The Anatomy of Melancholy

Although this beauty is generally most conspicuous in the face, other parts often have a most pleasing grace and are enough by themselves to inspire love. A high forehead like the bright heavens, “the loveliest region of the sky; a brow where honour lives, a brow where love plays,” white and smooth as polished alabaster; a pair of vermilion cheeks where love lodges: “Love, who spends the night on a girl’s soft cheeks.” A coral lip, “the shrine of kisses,” in which

A thousand kisses lie revealed, a thousand lie hidden,

“the Graces’ most delightful dwelling”: a sweet-smelling flower from which bees may gather honey. “Honey-gathering winged creatures, why still seek hollow thyme-blossoms and roses?” and so on,

Come, all of you, to my mistress’s lips: She breathes roses, and so on.

A white, rounded neck, that “Milky Way”; a dimple in the chin; black eyebrows, “Cupid’s bow”; sweet breath; white, even teeth, which some call the feature that sells the whole; a lovely, soft, rounded breast: these lend exquisite grace.

What beauty in swelling breasts of Parian marble!

And they form a pleasant valley, “a milky hollow,” between two chalk-white hills: “little sister breasts, rousing cold lovers to lust by the mere sight of them.” Hence this line:

How well the shape of those breasts invited a caress!

Again: Firm, upright breasts set the eyes on fire.

Flaxen hair: golden hair was held in high esteem, and Virgil praises Dido for it—“Proserpina had not yet taken away the golden lock,” and “her hair is tied up in gold.” Apollonius, in Argonautica, book 4—“Jason’s golden hair set Medea’s heart on fire”—makes Jason’s golden hair the chief cause of Medea’s infatuation with him.

Castor and Pollux were both blond. Paris, Menelaus and most amorous young men in every age have been so: “soft and charming,” as Giambattista della Porta concludes in Physiognomy, book 2, lovely to behold. Homer praises Helen in this way, and makes Patroclus and Achilles both blond. There is “beautiful-haired Venus,” and Cupid himself was blond, “his hair gleaming and curling into gold,” like the exquisite image of Narcissus in Callistratus; for so Psyche saw him sleeping.

Briseis, Polyxena, and so on, all golden-haired,

——and beautiful Hero, Whom young Apollo courted for her hair.

Leland praises Guithera, King Arthur’s wife, for her beautiful flaxen hair; Paulus Aemilius describes Clovis, that handsome king of France. Synesius holds that every effeminate man or adulterer is fair-haired; and Apuleius adds that Venus herself, goddess of love, cannot give delight, even if she comes accompanied by the Graces and all Cupid’s attendants, wearing her own girdle and smelling of cinnamon and balm: if she is bald or has ugly hair, she cannot please her Vulcan.