For Joe, Zac, Hannah, Dan (and all the Instagram generation).

With love.

INTRODUCTION

A few years ago, I stumbled across an extraordinary sixteenth-century book. I scanned the text open-mouthed. Did women in the Renaissance really worry about post-baby stretch marks, greying hair, being overweight? About having fat arms, saggy boobs, noses that were too big, bad breath, smelly feet, or unsightly dribbling in their sleep?

The unique quality of Giovanni Marinello’s The Ornaments of Ladies, first published in Venice in 1562, isn’t just its unprecedented size – it includes more than 1,400 recipes for the beautification of the face, hair and body – it’s also the way that these recipes are arranged, in order of the body part to be corrected, each section headed with descriptions of the perfect body, piece by piece, for readers to emulate. The book investigates women’s appearance from the crown of their (ideally) golden-haired heads to the tips of their finely rounded toes, showing its female readers how to amend their many faults to get the model physiques described (as Marinello explains) by ‘ancient and modern poets and painters’. Women’s bodies are presented as forever-unfinished projects, to be constantly improved and worked upon. In a way that feels eerily familiar, Marinello’s ‘helpful’ tips double up as a kind of self-dissatisfaction machine.

The art and literature of the Renaissance is typically written about from the point of view of its illustrious makers and its enlightened patrons; but here was a text that suggested that the celebrated poems, plays and paintings of the time had profound effects on how real people perceived bodies and beauty – their own and those of the folks around them. Marinello’s book gives us a glimpse of daily life behind the Raphaels, the Titians and the Medici – a window into the lives of real women and how they were affected by these new beauty norms. I needed to find out more.

I became intrigued by the many parallels between the sixteenth century and today, both eras characterised by rapid shifts in visual culture and technology. Renaissance innovations saw a new emphasis on women’s beauty in popular entertainment of all kinds – from fashionable stories containing long, lingering descriptions of naked young women (often in deadly peril, waiting to be rescued by a hero), to the endless images of newly realistic naked goddesses being churned out in sculptures, paintings and prints. Marinello’s book hints at an untold history of the Renaissance (and the aesthetic standards we’ve inherited from it) with women centre stage. It also gives us clues about the historical foundation of today’s impossible, contradictory pressures on women to alter their faces and bodies to meet ever-shifting standards.

One thing, at least, was clear early on in my investigations: Renaissance beauty ideals were unyielding and deliberately exclusive. Marinello’s book exposed a meshwork of Renaissance ideas about health, medicine and personality that formed a toxic combination, which (only sometimes unconsciously) justified hierarchies of sex, class and race, including many that we haven’t entirely shaken off. However, it also gave a palpable sense of the pleasure to be found in beauty culture, its role at the heart of female friendships and social lives, and the space it afforded women to spend time away from their often violent and sneering menfolk. The text gave tantalising clues about how women could use ‘ornament’ – the catch-all term in this period for the adornment of the hair, face and body – in creative and subversive ways, as a space for rebellion, self-expression and experimentation.

I have to admit, though, this isn’t the book I thought I’d write. Inspired by Marinello, I set off to research the history of cosmetics in the Italian Renaissance – a subject that hasn’t received much attention, and is wrongly still sometimes dismissed as trivial. I ended up astonished by Renaissance women’s inventive and thoughtful reactions to their appearance-obsessed culture. I followed where the primary sources led, and I found myself in some unexpected places: selling peaches with peasant women on the busy streets of Renaissance Venice; on the stage with female actors considering the complex relationship between external appearance and internal feelings; listening to learned doctors argue over whether dark-haired women were fertile; worrying over my weight in the stately halls of sixteenth-century Mantua; listening to a network of working-class women brewing up poison in the face of domestic violence; and, finally, in my own kitchen marvelling over the skills and knowledge inherent in Renaissance cosmetics recipes. I realised that beauty culture has tendrils that wind their way through women’s lives, and can’t be isolated from everything else. What we do with our hair, face and body reflects and affects our social world.

Highlighting an eclectic range of female voices from the period (at turns funny, insightful, surprising and poignant), it’s not surprising that there was no one way of being a woman in the Renaissance, as now. I show here how some women were able to use beauty to their advantage – at least until they got too old to wield this all-too-fickle weapon – while others struggled against a beauty culture they saw as unfair, superficial and oppressive. I suspect that most readers won’t have heard of these women before, yet they deserve to be firmly anchored in the history of feminism. They include the first female published poets and playwrights, composers and philosophers, actors and artists.

I’m also including a selection of updated recipes to encourage everyone to have a go at making Renaissance cosmetics themselves. These recipes demonstrate the impressive range of hands-on scientific knowledge many women possessed at the time – these unheralded early chemists and botanists. They not only showed an understanding of natural ingredients, especially plants, and their properties, but also a technical understanding of how to manipulate them – to make face tonics using distillation, or moisturiser using emulsion, or hair conditioner by extracting mucilage from mallow.

It takes hard work to have a socially acceptable body and, as many feminist writers have pointed out, this work is – and was – harder and more exacting for women than for men. Bathing, brushing, deodorising, hair removal, shampooing, cleansing, toning, moisturising, worrying over our diet – and that’s before we even think about putting on make-up. All these procedures and processes we carry out every day, or most days, often in an intimate space – a bathroom or a bedroom, perhaps. Other forms of body care might be less frequent – a visit to the hairdresser or barber, to the nail or brow salon, the spa. Some commentators have called this swathe of stuff ‘body work’ – recognising the resources of time, effort and money encapsulated in this activity that, like housework, mainly falls to women. Undoubtedly, such work can lie heavily on women and take up too much valuable time. But it can also form an important and comforting ritual, one that affords pleasure in expertise, and opportunities for connection. Keeping the body, face and hair looking good can be a pressure, a burden – but also often a lot of fun.

HISTORY CAN BE useful to think with. In a world of social media and sound bites, it’s a peculiar luxury to plunge into the knotty and rich history of this fascinating and foundational moment in time, a moment that has had such a lasting influence on thought and aesthetics today. I hope I’ve done justice to the people I discuss here, who, for centuries, have been neglected by the historical record. I hope that sometimes their stories will see you nodding along in recognition.

All the conclusions in this book are rooted in primary source materials, several of which have not been discussed by historians before, or deserve to be more widely known outside academia. Many of these texts only exist in their original Italian – the translations here are mine unless otherwise stated. Because of this I have included extensive endnotes, both so readers can follow any avenues that interest them through further reading if they wish, and also in the hope that this book can be used for teaching and further research.

Throughout, I have endeavoured to be sensitive to the intellectual, social and political context of the period, while inevitably being drawn to what most resonates with present-day concerns. History doesn’t just happen in the past.

But let’s begin with the words of Laura Terracina (1519–c. 1577) – a once famous, but now ironically little known, Renaissance writer:

Let these neglected voices be heard

Let our women not be so quiet

That they fail to be heard above the voices of men.

Part One BEAUTY IDEALS

1 VENUS AND THE FRUIT SELLER

HISTORICAL CHANGE is painted on the canvas of the body.¹ Whether we look fat, thin, clear-skinned, healthy, exhausted is not related simply to our genes, but constituted by a complex to-ing and fro-ing between inside and outside, between our bodies and our environment. In my lifetime, bodies have become stiller, more bound to screens, eyes drier, thumbs more dextrous as they negotiate tiny phone keyboards. Expectations of how real bodies should look have also changed, fundamentally affected by the rise of social media, the ubiquitous availability of porn, apps for the digital manipulation of images, and today’s self-help culture.

Renaissance Europe bestowed a cultural inheritance that we can see all around us. The years between about 1400–1650 are traditionally seen as Europe’s, and especially Italy’s, cultural peak. This era’s lasting legacy is reflected in another common term – the ‘early modern’ period. The rise of a new medium, the printed book, allowed information to be exchanged at an unprecedented scope and speed. Voyages of discovery revealed a world previously unknown to Europeans, exploding intellectual assumptions on the one hand, and giving new opportunities for trade and the exploitation of lands, materials and people on the other. Rapidly expanding mercantile capitalism saw goods moved around the globe, with large European ports such as Lisbon, London, Antwerp and Venice becoming ‘cities of foreigners’, where native populations were swelled by immigration.

