The text discusses the concept of enhancing one's natural beauty with adornment, emphasizing that genuine beauty often needs no embellishment. It suggests that true beauty can be discerned by imagining a person without their adornments, focusing only on their inherent features. The text advises skepticism towards beauty that is heavily reliant on external decorations.
Beauty of Human Figures.
Although the grace that represents true beauty is so simple and narrowly defined in itself that it cannot be easily enhanced with extravagant embellishments, we find that charm, even when lacking in beauty, can be greatly enhanced with intelligent and well-applied adornment; so much so that through this enchantment we are often misled from discerning the true from the fabricated beauty. But as we have said before, innate beauty often shows best when it is simply presented without any artificial enhancements. We should thus consider a method to distinguish false from true beauty: for example, when we see a beautiful person who is richly adorned, we must, to judge accurately, strip our thoughts from all those trimmings; and imagine how such a woman, daughter, man, young person, or child would appear if they were unadorned; we can do this effectively by observing through a small hole or by narrowing our view to focus only on their essential features. If then, we say, such a person appears as beautiful or even more beautiful than before, we need not doubt their beauty. But if we find the opposite to be true, let us freely consider that their beauty is not genuine; since their beauty disappears with the removal of adornments and is merely borrowed, although we must be willing to... (incomplete)
Translation Notes:
- "Bevalligheyd" translated as "charm" or "grace."
- "Cieraet" translated to "adornment" or "embellishments."
- "Gemaakte" refers to "fabricated" or "constructed" beauty.