ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Agnolo Firenzuola's treatise on female beauty, Delle bellezze delle donne , intitolato Celso (On the beauties of women, entitled Celso, 1548). Drawing inspiration from humanist circles, Firenzuola presents a catalogue of criteria for assessing female beauty based on symmetry and harmony. It refers to various classical sources such as Plato, Horace and Cicero, including Vitruvius's book on architecture to discuss proportion. Notably, it features diagrams of the normative Vitruvian man and woman for the very first time. Despite Firenzuola's egalitarian stance on gender, his work objectifies the female body and sexualizes certain body parts. It specifies the general principles of physical beauty, describing the colour and proportion of each visible body part. Celso brings the discussion of beautiful bodies into the realm of art criticism by measuring female bodies against ideals. Firenzuola was the first to bridge the gap between artistic practice and the objectified female body in modern literature by using artistic terminology.