Although we corral Renaissance art in galleries today, the advent of single-point perspective and naturalism in drawing, painting, sculpture and print was not just a novel artistic technique, but provided an accurate means of sharing knowledge. The new technology of draughtsmanship was the engine for the scientific revolution, fundamentally changing investigations in fields such as anatomy and botany. The advent of the naturalistic nude and true-to-life portraiture meant that external appearances came under increasing scrutiny.

As a result, the ideal shape of women’s bodies underwent a change, from the heavy-hipped, large-bellied, thin-shouldered Gothic ideal to the fleshy hourglass of newly fashionable antique statues. The Venetian painter Titian’s archetypal female nude of 1538, Venus of Urbino (see plate section, image no. 1), is a case in point. Languidly lying on her couch, her maids fossicking in the clothes chest behind her, this Venus (perhaps a portrait of a real-life woman; no one really knows) gazes at the viewer, one hand shielding her genitals, the other inefficiently grasping a posy of roses that fall onto the suggestive tangle of white sheet below her. Letters show that this painting, emblematic of Renaissance ideals of female beauty, provoked desire in elite male viewers, who recorded how they admired Titian’s ability to conjure up real, quivering, welcoming flesh. We know much less about the reactions of women at the time. But this image, and the other female nudes that saturated Renaissance culture, sent deep reverberations through the lives of real women – and could be found on the facades of houses, on the covers of books and in sculptures in public buildings as well as private houses.²

Let’s take the woman in image no. 2 of the plate section as an example. Portrayed in a sketch of 1575, in a book of vignettes of daily life in Venice, this countrywoman (or contadina, to use the Italian term) also tilts her head to gaze at the viewer. Unlike her relaxed counterpart in Urbino, our young contadina has a job to do. She is walking with her male companions to take her produce to market in the busy streets of Renaissance Venice, then one of the biggest cities in Europe. She balances two baskets of fruit (peaches and plums, perhaps?) on her shoulder, at either side of a simple wooden yoke. She carries her burden lightly, tripping along, her calves bare, her crisp white overskirt and apron partly concealing her red sleeves and blue gown. Scarlet ribbons tied to her shawl suggest she has made an effort to dress up for the trip. Her golden hair is centrally parted and tied back, though some curls escape. In contrast, her eyebrows are dark, almost black, and arch over her brown eyes. Her skin is pale – notably paler than that of her male companions – but tinged with red on her cheeks and her rosebud lips.

Like Titian’s Venus, this contadina is an ideal Renaissance beauty, drawn along lines derived from the sonnets of the fourteenth-century Italian poet, humanist and famous curmudgeon, Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–1374). Petrarch’s verses about his deceased beloved Laura’s ideal attributes invariably praise her golden hair, spacious forehead, benign eyes, rosy cheeks, ruby lips, sweet breath, white throat, apple breasts and white hands. Both male and female writers signed up to these stereotypes. A typical example is Giulia Bigolina’s description of a beautiful protagonist in her romance novel Urania (1550): ‘Look closely… how the gold and curly hair seems like a net to entrap a thousand hardened hearts. See the spacious and highly polished forehead, the eyes, which resemble two stars… the lashes curly and black as ebony, the well-proportioned nose, the rosy cheeks, the small mouth, the lips that surpass the corals in beauty…’ She goes on: ‘But what shall we say of this throat and chest that surpass the snow in whiteness? And of those little protruding apples, which no one, admiring them fully can see without feeling his heart melt from desire?’³ These lists of ideal female features are ubiquitous in Renaissance writings – they turn up in contexts from poems to plays to medical books, and even card games. Renaissance female beauty ideals were extremely narrow, and they were everywhere.

But did our contadina get lucky, and just happen to match these poetic descriptions – or did she have some help? Hundreds of countrywomen streamed into Venice and other Italian cities, walked through the bustling city streets, and added their voices to the hubbub of hawkers and shopkeepers jostling for customers. No doubt looking good – as fresh and alluring as the peaches she was selling – would have been beneficial for the contadina’s business. For a woman, being out on the street unchaperoned was often taken to be a sign of loose morals, and beyond the pale for ‘respectable’ middle- and upper-class urban women. There were dark mutterings about the suspect chastity of female pedlars, and the motives of their customers. For peasant women, who typically had little money and few opportunities, beauty was one way they could advance their life prospects, by finding a good husband. Perhaps, then, when taking a break from her labours, the contadina might consider a purchase of her own. For just one soldo (a shilling), less than the cost of a loaf of bread, she could buy the promise of becoming a truly beautiful Renaissance woman.⁴

Pictured opposite is the earliest known printed book of beauty tips. This version came out in 1526, but was reissued repeatedly over the next fifty years or so, the same text remarketed under a different cover. As the skew-whiff title page suggests, this is a humble, carelessly thrown together affair of only thirty pages – more of a pamphlet, really, than a book. The title would have been cried out by its seller: A pleasant new work which teaches how to make various perfumed compositions to make every woman beautiful… titled Venustà, a word that can roughly be translated as ‘beauty’ or ‘comeliness’ but literally means Venus-like. The implication is that if you follow the instructions within, you will be as resplendent and alluring as the goddess of beauty and love.

Frontispiece from A pleasant new work which teaches how to make various perfumed compositions to make every woman beautiful… titled Venustà (1526).

This is not the first beauty book ever written; far from it. There are existing manuscripts dating from the mid-thirteenth century addressed to ‘whatever woman… who wishes to have a beautiful face’, and excerpts of a now lost cosmetics recipe text by Criton of Heraclea, dating from around 100 CE, that was also famous in the Renaissance. There are even papyri from Ancient Egypt including medical-cosmetic ingredients.⁵ This little pamphlet, however, is quietly revolutionary. It is a bridge between two worlds, linking the poetic descriptions of ideal women, fashionable among the Italian elite, to the everyday life of an itinerant fruit vendor. The Venustà opened up the world of Renaissance beauty to a much larger audience than ever before. This little pamphlet indicates that, from at least those early years of the sixteenth century, women’s bodies – and not just rich women, but anyone who could afford cheap print – were envisaged as works-in-progress.

Sold by street pedlars, the Venustà was not aimed at gentlemen or their wives and daughters (who would hardly be wandering the streets) but at women like the contadina, working women who were out selling wares, or female servants shopping in the bustling piazzas.⁶ The opening poem may have been recited or perhaps sung to music, to drum up trade:

Ladies who wish to be fair,

This book will fulfil your desire.

Skin rosy and white is your prayer,

A glow like the sun you’ll acquire!

These things won’t seem modish or fake,

But will give you a natural look.

So many secrets to make,

All these tips hardly fit in this book.

The second verse boasts about the secret recipes the book reveals – make-up to colour the skin white and scarlet, compositions of distilled waters to grow or remove body and facial hair, to eradicate spots, or to make the skin soft. There are recipes to make musk soap, to heal gums and to clean and whiten teeth, to make ointment for gloves and, intriguingly, ‘many other secrets’. The third verse promises the reader that making all these recipes will be a walk in the park – and, most importantly, will ensure that she gets her man:

You’ll hear, without trouble, this guide

You’ll not waste ingredients or time.

Like a beautiful nymph by your side,

Giving advice with each rhyme.

Enough now I’ve spoken or spake,

From her you will learn the true art.

Such great potions she knows how to make,

In return he will give you his heart.

