This chapter explores the emergence of literary portraiture of the female body in medieval Castilian texts, situating it within the rhetorical tradition derived from the Latin artes poetriae. Beginning with Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria, it outlines two descriptive formulas: one dynamic and dramatized, in which beauty is staged as a contest between Nature and the body’s animated features; the other static and enumerative, offering a spatial inventory of idealized parts. Disseminated through rhetorical manuals and poetic exempla, these formulas coalesce into the rhetorical technique of effictio, which underpins many later representations of beauty and enshrines Helen of Troy as the ideal historical model and reference point in vernacular descriptions of the female body. The chapter then turns to a corpus of early Castilian texts and, through close readings of Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, Razón de amor, Libro de Alexandre, and Libro de Buen Amor, shows that actual Castilian practice resists the rigid schematicism later imposed by critics such as Edmond Faral. Rather than following a fixed descriptive order, these texts deploy an unstable yet coherent descriptive mode rooted in what the chapter defines as naïve realism: an effort to evoke ideal bodies through a language of approximation and moderation—“neither too tall nor too short,” “well-measured,” “of good size”—rather than through ideal proportion or geometric harmony. The chapter also revisits Dámaso Alonso’s influential thesis on Arabic aesthetic influence, particularly in Juan Ruiz, and nuances it by showing that while certain features may evoke Arabic tastes, the dominant descriptive logic remains grounded in European rhetorical models and ideals. What emerges is not merely a hybrid canon, but a vernacular field in the process of standardizing the beautiful body through the tools of Latin poetics and vernacular realism.