Everything that adorns woman, everything that serves to show off her beauty, is part of herself; and those artists who have made a particular study of this enigmatic being dote no less on all the details of the mandus muliebris than on Woman herself… What poet, in sitting down to paint the pleasure caused by the sight of a beautiful woman, would venture to separate her from her costume?
- Charles Baudelaire. Read more about his thoughts on fashion and modernity, and James Tissot’s paintings of women, at The Fashion Historian.
Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet, 1848
From Wikipedia:
Along with Poe, Baudelaire named the arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre as his maître à penser and adopted increasingly aristocratic views. In his journals, he wrote “There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”