The promise of fancy cosmetics for a knock-down price must have been alluring. The first recipe you encounter when you open the book is for a face ointment used by the ‘Queen of Hungary’, but made from snails, goat fat, veal marrow and other inexpensive ingredients. The second just promises to ‘keep the face beautiful’, and is a type of moisturiser, based largely on animal fats. Although the ingredients may seem off-putting nowadays, such recipes work to form an emulsion with egg whites, ending up with a similar texture to modern moisturiser. (You can try it yourself; see the recipe for anti-wrinkle cream on p. 251.)

Several recipes seem to be aimed at particular issues faced by labouring women – remedies to rid the face of sunburn and to make the hands white and soft. There are many recipes for hand and face washes, and even health suggestions like eating nettles ‘to give the face a good colour’. The section on hair includes both tips for its removal and instructions on how to make it long, blond, wavy and smooth. As well as all these creams, washes, tooth-powder and shampoo, there are also remedies for ‘women’s ailments’. Gynaecological in nature, these include substances to help women ‘give birth without danger’, for getting pregnant, to tighten the vagina and to elicit menstruation. The last is most likely a thinly veiled abortifacient – a highly hazardous herbal medicine designed to end a pregnancy. These were taken when women were in desperate straits, or forced to abort by men intent on hiding their misdeeds.⁷ Although this elision of cosmetic and gynaecological recipes might seem odd to us now, it derives from a longstanding medieval tradition where reproductive health and cosmetics are both considered ‘women’s secrets’ and dealt with in parallel texts.⁸

Publications like the Venustà were a mainstay of popular print from its inception and are the small siblings of a genre called ‘books of secrets’, cheap how-to texts that are as characteristic of Renaissance culture as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Machiavelli’s The Prince. These books sold in their thousands, all across Europe and beyond. They contained a miscellany of recipes for household medicines, preserving food, becoming pregnant, curing plague and other ailments, plus rather eccentric suggestions like how to make invisible ink, or dye your horse green as a practical joke.⁹

Possibly the most successful book of this period was The Secrets of Alessio Piemontese, first published in Venice in 1555, a self-proclaimed ‘work very useful and universally necessary for everyone’. Readers seemed to agree – the book was printed in more than 100 editions in the early modern period, and translated into no fewer than seven languages. The named author was a fiction, complete with an exotic backstory that involved a voyage through Europe and the Middle East. The real creator was a jobbing writer called Girolamo Ruscelli – ‘a good for nothing scoundrel, a swindler and a cheat’, according to a contemporary.¹⁰ Ruscelli had hit upon a winning formula; in 1561, ‘Isabella Cortese’ published her books of secrets. Cortese, too, was almost certainly fictional (her last name is an anagram of ‘secreto’, the Italian for secret – surely not a coincidence) though it is not certain who was behind the pen name. Cortese claimed she got her recipes from the papers of a mysterious traveller who had tragically died while staying at her home in Olomouc (now in the Czech Republic).¹¹

The presumed writer of the Venustà, Eustachio Celebrino (c. 1490–after 1535), specialised in churning out how-to pamphlets of all sorts – how to write neatly, how to compose love letters, how to make a dining table look good, how to cure syphilis, how to avoid the plague and other useful skills.¹² Because this type of text was often throwaway and copyright was in its infancy, these cheap bestsellers tended to be stolen and remarketed in different places and at different times. In the very same month, an almost identical version of the Venustà was published by a rival publisher, Bernardo Benalio, with a slightly different title: A most excellent new work… called The Crown of Ladies.¹³ Skulduggery seems likely here, given the fierce rivalry between Venetian presses; Celebrino’s name might have been added for marketing reasons.

Always claiming to be ‘A new work’, these texts were intended to share medicine and cosmetics recipes with a broad audience. Literacy was higher in Italian cities than elsewhere, with some scholars reckoning that in the sixteenth century up to 60 per cent of the population of Venice could read.¹⁴ But this statistic was for the whole population, and female literacy rates were far lower than men’s. Women of the noble and mercantile classes were able to read and write, as testified by the rich letter-writing culture of the Renaissance, but, lower down the social scale, reading was deemed less necessary – and, indeed, at times discouraged, lest women get dangerous ideas into their heads.

Given that most women could not read in this period, then, the fact that the Venustà was explicitly aimed at a female readership raises interesting questions about how these texts were used. There is a key difference between Renaissance reading culture and ours. You are very probably reading this in your head as a solitary occupation, but that would be relatively unusual in the sixteenth century; texts in the Renaissance were often intended to be listened to.¹⁵ This is why epic verse stories were so popular – tedious to read silently, they are much more fun to say and hear (if you’ve ever had to study Shakespeare’s plays while reading silently, for example, stumbling over the verses and meanings, you will know this all too well). In fact, the Venustà explicitly expects its audience to listen to the recipes rather than read them: ‘You’ll hear, without trouble, this guide’. Rather than imagining our contadina taking time out from her busy day to sit down and read a cosmetics book from cover to cover, we need to think of it as a much more fluid affair. She might find a literate friend or family member to read to her, or an apothecary or perfumer, who might also sell her the ingredients she needed or make up the more complex recipes.

Writing and speech were closely interwoven in Renaissance life, and the context of this first book of beauty tips is the noisy world of the seller on the market square and the street. The piazzas of European cities and towns resounded with the sounds of charlatan medical men and (occasionally) women, pamphlet-sellers and pedlars of medicines and cosmetics, who performed poems advertising their cures to passing audiences. They put on such a good show that their wares were alluring even to sceptics. The writer Pietro Aretino recalled watching one such street singer in Ferrara alongside his painter friend, Titian, in 1545:

at the first touch of their lyre, at the first sound of their voice, and at the first advertisement of their wares… they manage to sell even to those who know certainly that they are worth nothing, that they do nothing, and that they say nothing!¹⁶

Ambrogio Brambilla, Mirror and Pomades Seller, a detail from his Street Sellers of Rome (1582).

This is a world where everlasting health and beauty was promised in return for a few pennies, where audiences willingly suspended disbelief. The entertainments of these itinerant pedlars were tourist attractions, and you can still gain a sense of their theatrics from travellers’ accounts, of performers and musicians aloft on a stage, dramatically selling their wares. The English tourist Fynes Moryson described mountebanks on the Piazza San Marco selling popular medicinal-cosmetic ‘oyles, waters and salves’, when he visited Venice in the 1590s.¹⁷

Ambrogio Brambilla’s prints of 1582 record an eclectic bunch of sellers in Rome, hawking a dazzling range of goods, including make up tools and ingredients as well as cosmetics themselves.¹⁸ At the base of the images are the cries used to attract attention: ‘Roses, roses!’, ‘Bladders of musk!’, ‘Frogs!’ The man pictured, with a jaunty feather in his hat, is offering ready-made cosmetics based on perfumed fat (pomata, or pomades) that he would have sold alongside small mirrors.¹⁹

Women wishing to boost their appearance could even buy hairpieces, as noted sniffily by canon Pietro Casola in his discussion of Venetian women’s hairstyles in the 1490s: ‘The great part is false hair: and this I know for certain because I saw great quantities of it on poles, sold by peasants in the Piazza San Marco’.²⁰ Indeed, women were sometimes castigated for spending too much of their income on cosmetics: ‘if one sees a poor woman who has six pennies to her name, four of them are on her face’, a misogynistic tract of 1598 proclaims.²¹

Rather than buying recipes to make cosmetics at home, our contadina may have chosen to spend a few pennies on a makeover instead. Beyond the market square, inside houses both wealthy and poor, there existed a women’s world of beauty, where friends, family, servants or paid professionals would use their skills to improve each other’s looks. Just as today, some women made a living from these activities – and recent research suggests that the arrival of immigrants into Italy in the Renaissance had a big impact on the kinds of cosmetics and fashions that would have been available. Poor women recently arrived in Italian cities such as Rome and Venice specialised in creating beauty cures – women like Anna Ebrea (‘Jewish Anna’), who we will meet again later in this book. She was part of the Jewish community in Rome, a community that expanded practically overnight due to the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

