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Why didn't people smile in old portraits?
Why didn’t people smile in old portraits?
Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic:
“By the 17th century in Europe,” he writes, “it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.”
Indeed, not only were smiles of the middling sort, they breached propriety. In 1703, one French writer lamented “people who raise their upper lip so high… that their teeth are almost entirely visible.” Not only was this discourteous, he asked: Why do it at all? After all, “nature gave us lips to conceal them.”
They couldn’t really do selfies, that’s why.