Page 13 - El Rostro Enfermo

En la página 11, María Luisa de Orleans, por José García Hidalgo, h. 1679. Sobre
estas líneas, de izquierda a derecha, Anciano con un tumor en su nariz, por
Monogrammist I.S., 1645; Brígida del Río, la barbuda de Peñaranda, por Juan
Sánchez Cotán, 1590, y Jesús entre los doctores, por Alberto Durero, 1506.
Page 11, Marie Louise of Orléans, by J. García Hidalgo. Above, from left to right, Old
man with a Growth on his nose; Brígida del Río, The bearbed Lady of Peñaranda,
by J. Sánchez Cotán, and Jesus among the Doctors, by Albrecht Durer.

any representation of the human figure and of beauty, and facial deformity and disease as
culminating in a complete iconoclasm. instruments to represent it.
If we avoid the stylistic discontinuity that For the first time, order, symmetry and harmony,
followed the realistic sculptural portrait of those concepts that Greek and Latin artists
the late Roman Empire, it would be necessary associated with the “golden section” or “divine
to wait until the end of the Middle Ages, long proportion” provided, albeit minor, artistic space
before photography would allow a mechanical for the bizarre, the eccentric, the extravagant
recording of individual features of undeniable and the grotesque. And in the same way old Plato
loyalty, for the emergence of an artistic convinced us that beauty was an ideal that only
naturalism which created images of unique the spirit was able to achieve, some heterodox
people who were recognizable. It was then that artists undertook the unforgiving realistic
the implacable eye of the artist plunged into the representation of deformities carriers. Aesthetic
representation of the intricate secrets of the soul anomalies that inspired hostility, fear, disgust,
and finally showed us the true essence of human singling and sexual aversion in the viewer, as
beings not only highlighting their virtues but also deities that created children’s monsters intended
their defects, vices, depravity and immorality. for their divertimento, or demons emerged from
Then ugliness arose as an explanatory antagonist the satanic hybridization between animals and

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