That occurred to me, too. Also, it would be easier to draw the unnatural pose. For one, it straightens out the body. Two, you can have a model stand in the unna

That occurred to me, too. Also, it would be easier to draw the unnatural pose. For one, it straightens out the body. Two, you can have a model stand in the unnatural pose, because it's stable. Once the masters used this pose, it would have become a kind of canonical pose that later artists imitated. The opinion of an art historian would be worth hearing.