By Theresa Rézeau

Peter Paul Rubens did not ask the bodies in The Three Graces to become smaller before they could become beautiful.

Painted around 1630–35, the three women stand almost entirely exposed. Their stomachs are soft, their thighs substantial, their flesh folded and luminous. Rubens (1577–1640), the Flemish Baroque painter, gives them scale, sensuality and presence. There is no visual apology for the space their bodies occupy.

Nearly four centuries later, those bodies enter a culture with a very different vocabulary.

In a recent online conversation, someone wrote, “God hates when you disrespect a gift He gives you.”

The thought seemed reasonable enough. A talent can be wasted. Time can be squandered. The body can be neglected.

Then came the conclusion: “This is why fat people are always unlucky.”

Somewhere between those two sentences, stewardship had become judgement.

To call the body a gift is to speak of responsibility, but responsibility is not the same as appearance. Caring for a body may involve nourishment, movement, rest, medical care, restraint and attention to its changing needs. None of these can be reliably measured simply by looking at another person’s size.

Yet appearance is often treated as evidence.

A larger body can be read as laziness. A muscular body as discipline. Thinness as control. Youthfulness as health. These judgements take seconds to form, while the histories contained within bodies may have taken decades to create.

Genetics, illness, medication, trauma, pregnancy, mental health, poverty, metabolism, disability, age and circumstance can all shape the human form. So can individual choices. The difficulty begins when appearance is treated as sufficient evidence to determine which of these forces has been at work.

Before entering the art world, I worked as a qualified personal trainer at Third Space Canary Wharf and Matt Roberts Personal Training in London. I also competed in bodybuilding, an environment in which the body is deliberately trained, shaped and ultimately judged according to precise visual standards. Standing before judges taught me how much work can exist behind an appearance, but also how quickly an entire body can be reduced to what is visible in a single moment.

Those experiences taught me how complicated the relationship between appearance and discipline really is. I knew what it meant to train a body intensely, but working closely with clients taught me something equally important: two bodies that look similar may carry entirely different histories.

People arrived with different metabolisms, injuries, relationships with food, levels of confidence, medical histories and experiences of their own bodies. Some were attempting to lose weight. Others wanted strength, mobility or endurance. Some needed to rebuild trust in bodies that had become sources of frustration.

Working with them made one assumption increasingly difficult to accept: that a stranger’s body provides enough information to tell us how disciplined they are, how well they care for themselves or what brought them to their present condition.

Weight is not a biography.

Discipline itself is largely invisible. It can exist in the person who exercises consistently and remains large. It can exist in someone recovering from illness, learning to walk again, resisting an addiction, managing chronic pain or simply trying to establish a healthier relationship with food. Conversely, a body that conforms perfectly to contemporary beauty standards tells us very little about the character of the person inhabiting it.

Rubens’s Three Graces complicates these assumptions because the painting comes from another visual world.

The Three Graces originate in classical mythology, traditionally associated with beauty, charm and abundance. Rubens inherited a subject artists had represented for centuries, but his women are unmistakably physical. Their flesh has weight. Their bodies press against gravity. Skin folds where bodies turn. Light moves across backs, hips, shoulders and thighs.

They are idealised, certainly, but the ideal itself is revealing.

Beauty has never had a permanent body.

Every age constructs its own visual language around desirability. Bodies are enlarged, reduced, covered, exposed, disciplined, ornamented or altered according to values that can appear natural while we are living inside them. Time exposes how temporary many of those certainties are.

What one period celebrates, another may attempt to correct.

This matters because contemporary culture possesses technologies of comparison that Rubens could never have imagined. Images now arrive continuously through phones and screens. Faces can be narrowed, skin smoothed, waists reduced and proportions altered before an image reaches another person. Cosmetic procedures can extend that pursuit from the digital image into the physical body itself.

None of this means that altering one’s appearance is inherently wrong. Human beings have decorated and modified their bodies across cultures and centuries. The deeper problem begins when alteration stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the price of social acceptance.

An ideal can become so familiar that it disguises itself as truth.

