The birth of the aesthetic ideal: on the problem of the formation of a new aesthetics of the female body in Russia in the XVIII century

The paper presents the results of the author's long-term research aimed at identifying the sociocultural prerequisites and features of the transformation of ideas about the aesthetic ideal, taste and measure, the specifics of physical attractiveness, the ways and purpose of female embellishments in the history of Russian culture. The focus is on the antithesis of traditions and innovations in a woman's attitude to her own body, the problem of the formation of a new aesthetics of the female body in Russia in the XVIII century. The historical material summarized in the paper provides evidence of how cultural orientations regulating external parameters of the female body change in the process of the historical and social development of civilizations, how customs are replaced by aesthetic ideals, and how the innovative canonicity appears, in which real physical beauty becomes a subject of constant search for ideal beauty, and the achievement of ideal beauty is reduced to the constant cultivation of real beauty