Anna’s world as an immigrant in Rome was described in a lively picaresque novel called Andalucian Lozana by one of these Spanish migrants, Francisco Delicado. The novel was published in 1528, but the action takes place in Rome between 1513 and 1527 (just after Michelangelo had completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and when Raphael was painting his glorious fresco cycles in the Vatican). Lozana is a converted Jewish woman (a conversa) who arrives in Rome without a husband or family to support her. She soon inveigles her way into a household led by a woman from Naples and her children who made their living by ‘concocting facial preparations with powders, rouges and creams, plucking eyebrows and beautifying betrothed women, while they prepared treatments of rock candy lotions from the jujube tree and astringents for female parts’ – in other words, exactly the scope of the Venustà. The Neapolitan family – who are perhaps conversos like Lozana – have learnt much about cosmetic treatment from the Jewish immigrants in the neighbourhood, who ‘go throughout the city of Rome repairing lost virginities and hawking treatments for the face’.²²

Lozana was a maestra – a rather loose term for a woman who specialised in various aspects of maintaining and beautifying women’s bodies. She had reportedly lived for a while in the Levant – the Muslim Eastern Mediterranean – and she brought the knowledge of beauty practices she gained there to share with her Roman clientele. This included dressing hair, applying make-up for weddings, plucking eyebrows, removing body hair, and creating and applying bespoke skin treatments. In this illustration Lozana sits plucking the eyebrows of her customer, Clarina, who kneels between her legs. Clarina’s hair hangs loose down her back, perhaps just washed, as she peers at Lozana’s progress in a hand mirror. Further female clients wait for their beauty treatments in the background, while one of Lozana’s friends, a sex worker named Divicia, sleeps with her customer in a curtained bed. Lozana’s lover, Ranpin, is pictured twice, once with a pestle and mortar, grinding ingredients for her beauty cures, and once encouraging the roaring fire with bellows. Dried plants and straw-wrapped bottles are hung from the ceiling, while jars on the windowsill are most likely preparations being left to steep in the sunshine.

Lozana plucking eyebrows in her chamber, as Rampin grinds ingredients for cosmetics. From Francisco Delicado, Portrait of Andalusian Lozana (1528).

Although fictional, Delicado’s book evokes the messy and often difficult lives of countless women who inhabited the poorer quarters of Renaissance cities. It suggests that the long wait that beauty treatments necessitated also offered opportunities for chat, gossip and laughter. It also, tantalisingly, shows how immigrant women – who lived worlds away from the elegant salons of Titian’s Venus – may have contributed to the wider culture of beauty in the Renaissance.

BACK IN 1976 the feminist historian Joan Kelly asked, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ The answer here is absolutely yes, but whether Renaissance beauty culture had a positive or negative effect on women’s lives is somewhat harder to answer. Studying cosmetics can illuminate dark corners of women’s pasts that other subjects cannot reach. Beauty in the Renaissance is so often assumed to be an elite affair, but this was a world where even a peasant fruit seller would have been urged to emulate Venus. Cosmetics culture is not just about perfect female nudes in paintings, all primped and preening, skin white and soft and plump, who could idle away their days thinking about how their hair could keep the perfect wave. It is also about their maids, their slaves, those women scraping together a dowry by sewing or spinning or taking in laundry; the wives bringing in money to pay the rent, calculating their daughters’ marriage prospects; the widows heading up their own households, maybe on the lookout for a second husband; the courtesans and sex workers who lived on their appearance.

Looking good was important for women in a world where the legal rights and earning power of men meant that influence was often gained through manipulation, where beauty could raise your social status, and where – as we shall see – the nascent pseudoscience of physiognomy meant that prospective husbands could scrutinise your body, hair and face for signs of wifely obedience and fertility.

Renaissance women cared about what they looked like: they had to.

2 WHAT IS A (RENAISSANCE) WOMAN?

Oh!’ cried Cornelia, ‘If men could hear us talking about these things, how they’d mock us! As it is, they’re always saying that it’s the only thing we’re interested in, preening ourselves and making ourselves beautiful.’

‘Oh, let them say what they want!’ said Corinna.

MODERATA FONTE (the pen name of Modesta Pozzo, 1555–92) finished her remarkable dialogue, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, just before she tragically died in childbirth in 1592. We can still hear her voice ring out through these pages. Sharp-witted, erudite and often startlingly funny, Fonte relates an imagined discussion that a group of female friends have over two days in their home city of Venice. One of them, Leonora, had recently been widowed, and her lovely house and garden provided a women-only space where they could gather and talk about any subject they liked, away from the policing gaze of a misogynistic society.

Corinna – an avatar for Fonte herself – is knowledgeable on all kinds of subjects. She talks to her friends about the animal kingdom, the property of minerals and plants among other matters, but she is insistent that the adornment of the body – clothes and make-up – is also a valid area of interest. A glance at Fonte’s author portrait from the 1600 edition of the text suggests she was in agreement with her protagonist. With arched eyebrows over hooded eyes, Fonte’s direct questioning gaze is framed by the painstakingly rendered filigree of her rigid lace collar, while her poet’s laurel wreath is almost buried by the prominent horns of her fabulously fashionable hairstyle. Her ring of pearls was perhaps designed to show off the smooth skin of her upper chest, which contrasts, too, with the intricate lacework of her neckline.

Posthumous author portrait of Moderata Fonte. From The Worth of Women (1600).

Although the main theme of her book is how useless men are in comparison with women (and why on earth women put up with them, let alone love them), a significant section of it considers beauty – whether it’s important, what it signifies, and how best to enhance it. One of the women, the newly-wed Helena, worries that by talking about such matters, they are effectively trapping themselves into an unfair female stereotype:

What [men] would find ridiculous, I’d think, is hearing us talk about some of the things we’ve been discussing today, which they think only men should talk about. As for clothes and beauty, they don’t mind us being interested in them, because they see them as women’s proper concern.¹

Although there were many types of femininity in the Renaissance, just as there are now, traditional ideas about women, inherited from misogynistic classical, medieval and religious texts, were that they were essentially inferior to men in every way, with stereotypes of frivolity and vanity playing into that idea. The sixteenth and early seventeenth century, however, saw a cultural obsession with gender, throwing these old assumptions and tropes wide open. A prime question that arose from all this was ‘what is a woman?’ The question was investigated everywhere from the visual arts, to theatre, to medicine, with doctors studying how character traits that were understood as feminine (an interest in beauty, deceitfulness, stupidity, among others) were linked to the physicality of the body.

The Renaissance was also a time when many imaginative escapes were attempted from the tightly wrought prison of gender roles, and the possibilities of transformation of these roles was explored by some, just as tightly enforced norms were prescribed by others. Some men and women, like Fonte, saw new possibilities for women if only they received an adequate education – it’s this insistence on equality of intellect between the sexes that has been rightly called Renaissance feminism.²

It’s a Girl!

When a daughter is born, there should be the most profound rejoicing across the whole family. But, on the contrary, when a father is told that his child is a girl, he is put out and dismayed and gets angry with his wife.

Girls were often a disappointment to fathers in Renaissance Europe, as Fonte’s exasperated Corinna reveals here. There were financial reasons for this. Both law and custom normally meant that women could not inherit family wealth or take over the family business. Rather than be educated in schools or as apprentices, girls had to be protected, taught in convents or in the home, and, when they were ready to marry, there was the cost of the dowry to think about. Dowries, the money and property women brought with them from their birth family at marriage, were often considerable and saved up for from infancy.³ Cultural beliefs, however, were perhaps even more important than the finances: many Renaissance parents believed that girls were inferior to boys in practically every way.