This is why The Three Graces remains useful. The painting does not prove that larger bodies are superior to thinner ones, nor should a seventeenth-century beauty ideal simply replace a twenty-first-century one. Reversing the hierarchy would leave the hierarchy intact.

The more interesting lesson is that the hierarchy moves.

One painting cannot define the beauty standards of an entire century, and Rubens should not be made to stand for every body his culture valued or rejected. The Three Graces offers something more modest but still important: evidence that bodies considered beautiful have not always been imagined according to the proportions dominant in our own moment.

The body remains while standards migrate around it.

The word gift is what returns the argument to faith. It was the word that first caught my attention in the online conversation, because within the Christian tradition that shaped my own understanding, the body has never been merely an aesthetic object. To call it a gift is to make a claim about where its value begins.

Christianity makes an extraordinary commitment to embodiment. God enters human history through flesh. Christ experiences hunger, exhaustion, touch, injury and death through a body. Resurrection does not discard that body as though matter were an inconvenience. The wounds remain.

This is what makes Saint Paul’s language of the body as a temple so demanding. His description of the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit has often been invoked to encourage restraint and care. But a temple is sacred before it is aesthetically pleasing.

That distinction matters.

If sacredness depends upon conformity to a particular weight, age, ability or appearance, then sacredness has been reduced to fashion.

A body can require care without deserving contempt. Health can matter without becoming a measure of human worth. Someone can want to lose weight, gain strength, change their diet or seek medical treatment without first being taught to hate the body from which that change must begin.

Care and contempt are not the same form of motivation.

This becomes particularly important in conversations about obesity and health. There are legitimate medical reasons to discuss body weight, nutrition, cardiovascular health, mobility and physical activity. Refusing to shame people does not require pretending that every physical condition carries identical health implications.

But medicine asks a different question from prejudice.

Medicine asks what is happening within a particular body and what might improve that person’s health. Prejudice looks at a body and decides what kind of person lives inside it.

One requires knowledge. The other requires only assumption.

The consequences of those assumptions extend beyond appearance. People who live in bodies that fall outside prevailing ideals can experience ridicule, exclusion and humiliation. Repeated scrutiny can alter the relationship a person has with food, exercise, intimacy and even their willingness to be seen.

This creates a peculiar contradiction. A culture that claims to encourage people to care for their bodies can make some people despise those bodies first.

Shame is then presented as motivation.

Art offers another way of looking.

Not because art has always been kind to the human body. It has not. Artists have idealised, exaggerated, eroticised and manipulated the human form throughout history. Paintings are not neutral witnesses.

That is precisely why they are useful.

Art preserves evidence that the supposedly obvious rules of beauty have changed repeatedly. The body considered desirable in one century may be criticised in another. A feature once exaggerated may later be concealed. What feels permanent from inside a culture becomes visibly temporary when viewed across history.

Rubens gives that instability flesh.

Look again at The Three Graces. The women do not know that centuries later viewers might examine their stomachs according to a different standard. They do not anticipate calorie counters, fitness trackers, filters or social media comments. Within the world Rubens creates for them, their bodies require no explanation.

They simply occupy the painting.

There is something profoundly humane in that permission.

Calling the body a gift should not mean abandoning responsibility for it. Gifts can be cared for. Bodies need nourishment, movement, rest, medical attention and protection. Sometimes caring for the body requires difficult change.

But stewardship begins with the body one actually has, not the body a culture has decided one ought to possess.

It also places limits on judgement.

The original statement was right about one thing: gifts deserve care. But that principle becomes distorted when it is used to determine another person’s character, fortune or spiritual worth from their appearance.

If the body is a gift, contempt for another person’s body cannot easily be reconciled with reverence for the giver.

Nearly four centuries after Rubens painted The Three Graces, their bodies remain before us: soft stomachs, rounded thighs, folds of flesh, skin touched by light. What has changed is not the existence of the human body, but the language surrounding it.

To call the body a gift cannot mean that only certain bodies qualify.

Stewardship asks what we do with what we have been given. Judgement assumes we know what another person has done with theirs.

Rubens offers no medical diagnosis, moral ranking or apology. He simply allows the body to occupy the canvas with dignity.

If the body is sacred, that dignity is part of the gift too.