In praise of beautiful women

Male writers have traditionally praised female beauty and some of the paean have reverberated through time.

In Shakespeare's play, Antony and Cleopatra, one of Julius Caesar's Roman courtiers Enobarbus says this while beholding Cleopatra aboard her barge:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety
other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

In Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, the eponymous hero can't take his eyes off Helen, when he sees her conjured up face:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

From fretting about the face of Helen launching ships, we may have descended (or degenerated) into joking about beautiful female faces launching, or procreating rather, a thousand "cubist" children.

In a New Yorker review of Danny Boyle's new movie, Trance, critic Anthony Lane isn't impressed by the film per se, but is smitten by the beauty of its heroine, Rosario Dawson.

He is, shall we say, hypnotized by the actresses' perfect facial features:

When the Lord God forbade his worshippers to bow down before any graven image, Dawson's face was exactly the kind of thing He had in mind. No other star can boast of such sculptured features [...]

But Lane isn't just praising the present of Ms. Dawson's beauty; he goes on to envision future vessels for that beauty as well:

When [the other pretty face James McAvoy] and Dawson make love, in Trance, one strong bone structure pressed against another, it's like a clash of major religions. What if they had a family? The kids would be practically cubist.