The difference between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ is generally summarised as the former being physical, and the latter cultural. While sex is normally understood to be based in biological factors like chromosomes and genitals, gender is the social presentation of femininity or masculinity (or anywhere on a shifting scale between), and from infancy onwards is embedded in a series of (generally unconscious) behaviours, acts, choices and desires. Current controversies over gender identity tussle with the relationship between physicality and gender presentation. Over the last decade or so, scholars have shown how historical studies can provide reflective material for thinking about gender and sexual identities, while these contemporary debates can equally lead historians to ask novel, often revealing, questions of their sources.⁴

I discuss instances of Renaissance gender non-conformity below. However, my focus throughout this book is on the vast majority of early modern women, whose lives were constricted due to misunderstandings about the relationship between female bodies and women’s potential as social and intellectual beings. Although femininity cannot (and should not) be reduced to reproductive organs, Renaissance women’s physicality determined their life chances. The possibility of pregnancy meant that chastity had to be guarded at all costs, and there was little medical protection against the significant corporeal and mental burden of childbearing. Femininity in the Renaissance, just like today, was understood as a complex mixture of the physical and cultural. However, ideas of physical sex were based on the belief that the body was made up of four ‘humours’, types of liquid that each had their own qualities of heat and moisture. Corinna explains this to her friends as part of their discussion of gender difference:

We are all made up of four elements, which combine to form the four principal substances or dispositions of the human body; that is phlegm, which is generated from air; blood, from water; choler, from fire; and melancholy, from earth. If one of these humours predominates in the patient’s body, the doctor must be able to recognize this and choose the appropriate remedy for correcting the balance and tempering the dominant element.

Since antiquity, humours had been associated with the body’s degree of moisture and heat, which corresponded to the four temperaments. The planets were said to govern the different humours (thus melancholics are said to be ‘born under Saturn’, for example), which meant that astrology played an important role in medical practice. As Corinna notes, the balance of humours also resulted in different body types, propensities to illness and personalities. This included your sex. Many Renaissance medics subscribed to an idea originally proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, that embryos became female because they didn’t have sufficient heat to push out male genitalia. So, women were dominated by cold and damp humours, whereas energetic masculinity was hot and dry. Moreover, women lacked the ‘shaping force’ to create embryos; this was all provided by the man. Women’s wombs were merely a passive source of matter to be shaped.

As we’ll see, this view was often challenged over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but in the early Renaissance the assumption that women were physically and intellectually inferior to men was commonplace. Baldassare Castiglione’s character, Gasparre, in his famous The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528, expresses this typical and denigrating view:

man is by his natural qualities more perfect than woman, who is frigid by temperament, and man warm. And warmth is far nobler and more perfect than cold, because it is active and productive… the frigidity of women’s temperament is the cause of their abasement and timidity.

Many people in this period linked women’s supposed faults to their perceived imperfect physique. After all, the Bible recounted that the first woman was born from Adam’s rib as a secondary type of human, a companion to man. Eve demonstrated her sex’s fallibility by giving in to the temptation offered to her by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. It was, therefore, women’s fault that God banished humankind from Eden and condemned them to a life of labour. God punished women for this first transgression by inflicting on them the pains of menstruation and birth; the imperfections of female bodies were a result of Eve’s sins. A 1586 pamphlet declared:

In [women] there is no truth, no faith, no loyalty, no beauty, no love, no charity, no sincerity, but only silly pretences and uncovered deceptions. Lies dominate their paltry honesty, falsehoods are abundant… [women] are the cause of all harm, the beginning of all misery, the origin of all labour.⁵

According to this logic, the best way to deal with girls and their leaky, disorganised, unpredictable bodies was to keep them inside the house – and to keep them busy. This would ensure their chastity until marriage, and then you might hope that they would go on to have many healthy male children. Women’s ideal roles in life are illustrated in a pamphlet teaching parents how to raise girls, The Customs of Women, first published in 1525.⁶ The frontispiece shows a domestic interior full of women engaged in spinning and sewing, feminine work that was thought to usefully inculcate patience and prevent idleness. The pamphlet recommends these occupations, warning women against looking out of the window, too much talking, or going out without a chaperone.

Women and girls doing ‘suitable’ female work. From The Customs of Women (1525).

Indeed, women were fundamental to textile production, and much encouraged to take up this appropriate occupation – carding wool and spinning it into yarn, using a drop spindle or sometimes a spinning wheel. They were also kept busy in domestic service, either as servants or through more informal relationships – childcare, laundering, wet nursing, cooking and various odd jobs (often for extremely low wages), as well as labouring on the land and growing food. Others worked in a wide variety of family businesses – sometimes in partnership, sometimes as widows. In the Florentine tax records of 1427, there was a female blacksmith, a grocer, a stationer, a linen manufacture, a money changer, a furrier, a banker and an international merchant.⁷

In practice, then, Renaissance women were generally as knowledgeable, hard-working and productive as their male counterparts. But they did all this while wrestling with a culture that constantly denied their abilities. In one popular sixteenth-century text, a physician asks bluntly, ‘Why are women more imprudent and foolish than men?’:

Because women have much narrower and smaller pores than men, so they cannot evacuate vapours from their head. Moreover, women have wet and warm complexions. So that if they generate in their head very gross vapours and… swirling noxious gases that they cannot purge out of their head through their pores, there cannot be women who are prudent and wise, or only very rarely.⁸

Writers like Moderata Fonte fought against these commonplace misogynist tropes and hangovers from medieval times. After all, the Renaissance was a moment in time when bodies – and the societies and culture that shaped them – were shifting in quite dramatic ways. Even human remains give us clues that a more positive view of women and girls may have been emerging. Skeletons show that women from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were taller than their medieval predecessors. Though it is hardly an exact science, the average female height during these years has been estimated as 163 cm (about 5 feet 4 inches), compared to just over 160 cm in the previous two centuries (about 5 feet 2 inches).⁹ This cannot be ascribed to surplus food due to the population decline in Europe in the wake of the devastating Black Death pandemic of the fourteenth century, as male heights do not show the same increase. Increased height often indicates that people are better nourished, with more access to high-quality protein. Might it be that more women in this period were being properly fed?

ONE FUNDAMENTAL and dominating aspect of what it meant to be a woman at this time was childbearing and child-rearing. Although there was rudimentary, unreliable contraception available, and even more rudimentary abortifacients, many women spent much of their time from the age of puberty to menopause pregnant. Having a baby a year throughout your twenties was not unusual. Human remains tell us a lot about the toll of repeated pregnancy and childbirth; despite her likely nutritious and protein-filled diet, the Duchess of Florence, Eleonora di Toledo (1522–62), seen in image no. 3 of the plate section with her oldest son in a portrait by Agnolo Bronzino of around 1545, suffered terribly from tooth disease, and when she died at the age of forty she had only twenty-three teeth left, five of which were badly decayed.¹⁰ Eleonora had eleven children between 1540 and 1554, three of whom died in infancy, and another four of whom died before they were twenty. She commissioned iron corsets from the ducal armourer between pregnancies in 1549, perhaps indicating that by then she was having difficulties keeping her torso erect.

Cultural shifts in the understanding of femininity and arguments about the value of women were echoed in medical studies as time went on, and Aristotle’s theories on conception came under scrutiny in light of the (re)discovery of a work by the classical medic Galen, On the Use of Parts – which became an increasingly fashionable text in medical circles from around 1500. Galen (129–216 CE) suggested that women, like men, produced ‘seed’, but it was weaker than the male version. He saw female genitalia as an inverted version of the male, leading to confusing illustrations of the womb and vagina in sixteenth-century medical texts, such as the pioneering work of Andreas Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), which takes the ‘inverted penis’ idea to its logical extreme.¹¹

Illustration of the uterus, vagina and vulva as an inverted penis. From Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543).

