Women in Catholic art

[Arra]

While looking online today for a Catholic church for my boyfriend to go to during his brief stay in Seattle before taking the train up here to spend a week , I ran across an annoyance I've had for a while with the way Catholic art portrays women. The church I found was a Cathedral. The pictures of it were amazing, it was relatively huge and looked beautiful. But the women look so plain-faced and simple-minded. Their eyes look shallow and thoughtless. That's what it looks like to me, anyway. Their faces look more like the faces of ugly little boys than those of actual women. The men are sometimes portrayed similarly, but not as often. Google-imaging 'catholic art' doesn't do justice to my case. The top images don't represent the average. The stain-glassed windows, statues, etc. I've seen in actual (non-mainstream) Catholic churches and on most of the art is always as I say. A typical example: Look at the individual faces of these women. At first, I thought this was an exception, and thought "hey, not only does this face have realistic depth and character to it, but she's actually pretty attractive". But then I realized this is meant to be a male. There are a few possibilities that I see for why this is: 1) Perhaps when most of the art was created, that was just the way people drew women. And now it's become the style to draw in, so they continue to do it even while creating new pieces of art. Maybe it's just an 1800's thing. For example, I looked up portraits of Anne Boleyn, and even though she was supposed to be fairly attractive, there is the similar plain-facedness. But perhaps that style was influenced by the Catholic Church. 2) Maybe it's only me who has any problem with this. Perhaps those plain-faced women do look pretty or even average to others. Bodies that we'd consider a bit chubby now were once considered healthy and attractive. Maybe it was the same with faces, and they do consider the faces normal. 3) The look, aside from making them look ugly (in my opinion), makes them look modest and humble. Catholics might view it as nothing but positive. 4) Maybe it's simply a way to desexualize women. They don't want Catholic men, who aren't really allowed to feel lust for any human other than their wives, to find the statues in any way attractive. 5) Now this is the one that I've always felt was true, in combination with the above two. The beauty is removed to make clear that women have almost no value. Not only are they subservient, weak-willed, stupid, etc. but they lack beauty too. The only positive personality trait that a woman can take on is humbleness and submissiveness, a recognition that she is inferior to men and a humbleness about the fact. Whatever the reason for this style of art, I don't like it. The women look sickly and stupid to me. My mind starts feeling a little brain-dead just looking at them. I tend to interpret things wrongly so I don't exactly trust my intuition about this, and I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm just looking for opinions or knowledge about this. I have an incredible lack of historical knowledge. There may be some obvious explanation for this which has nothing to do with seeing women as inferior that I'm not aware of. (I considered putting this thread in the religion category but thought it wouldn't fit there, since this isn't a 'debate' type of topic. But maybe it would fit better there, or even in the art sub-forum, I don't know. Feel free to move it mods.)

[Alric]

People just weren't as good at drawing back then. One of the things they were bad at, at that time and place was proportions. I am glad you showed a couple with babies because those are always a classic examples, the babies never look like babies. They usually look kind of like smaller people, because they sucked at drawing babies. Like that first picture, they were probably really trying to draw a baby, but just couldn't. So when dealing with some of the early stuff you got to take it with a grain of salt due to just lack of fundamental drawing skill and technique of the time period. The first example is clearly a very early painting. The second probably comes a little later but still looks fairly early. The stain glass window one looks like it came from a much later period and might even be a modern piece. I admit I don't know a ton about art though. I do know if you go back to like roman times they were pretty good, but then the dark ages period everyone in Europe like forgot how to draw, and then in the renaissance period they redeveloped the skills. A lot of that Catholic art is from the dark ages or early renaissance.

[Laughing Man]

Well first, you don't "draw" paintings. Perhaps you were just using the term loosely but I just wanted to point that out. Also it's not "the dark ages," the Middle Ages were actually a period of great innovations. It has its down sides but so do all periods. If you want to see some real art, look at the illuminated manuscripts at the time and realize that it was all done by hand...on animal skin...without any of the comforts that artists have today and it had to be systematic for other scholars to write on. Monks or priests weren't really painting. They did manuscripts, well the monks did, but they weren't necessarily painters. With the cost of parchment being so high, not so much in England because they had an abundance of sheep, it's really difficult and expensive to actually commission a painting. I mean even illuminated manuscripts were coveted and hardly ever taken out of the family vault and would be passed down much like an heirloom so its not as if nobility had these paintings hanging around the castle or had a whole gallery in their vault. I think what is really interesting is how paintings but more generally art tried to paint (no pun) women as the wives of Christ. Establishing gender roles for them.

[DeletePlease]

Those pictures really creep me out. /off topic

[IndieAnthias]

I remember seeing the "smiling" Buddha and thinking, wow. This guy is definitely not a Christian.

[ninja9578]

Have you even read the bible? Women were second class citizens, they were more property than people. Above slaves, but not by much. You are surprised they are shown that way in art?