mong 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. This is notably apparent in the work of the Van Eycks: in the
Eve in the Brussels Gallery; in the wife of Arnolfini in the highly
finished portrait group in the National Gallery; even the virgins in the
great masterpiece of the Van Eycks in the Cathedral at Ghent assume the
type of the pregnant woman.

"Through all the middle ages down to Duerer and Cranach," quite
truly remarks Laura Marholm (as quoted by I. Bloch, _Beitraege zur
AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil I, p. 154), "we find a
very peculiar type which has falsely been regarded as one of
merely ascetic character. It represents quiet, peaceful, and
cheerful faces, full of innocence; tall, slender, young figures;
the shoulders still scanty; the breasts small, with slender legs
beneath their garments; and round the upper part of the body
clothing that is tight almost to the point of constriction. The
waist comes just under the bosom, and from this point the broad
skirts in folds give to the most feminine part of the feminine
body full and absolutely unhampered power of movement and
expansion. The womanly belly even in saints and virgins is very
pronounced in the carriage of the body and clearly protuberant
beneath the clothing. It is the maternal function, in sacred and
profane figures alike, which marks the whole type--indeed, the
whole conception--of woman." For a brief period this fashion
reappeared in the eighteenth century, and women wore pads and
other devices to increase the size of the abdomen.

With the Renaissance this ideal of beauty disappeared from art. But in
real life we still seem to trace its survival in the fashion for that
class of garments which involved an immense amount of expansion below the
waist and secured such expansion by the use of whalebone hoops and similar
devices. The Elizabethan farthingale was such a garment. This was
originally a Spanish invention, as indicated by the name (from
_verdugardo_, provided with hoops), and reached England through France. We
find the fashi