Even the so-called ‘discovery’ of the clitoris by Gabriele Falloppio and/or Realdo Colombo in the 1550s did not shift the notion of a correlation between male and female genitalia in conservative medical circles, though, as the century wore on, women’s biology began to be seen as essentially different to men’s rather than simply inferior. Girolamo Mercuriale, professor of anatomy at the University of Padua, argued in 1586 that perhaps women’s bodies were no afterthought but ‘a primary goal of Nature’s intention’ after all.¹²

ALONGSIDE THESE shifts in anatomical understanding, by the end of the sixteenth century commentators like Moderata Fonte were emboldened to reinterpret the logic of the humoral system in favour of women. Fonte’s Corinna explains:

Men, being of a hot and dry complexion, dominated by choler – all flame and fire – are more likely to go astray and can scarcely contain their tempestuous appetites. And that is the reason for the fierceness, waywardness, and fury of their anger, and the urgency and excessiveness of their burning, intemperate desires, carnal and otherwise. Desire in men is so powerful that their senses overpower their reason.

Such debates show how Renaissance culture obsessively picked at these loose threads of gender distinction. The stage, in particular, provided a space where the inequities of gender could be explored. Early sixteenth-century Italian comedies influenced Shakespeare’s fondness for the dramatic device of gender-swapping twins, with the resulting confusion, compromised sexual situations and laughter that were such a hit with audiences. Women dressed in men’s clothes could venture out in the world and be at the heart of the action, something that would have been impossible for a virtuous gentlewoman stuck inside with her needlework. Probably the first play where a female protagonist dresses up as her twin brother was La Calandria of 1513, written by Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi daBibbiena. His character Santilla dresses as a boy to avoid persecution when captured by Turkish troops: ‘it’s very clear how much more fortunate men are than women,’ she complains; ‘must I give up these clothes… and give up this freedom?’ She is only discovered when her confused female lover finds she does not have a penis.¹³

There are seemingly endless plays and stories from sixteenth-century Italy where dressing as a member of the opposite sex results in a completely persuasive transformation. The device allows fictional girls to go to school as boys to learn Latin, fictional young men to be the most beautiful woman at a party, fictional daughters to inherit their family fortune as male heirs. Commonly, as in Santilla’s case, the game is eventually up because of some sort of encounter with genitals – often as part of a same-sex seduction scene. The spectre of gender instability unleashed by these plays is regulated at the end through marriage, where women and men take their ‘proper’ roles and wives settle down to a regular life of female subjugation in the home.¹⁴

IN THE VISUAL ARTS and philosophy, there was a parallel – though generally less humorous – investigation into the boundaries of gender through the visual exploration of androgyny. The most fashionable artists at the turn of the sixteenth century believed that a mixture of both sexes was the height of beauty. This can most clearly be seen in the epicene young male saints by Leonardo da Vinci or in Michelangelo’s heroic muscled female figures – represented by his beautiful preparatory drawing for the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine ceiling. Michelangelo based this figure on a male model not because female models were unavailable, or because of his own sexual predilections (although he was certainly erotically involved with other men to some extent), but because of an aesthetic fascination with androgyny.

Michelangelo, Study for the Libyan Sibyl (1511)

There were theological reasons why the most perfect human form might be androgynous. As Eve was created from Adam’s rib, for some Renaissance thinkers this meant the original humans contained both male and female elements. Others argued that like is attracted to like. The Neopla-tonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, for example, argued that: ‘Women truly easily capture men, and even more those women who bear a masculine character.’ Similarly, his follower, Mario Equicola, claimed in 1525 that ‘the effeminate male and the manly female are graceful in almost every aspect’. Perfect beauty lay at gender’s boundaries.¹⁵

THIS FASCINATION with gender transition was not always confined to the imagination. Real examples of individuals who we might now describe as transgender can be found occasionally in court records. One tragic story is recounted in a 1498 diary entry by the papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard. A courtesan named Cursetta had in her household a North African servant called ‘Barbara the Spaniard’. Barbara was possibly in Rome as a result of the Mediterranean slave trade, where it was common for female slaves to be taken on in households, whereas men were set to work in agriculture or rowing galleys. It seems, therefore, that Barbara lived as a woman and was treated as such by those around her. When it was discovered that Barbara had male genitals, however, both servant and mistress were punished by being paraded through Rome. Cursetta was dressed in the black shapeless gown of a penitent, but Barbara walked (in Burchard’s words):

in a woman’s dress, his arms tightly bound at the elbows behind his back, with all his clothing including his undershirt lifted up higher than his navel so that all his testicles or genitals might be seen so his trickery became apparent to all.

They were both put in jail after this ritualised punishment. Cursetta was soon set free, but Barbara was released only to take part in a procession to the Campo de’ Fiori to be publicly strangled and then burned at the stake.¹⁶ As in the gender-swapping plays, the punishment viscerally argued that genitals were the final proof of sex, and that experimentation with gender expression was socially transgressive and to be harshly punished.

Interestingly, women who chose to live, or simply dress up, in male clothing seem to have been treated less harshly. There could be an erotic element to some female cross-dressing – sex workers were sometimes upbraided for dressing as men to please their clients. Other evidence suggests that women simply enjoyed greater freedoms if they could pass as men. Court records in Verona in 1599 recall a woman called Laura Gallicina who dressed as a man so she could run away with her (male) lover and live more freely. She turned up to court in male dress but was not punished for this seemingly transgressive behaviour.¹⁷

Perhaps the most striking example of someone born female and then choosing to live as a man was the Spanish soldier Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650). Erauso left her life at a convent behind to live as a man for twenty years, having a successful (if violent) career both in Spain and in Mexico:

I was educated there [in the convent], took the habit, became a novice and was about to be professed when, for such-and-such reasons, I ran away; that I went to such-and-such a place, stripped, dressed up, and cut my hair, went hither and thither, embarked, went into port, took to roving, slew, wounded, embezzled and roamed about.¹⁸

Erauso was not merely wearing masculine clothes, but sought to alter her body too. A contemporary who met her in Rome reported, ‘She told me she had used some sort of remedy to make [her breasts] disappear. I believe it was a poultice given her by an Italian – it hurt a great deal, but the effect was very much to her liking.’¹⁹ In the last couple of decades, these fragmented stories of transgender lives have started to be discovered, and together form a much queerer picture of the pre-modern past than was formerly appreciated.²⁰

WHILE THE VAST majority of Renaissance women grew up within confined social and legal strictures, the sixteenth-century fashion for educating girls means that we do have a glimpse, from the works of Fonte and other prominent female writers at the time, of what they could achieve when their learning was supported. Although it was a socially and temporally limited movement, sixteenth-century northern Italy and elsewhere formed a cradle for early feminist thought and learning, and a moment when fathers, uncles and other guardians started to invest in education for their daughters; and educated mothers and aunts started to encourage the girls in their life to become lettered too.

Fonte’s chivalric romance epic, Floridoro, published in an incomplete state in 1581, is testament to the power of an imagination fuelled by access to books. It tells the story of two heroic knights, one male and one female. The male protagonist, Floridoro, is remarkable for his delightful appearance – with his ‘comely face’, ‘golden hair’ and ‘white and vermilion complexion’, he very much resembles the ideal (female) beauties of the era. His female counterpart, Risamante, is also beautiful, but is less closely described. She is too busy fighting. Among other adventures, she kills a fierce serpent, vanquishes a treacherous dragon and lays siege to a city. Fonte explains that Risamante is an example of what women can do if you educate them and allow them freedom:

Women in every age were by nature

endowed with great judgement and spirit,

nor are they born less apt than men to demonstrate

(with study and care) their wisdom and valour.

And why, if their bodily form is the same,

if their substances are not varied,

if they have the same food and speech, must they

have then different courage and wisdom?…

If when a daughter is born the father

set her with his son to equivalent tasks

she would not be in lofty and fair deeds

inferior or unequal to her brother.²¹

Fonte was well aware that her success was dependent on her education, and the enlightened men like her grandfather who played an important role in allowing her access to books and a public platform, at a time when other women were silenced.

THIS WAS A MOMENT when men and women were reconsidering the ‘natural’ status quo and old justifications for men’s superior power, arguing that it was not rooted in God, or the fallibility of women’s bodies or intellects. Rather, as Fonte’s character Leonora argues, if women were ‘inferiors in status but not in worth’, then this represented an abuse that has been introduced into the world, translated over time into law and custom.²² If women weren’t essentially, naturally, biologically inferior, but were nonetheless treated as lesser members of society, then change became not only possible, but a moral necessity.

