipples to the top
of the head is the same. From the top of the chest to the highest point of
the forehead is a seventh. If the length of the face, from the roots of the
hair to the chin, be divided into three equal parts, the first division
determines the point where the eyebrows meet, and the second the place of
the nostrils. The navel is the central point of the human body, and if a
man should lie on his back with his arms and legs extended, the periphery
of the circle which might be described around him, with the navel for its
center, would touch the extremities of his hands and feet. The height from
the feet to the top of the head is the same as the {100} distance from the
extremity of one hand to the extremity of the other when the arms are
extended.
The Venus de Medici is considered the most perfect model of the female
forms, and has been the admiration of the world for ages. Alexander Walker,
after minutely describing this celebrated statue, says: "All these
admirable characteristics of the female form, the mere existence of which
in woman must, one is temped to imagine, be, even to herself, a source of
ineffable pleasure, these constitute a being worthy, as the personification
of beauty, of occupying the temples of Greece; present an object finer,
alas, than Nature even seems capable of producing; and offer to all nations
and ages a theme of admiration and delight." Well might Thomson say:
So stands the statue that enchants the world,
So, bending, tries to vail the matchless boast--
The mingled beauties of exulting Greece.
We beg our readers to observe the form of the waist (evidently innocent of
corsets and tight dresses) of this model woman, and also that of the Greek
Slave in the accompanying outlines. These forms are such as unperverted
nature and the highest art alike require. To compress the waist, and
thereby change its form, pushing the ribs inward, displacing the vital
organs, and preventing the due expansion of the lungs, is as destructive to
beauty as it is to health. {101}