If that's supposed to be a proportioned human, why does it have the penis of a 3-year old?

Omg. That dick is pathetic.

Even if the subjects are "naive to art criticism" (whatever that means) they probably live in the Euro world, right? Where classical and renaissance art have formed the context for how we view "beautiful"? Or were these non-European contextualized beings? Like mermaids or bedouins?

Actually...all of those photos look a bit distorted. The legs in the one on the left look way too small for the rest of the body. The one in the middle looks closest to being "right" and least to my eye.

Ack! Bruce, you're correct. Great eye! I mislabeled the figure. Corrected. Thank you.

And Travis, good call. One of the perils of research in Rome, eh? They should recruit from Indianapolis for the next study.

He was a grower, not a shower - a delicious surprise.

What Bruce said. Look at the torso of the left one and the legs of the one on the right. The center image is the original and most closely based on classical ideals of proportion.

Additionally, Jonathon, framing the reproportioning as a function of abandoning 'the golden mean' ignores less-mathematically-derived cues, such as the jagged photoshoppery on the image to the right and the otherwise-well-known preference for anatomical proportions that approach the median (dwarves and stilts are less likely to be celebrated specimens of physical attractiveness than someone between the height of 5-5 and 6-5).

Certainly such body types deviate from the golden mean, but the mean is an observed framework laid over the organic reality, not the derivational base.

That's the 'standard penis' put on ancient sculptures so the Greeks and Romans would feel good about themselves.

I'm a little surprised that they used such a widely-known image for the study. Might people not react more to the center image because it is the most familiar, by virtue of being accurate?

OK, having reviewed the article, I'm correct about the image. The center one is of the original greek sculpture (actually, it's an image of a partial roman marble copy of a greek bronze by Polykleitos, but whatever). They only used that image and the one on the left, and the leftmost image is the altered one.

Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doryphoros

That said, the authors of the study frame it as a reflection on the validity of the golden mean. I still call bullshit. The images they employed couldn't possibly begin to control for the mean, based solely on the flaws I noted earlier.

Finally, why the fuck would you use a cheesy engraved image of a subpar Roamn copy instead of sweet-n-juicy photos of the original?

I love your posts Jonathan! Please tell me you'll be coming to the Slog party again. It was so nice chatting with you last time.

Mike--

What did you think of the subjective study in the paper? (Brain responses to what the volunteers said were beautiful or ugly images.) I thought the results were a bit stronger than the golden ratio stuff.

Sorry about the mislabeling. I've corrected it now

OM -- Aww, thanks. I'm trying. If I can squeeze out of work early enough...

@1 & @2: During the classical period, the Greeks idealized small penises. Large penises were associated with the debauched, and as such, were not desirable. Ignoring the obvious (bigger fells better inside!) it’s kind of fascinating to observe the shift in cultural values from small penis = purity = desirable to large penis = power = desirable.

Don't you preach to me!

i had a roommate who was proportioned like the one on the left.

that's the ideal NFL tight end.

@13 No Shit? I was teaching renaissance art to my students today. There was a slight uproar when I showed them a pic of the creation of Adam. When I asked what was so funny, one of them replied "Whats up with his dick?" That got me thinking. What's up with his dick indeed.

Not to mention people back then thought gigantic penises were a curse because they hurt the people they got shoved into. Look up Priapus. Apparently people used to keep statues of Priapus in their house as a warning to people not to break in or they'd be raped by the god of huge cocks.

There is a very interesting book on the wider topic of science and beauty, and how sensitivity to beauty seems to be a biological adaptation shaped by natural selection, called Survival of the Prettiest.

@16

That’s what they told me back when I was matriculating...

@15- When we moved, we had a piano mover come in. One of the guys was about 5'2 and proportioned like the one on the left. He bent down and, no shit, dead-lifted one end of our piano like it was nothing. That thing weighs 700 lbs easy.

In the quote shown are they equating something genetically coded with being "objective"? A genetic basis for beauty standards may be unthinking, but that hardly means it must be completely unbiased. Then again, I think most of these kinds of studies are just more evo/devo sexist claptrap anyway....

Maybe they should try the same experiment with different body proportions and penis sizes, and get back to us with new results.

Sigh. This is an egregious mis-use of high-tech. The brain imaging doesn't really tell us anything beyond what you get from the self-report. (To the extent that the authors claim it does, they are relying on circular reasoning.)

I saw a study recently that looked at brain activation in response to fatty foods, and found activation of pleasure centers. Someone commented: "Couldn't they have done this more cheaply with a piece of cake and check-box?"

I suspect this only got published because it was done by Rizzolatti, who is big noise in his field.

I say bullshit.

Everyone knows objective research shows the most beautiful art shows a nice blue water lake, a blue sky with 1 or 2 white clouds, kids playing ball, a sailboat, and George Washington.

Jonathon --

Margaret reflects my thinking. I did go back a third time and take a look at what they were doing, and yeah, they aren't solely basing the study on Polykleitos' Doryphoros (which appears to have been selected as it's literally the poster boy for - no shit - Polykleitos's own theory of the the Golden Mean).

That said, the other images aren't shown (and my reservations about the one used are noted). Further, as Margaret notes, the criteria evaluated were self-reported 'beauty' and 'good proportion.'

I'm far from disagreeing that it's impossible to test for and evaluate human responses to beauty. Amy's reference to one look at a non-scientific evaluation of beauty as a biological basis for mate selection is interesting, and as I recall, convinced me of the relative importance of bi- or multi- lateral symmetry as a marker for beauty.

And I'm not a die-hard opponent of proportionality as a spur to art or investigation. But proportionality is a true hangover of Platonist (NOT Platonic) projective interpretation and an enemy of science. It privileges a cultural artifact (a specific variety of geometry) over observed evidence.

I think a study truly oriented to investigating proportionality-as-beauty (and the Mean is only one example of it) would present figures which are not derived from organics in a context somewhat similar to the study referred to. Finally, the study would necessarily need to control for European and non-European cultural backgrounds.

If I were tested for a 'beauty' response to certain infinite-regress images (certainly including the Doryphoros, but also works by Klee or le Witt or Mappplethorpe) I'm sure my responses would be positive. Others (a patchouli-scented fractal, for example) I would reject. Proportionality carries ideas of order in Western society which by turns carry beauty and horror. Polykleitos' big idea is a big idea, sure, but it is just an idea, not a fact.

The Golden mean stuff is crap. Why on earth would the location of the belly button be the dividing point on a human figure. How about, I dunno, the waist? And why would you choose the second dividing line at the bent knee. Wouldn't the straight knee be more relevant?