3 SPREZZATURA AND THE NATURAL LOOK

IN 2019, A TEAM OF psychologists from the University of Brussels published a study arguing that women who wore obvious facial cosmetics were judged as ‘less human’ than their less made-up counterparts. Make-up was associated with ‘sexualised female bodies’ that were perceived ‘as lacking in mind and moral status, and as possessing less agency, less uniquely human traits, less competence, less warmth and less morality than faces without make-up’.¹ This study was widely reported in the press, despite being massively problematic in its approach. It used ‘makeover technology’ (not even real make-up!) to add coral-red lipstick and dark eyeshadow and mascara to the non-made-up faces of young white women, who were then appraised with these clumsily manipulated images. It’s as if the whole experiment was devised by people who had vaguely heard of cosmetics from some moralistic Victorian text. One can only guess at the motivation behind the wording of the questions: ‘less human’?

What the Brussels psychologists were investigating was not opinions of make-up per se, but reactions to clumsily applied coloured cosmetics that were unsuited to the subjects’ faces. They ignored the considerable skill demanded to do make-up well. Social media has allowed the newly widespread demonstration of the possibilities of cosmetics, with expert make-up artists showing viewers how to manipulate their appearance in a way that is not (necessarily) about beauty, but about creativity, artifice and expertise. Equally impressive, though, is the skilful use of skincare and cosmetics to change (and improve) appearance without the appearance of artificiality. Anyone who knows about cosmetics will know that a ‘natural look’ – where the undiscerning viewer may think you do not have make-up on at all – is worn every day by millions of women and men.

Who cares about art, though, if – like the authors of the 2019 study – you can use psychology to peddle misogynistic tropes about make-up, immorality and lasciviousness that go back to classical antiquity: ‘the concealment of your art aids your appearance. / Who would not be offended by muck smeared all over the face / when having slipped because of its weight drips onto a warm bosom?’ asks Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) in the third book of his Art of Love.² He’s not against make-up, just against doing it so it doesn’t look natural. Artifice is acceptable, but admired most when concealed, when it is done so well that you cannot see it. This idea is repeated again and again in Renaissance sources – no wonder it’s the culture that coined the notion of sprezzatura.

Sprezzatura as a term was first used by Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. There’s no direct English translation of the word. Castiglione describes it as an art that he admired in his contemporaries, the ability ‘to conceal and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it’. To possess sprezzatura you need to be able to do something brilliantly without looking like you’re even trying, to look like the kind of person who tumbles out of bed well dressed, beautifully groomed and elegant. You can express this quality in a broad range of fields, from diving, to football, to home decoration, to make-up – the unifying feature is that the ‘natural look’ can take a long time and a great deal of painstaking labour.

The ‘natural look’ isn’t about a lack of make-up; far from it. It is about successfully ‘passing’ – having an exterior appearance that seems authentic. Maybe she’s born with it? Or maybe not. Looking like you’ve made an effort to hide your flaws is the antithesis of sprezzatura. The idea that Renaissance make-up largely consisted of thick white masking foundation would have appalled people living at the time. Even sources arguing in favour of the use of cosmetic treatments worry over make-up looking overt, and berate those who apply too much ‘paint’ to their faces.³ The feminist writer Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is horrified by these ‘painted masks’ – ‘it is unworthy and repulsive to cover the face with thick coverings of red and white,’ she warns.⁴

Indeed, most writers see overly thick make-up as a great opportunity for mockery. In Agnolo Firenzuola’s influential dialogue On the Beauty of Women (1548), a female character criticises make-up that is ‘not unlike plaster or gypsum on the surface of walls’; ‘such concoctions,’ she continues, ‘besides ruining their skin and making them grow old before their time, also ruin their teeth and make them look like carnival clowns all year round.’ One woman looks older the more she makes herself up: ‘She looks like a gold ducat that has been dropped in acid.’⁵ Successful Renaissance cosmetics were not readily discerned. In the words of Marinello: ‘You’ll want your body (and all parts of it) to be evaluated as naturally beautiful.’⁶

As the University of Brussels experiment showed, many people today also find obvious make-up a matter for derision or discomfort – but why? The Renaissance can offer clues – this was a key moment in the complex history of the natural look, when debates raged about the relationship between surface appearance and inner character, between virtue and beauty, between looks and who you ‘really’ are.

Reflections on the Full-Length Mirror

But what do I see? What do I behold

In the crystal liquid?

A comely nymph – no, a comely goddess…

I bow down before you

On my knees and with my heart…

I also see that courteously to my greeting

She responds…

And also as I move my lips, my head

Bows, she bows hers…

I feel in the burning dawn,

A fiery desire to possess

The celestial beauty that I spy…

Too much these eyes please my eyes,

This face, this breast, too much;

In the end, I love myself!⁷

Imagine this passage from the playwright and actor Isabella Andreini’s comedy Mirtilla (1588) on stage. Andreini (1562–1604) takes on the role of the nymph Ardelia, and peers into an imagined pool of water on the stage floor. Narcissus-like, her yearning desire for her perfect reflected beauty keeps the audience on tenterhooks. Will she realise – no, when will she realise – that she is looking at herself?

The playwright is depicted (opposite) at the beginning of her first collection of poems from 1601, her head and shoulders in an oval frame, mirror-like, sporting the gravity-defying hairstyle of the Baroque court. Her half smile and her raised eyebrows invite the viewer into a world of shape-shifting, of make-believe. Andreini was a wildly successful impresario, actress, comedian and poet who wowed audiences with her ability to ventriloquise a wide range of voices. She was one of the first female actresses to gain considerable fame. The opening verse in the collection explains how she manipulates her audience by taking on various guises:

Portrait of Isabella Andreini. From her Book of Rhymes (1601).

If ever there is anyone who these my neglected verses

Reads, don’t believe in their feigned ardours

As in their Scenes imagined loves

I’ve handled with emotions false…

Just like in theatres, now a woman and now

A man I’ve played in varied styles

As Nature would instruct, and Art.⁸

Renaissance culture was fascinated with what you might call the performativity of everyday life, and the relationship between exterior appearance and interior essence. As we’ve seen, switching genders and causing comic confusion was a favourite playful device of early-sixteenth-century Italian theatre, but this obsession went far beyond the stage. The close, intrigue-filled world of the Renaissance court meant that it was not always possible to trust what your eyes could see.

The need to keep up appearances could be relentless, and the relationship to the inner truth of personality a cause of obsessive anxiety. Think of Machiavelli’s emphasis in The Prince on seeming (rather than being) moral: ‘Everyone sees what you appear to be, but few really know what you are,’ he explains; or Castiglione’s instructions to ‘dress oneself in another persona’ to get ahead at court – the precise opposite of today’s advice to ‘just be yourself’. Whatever you do, don’t be yourself – be whoever the person in power might like best. This was an era when revealing your true self – your real religious faith, what you really thought of your patron – could ruin you financially, or even get you beheaded or (especially in Italy) poisoned. The stakes were high. Shakespeare, too, revisited this theme in so many of his plays, not least As You Like It, written around a decade after Andreini’s Mirtilla:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts.

But what does the idea of ‘role-playing’ say about that drifting flotsam of concepts that we call the ‘self’? For more than a century and a half, Renaissance scholars have been wrestling with the suggestion of Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss art historian, that this period saw the ‘development of the individual’:

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness… lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession… Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation – only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air… man became a spirited individual, and recognised himself as such.⁹

A medievalist would likely tell you that this characterisation of the Middle Ages is nonsense. But Burckhardt’s ideas about the Renaissance individual are surprisingly resistant to decades of scepticism, if only because new types of writing (the autobiography, the soliloquy, the diary) and images (the portrait) allow us access into people’s attempts to present the ‘self ’ in a way that was unusual before the fifteenth century. It’s like an entire society started to see itself from the outside, and became obsessed with its own reflection, made up of so many Narcissuses, seeing their image for first time: ‘In the end I love myself!’

