"regrets collect like old friends / here to relive your darkest moments"

[larryhammer]

Bah. Chest cold. *cough cough* All I have to offer, before I curl back up on the couch, is a note jotted down a couple days ago:

The more Elizabethan/Jacobean poetry I read, the more I'm convinced that all the period portraits lie and women of the time routinely went around topless. Passages like:

Hide, oh, hide those hills of snow
    Which thy frozen bosom bears,
On whose tips the pinks that grow
    Are of those that April wears

where breasts are described complete with nipples are all over the place. While the snowy hills thing continues after the Civil War, the nipples disappear, as if covered over.

Well, it made sense at the time. *honk*

---L.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

On bare-breasted Renaissance women, you may find this blog post (http://tudorstuff.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/the-tudors-boobs-exposed/) interesting.

It seems on this slim evidence that you were more likely to be portrayed with bare breasts in a woodcut than in a painting. Does this say more about the nature of the medium, or who was likely to be depicted in it?

[larryhammer]

Heh. (A safe comment, as laughing online doesn't send me into a coughing fit.)

Good question. Clearly it needs more investigation.

---L.