this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Can they also do something about those breasts? Had the artist ever seen breasts under fabric before?
I think that is part of the style of steel armour they had back when shield maidens were a thing?
I checked wikipedia and neither the Ukrainian or English page mention armour or inspiration beyond the personification of victory, just that it was designed and then redesigned with different artists and models. Draped cloth is not really practical for armor either.
Also it was built by the USSR. I could accept Soviet post-revolutionary art geometric influence as a reason if the rest of the sculpture wasn't so much more precise. The rest of the fabric drapes well enough over more irregular curves.
It just makes me think of a modern steel Michelangelo interpretation of breasts on the Tomb of De Medici (nsfw? Nude marble statue breasts)
The face has that geometric Soviet thing going too. I think this is the answer even if it was questionably executed.
WTF. Had he never seen an actual woman?
There were rumours about his sexuality, I have no idea if that is true. But the whole Catholic purity thing about viewing bodies of the other sex, combined with the exclusion of women as paid artists, led to some really terrible breasts on otherwise realistic figures for a long time in Western European art.
So this is actually not that weird? Like, everyone that saw this thing must have thought "WTF they don't come out of the armpit (of an otherwise male-ish torso)".
There are plenty of more natural looking breasts on the Sistine Chapel frescoes. Leonardo De Vinci understood breasts. Michelangelo had female friends and mistresses, some of whom inspired his Sistine Sibyls. Because of this, I think this theory might be a bit simplistic. The scale of the sculpture or fresco also affects how the chest is going to look, Raphael and Michelangelo painted huge frescoes meant to be seen from hundreds of feet away. They adjusted the proportions of huge painted bodies so that they looked natural and balanced from the intended viewing distance. Up close, the same image would look distorted. Reference the 1992-1997 restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The close up images taken from the restorer's platforms look stretched out and weird, compared to photos taken from the floor of the Chapel.