There is a very funny scene in Charlotte Brontë's novel
Villette where Lucy Snowe visits the art museum and confronts a painting titled ``Cleopatra.'' Before she is shuffled off by M. Paul Emanuel to ``a particularly dull corner'' to view a dreary series called ``La vie d'une femme'', Lucy has a good look at the Rubenesque Cleopatra.
 |
This is possibly the painting that Lucy Snow saw!
She does not look that big though! |
The lounging woman in the painting looks ``considerably larger ... than the life,'' thinks Lucy, who wonders at her ``breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh.'' Lucy calculates that Cleopatra ``would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone.'' That's about 90-100 kilograms or around 200 pounds!
Charlotte based the description on a real painting (by a now forgotten artist) that she had seen in 1842 in Brussels. Did she realize that she could have used a fairly recent Belgian innovation to help her calculate the Cleopatra's ``affluence of flesh''? Ghent-born Adolphe Quetelet in the 1830s developed an index to classify a person's weight relative to an ideal scale. Called the Quetelet Index, his method is still used today, though it was renamed the Body Mass Index (BMI) in the 1970s.
