Looking Good

In the age of tootsie tucks, who could be surprised that a publicity photograph of the latest anchor of CBS News -- a post made legendary by portly Walter Cronkite -- was electronically altered to shave off a few pounds? Or that in Hollywood, even the frizzy-haired frump and plain-Jane salesclerk roles go to such notable beauties as Cameron Diaz ("Being John Malkovich") and Claire Danes ("Shopgirl")? America reportedly spends $33.5 billion a year on cosmetics and fragrances, $15 billion on health club memberships. Billions more at hair salons and nail salons and back-waxing emporiums. And the infinite varieties of blue jeans. All the straightening, capping, lasering and bleaching of teeth. The special razors to give a young man the perfect stubbly face. The designer shoes, designer socks, designer skivvies and shirts and blouses, designer jackets and sweaters and eyeglass frames and jammies.

As Calvin Klein might say: obsession.

Is ours any greater obsession, though -- given the differences in societies and technologies and resources -- than the obsession that focused the riches and skills of ancient Egypt on creating a bust of a beautiful queen? Her husband, the all-powerful Pharoah, could have ordered up another sphinx, pyramid or sarcophagus, but he decided to immortalize this woman's appearance. He summoned an artist of unsurpassed skill and gave him the tools and time he needed. No Vogue editor, no Hollywood studio, ever poured more into memorializing a face.

Is it any greater obsession than the one Homer describes, in which the thousand ships were launched to bring the beautiful Helen back from Troy? Any greater than the one that caused the leading citizens of Florence to purchase an enormous block of marble that would -- after decades of false starts by other artists -- be carved into an ideal young male form by Michelangelo and named "David"?

Beauty is an eternal obsession, the Italian brainiac Umberto Eco explains, though the obsession finds new channels and expressions according to time and place. "Beauty has never been absolute and immutable, but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country," he declares in his History of Beauty -- a sumptuously illustrated book that makes you think every philosophical tome might benefit from pictures of good-looking naked people.

The question, then, is not whether we are more obsessed today than ever before, but what today's modes of obsession might tell us about ourselves.

Consider an advertisement that appeared this summer in key fashion magazines.

Three figures are shown against a vague, gray background: two beautiful young men and one beautiful young woman. Their feet are obscured by wispy fog, as though they might be walking in a cloud. All three are facing away from the camera. Each one is the proud owner of a well-shaped tush, easy to discern, because two of them are wearing tight jeans, and the third -- one of the fellas -- is clad in a loincloth that covers just half his loins.

Besides the loincloth, his only adornment is a pair of fluffy white angel wings. This angel is standing between the mortals in jeans and has a wing around each one. Maybe he is comforting them through a dark night of the soul. Maybe they have died in a terrible accident and he is taking them to heaven. But whatever he's up to, the woman has hanky-panky on her mind. She is reaching to lay a hand on his celestial rear. The startled angel swings his head to look at her, and what do you know? He has the profile of a Greek Adonis.

The ad team for Diesel jeans packed this picture full of enough symbols and allusions to choke a grad student. But one striking fact about it is that images used by Greek philosophers to exalt their gods (curly-haired Adonis, seductive Venus), and later used by Renaissance popes to promote Catholicism (near-nude angel, curvy Madonna), are now employed to sell $200 jeans in 300-page fashion slicks.

In those earlier eras, physical beauty was treated as a gateway to higher virtues. "What if man had eyes to see the true beauty -- the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed," Socrates muses in Plato's Symposium. Physical beauty, to Plato, was but a shadow of ideal beauty; the reason to gaze on a beautiful body was that it might inspire contemplation of the ideal. This concept held sway over Western aesthetics for much of 2,000 years. The rippling abs, coiled calves, full breasts and buns of steel in the work of Phidias of Greece and Michelangelo of Italy make today's Abercrombie & Fitch kids look prudish and wan. But the purpose of those erotic creations was (in theory, at least) to lead viewers toward a Platonic divine. The beauty of youth was but a step toward the beautiful Truth, and so every canvas was an allegory and every hottie a god or goddess. No history records the names of the gorgeous models who posed for those statues; instead, we know them as Diana or Mary, Achilles or David.

Today, beauty doesn't sell ideas or religions; it sells products and lifestyles. Obvious, perhaps. But what are the implications? For one thing, this change in the purpose of beauty has had the effect of democratizing beauty. Looking good is no longer the exclusive province of gods and near-gods. Everyone can join in.