Any history of cosmetics and beauty has to consider the relationship between appearance and identity. Before the sixteenth century, it was difficult for people to see themselves in their entirety from an exterior viewpoint, in the way that others could. In fact, the full-length mirror was an archetypal Renaissance innovation, I would argue just as representative of the period as the printing press, the atlas or the handgun.¹⁰ In 1507, a patent was given to Antonio and Domenico del Gallo to make ‘mirrors of true crystal glass’ on the island of Murano near Venice – a place still famous for its expert glassmakers. Before this, flat mirrors were made of polished metal, or you could have small round ones made of blown glass, to hold in the hand. These were generally convex, bulging outwards, and thus distorted the features. The Knight Hospitaller and humanist, Sabba da Castiglione, parodied the effect of looking in a convex mirror in his diary:

It gives such a magnificent reflection of the natural object, that his eyelashes, hair and the hairs of his head look like the bristle of an old boar or the twigs of a besom, and the teeth resemble those of a Turkish horse, older than mine, which was fifty years old.¹¹

The precocious young painter Parmigianino made a name for himself with his self-portrait in a convex mirror of 1524 (see plate section, image no. 4), when he was around twenty-one. The panel is the rounded shape and liftable size (about 24 cm in diameter) of a real mirror, delighting viewers who looked in it to see a fancily clad youth rather than their own reflection. His face in the middle seems distant compared to his gigantic hand that dominates the lower part of the glass. You need to be close to a small, convex mirror to see much – there’s no way to see a good image of your entire body. This is how, typically, most men and women would encounter their reflections up until the sixteenth century.

Think, then, how startling, chastening, surprising, disappointing, funny it must have been to see yourself in a clear, flat, full-length mirror for the first time. ‘It is difficult for us to imagine how astonishing it must have seemed to our ancestors when it first became possible to see oneself reflected from top to toe in a single sheet of glass,’ writes Peter Thornton.¹² It was possible for the first time for people to see the entirety of themselves as if from the outside, to understand more clearly how they were seen by others – and to evaluate their entire bodies. With two mirrors, it was even possible to see parts of the body that were normally hidden, to see oneself from behind.

Mirrors started from the 1510s to become a staple subject of Venetian painters like Giovanni Bellini and Titian. They allowed artists to experiment with new pictorial effects – reflective surfaces, the body from a variety of angles, sharp reflective flashes – while prompting the viewer into self-reflections about painting and time, imagination and mimesis and the transient nature of beauty and life itself. These visual and intellectual possibilities must have made the cost worth it. The north Italian painter Lorenzo Lotto ordered a mirror from Murano in 1549 for twenty-two ducats – about three week’s wages for a skilled artisan.¹³

Much of Titian’s playing with mirrors involved women looking at themselves while getting dressed, adorning their hair, perhaps applying some kind of salve from a pot, as in his Woman with a Mirror of 1512–15 (see plate section, image no. 5). Here she looks in a small flat mirror while a convex mirror is held behind her head. This was a genre of painting that started in the early sixteenth century and remained popular for a couple of centuries, now grouped under the unpromising title of ‘Ladies at their toilet’ paintings. The word ‘toilet’, which comes from the translucent fabric, ‘toile’, that might have formed a cover for the dressing table, was originally a euphemism for a range of things a lady might do in private in her dressing room, and only in the nineteenth century became specifically related to the lavatory.

These ‘women getting ready’ paintings (which were to spread well beyond Italy, most notably to France and the Netherlands) are sometimes dismissed as merely an opportunity for ogling, giving the (presumed male, heterosexual) viewer access to a normally private activity. It allows them to see women before they have assumed the carapace that protects them from the gaze of the outside world – perhaps that way, you can ensure that you can see women’s ‘true’ beauty, her ‘natural’ face. This was a piece of advice given to real suitors, as we shall see. These images are not just about seeing the ‘truth’ of women’s external appearance, however. They are also a meditation on looking itself, an exchange of reflections and gazes.

Beauty and Virtue

Giulia Bigolina (c. 1518–c. 1569) bemoaned her culture’s obsession with exterior beauty:

There are two beauties in women loved and desired by man – that is, the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul – and the incorruptible and immortal nature of one, and the corruptible and fleeting nature of the other, make clear how much the one must be kept dearer and more esteemed than the other.¹⁴

Bigolina was the first woman to write a ‘prose romance’, the forerunner to the modern novel. Written around 1557 – fifty years or so before Cervantes was to pen his epic Don Quixote – Bigolina’s Urania languished unnoticed for centuries in the Trivulziana Library in Milan, until it was edited, published and then translated into English by Valeria Finucci in 2002.

Not much is known about Bigolina. She was from a well-to-do family from the university city of Padua in northern Italy and, according to a local chronicler, ‘a virtuous poet, learned in the Tuscan and Latin languages’.¹⁵ Eccentric and sometimes rambling, Urania is an extraordinary text steeped in the Italian Renaissance culture that Bigolina was raised on. It’s at once a travel narrative, a gender-swapping comedy of errors, and a treatise arguing for the spiritual and intellectual equality of women. Above all, though, Urania is a cautionary tale against the perils of superficial beauty.

Addressed to a young male lawyer friend, Bigolina’s dedicatory letter recounts how she is considering having a portrait painted to give him so that he will not forget her. While alone in her chamber mulling this over, she feels a tugging at her skirts and turns round to see a tiny naked man with an enormous head dominated by one circular mirror-eye. Although she is fully dressed she can see herself in this eye completely naked. The man explains that he is all-seeing justice, and persuades her that she should send her friend the true fruit of her heart and mind through her writing, rather than a portrait, merely a record of her external appearance.

The story proper starts when the poet Urania is spurned by her erstwhile lover, Fabio, for a woman who was ‘much more beautiful than Urania, but faded in comparison to her virtue’. Urania is devastated; she decides to dress in men’s clothes to allow her the freedom to flee her hometown and travel around Italy. She has many adventures. This includes advising a group of women on how to choose a decent husband, and launching a full-scale defence of the female sex to a group of men. Eventually, Fabio realises he’s made a huge mistake, and recognises that looks are less important than being a decent person.

There may have been some wish fulfilment in Bigolina’s narrative (could she have been abandoned in favour of another woman?) but it’s impossible to know for sure. As we’ll see in the next chapter, being the losing contestant in the competition of Renaissance marriage negotiations must have been profoundly dispiriting. Her call to look at inner worth was out of step with the mainstream, however. Neoplatonic philosophy, popular from the later fifteenth century, firmly linked love with beauty and virtue – an idea that was taken up by both male and female writers. ‘Love (if my judgement is not mistaken)’ declared the poet Chiara Matraini, ‘is none other than desire for a thing which is beautiful and good.’¹⁶ The courtesan poet and philosopher Tullia d’Aragona (c. 1510–1556) was the first woman to extensively discuss the relationship between beauty, love and virtue. In her 1547 treatise, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, she argues that love ‘is to desire to enjoy and to be united with what is truly beautiful or what seems beautiful to the lover’.¹⁷

Many people assumed that beauty equated to good health and to a virtuous personality – ‘the beauty of the face is mainly a sign of the interior goodness of the soul,’ Lodovico Domenichi writes in a dialogue of 1549.¹⁸ This was taken to its extreme by the widely influential Spanish celebrity doctor Juan Huarte (1529–88), who showed men how to evaluate women’s suitability as potential wives based on the principles of physiognomy. Huarte’s book on intelligence, The Examination of Men’s Wits, was first published in Spanish in 1575, and translated into French, Italian and English over the next twenty years.¹⁹ Huarte was firmly on the anti-woman side of the debate: women were ‘created by God as cold and moist, which temperaments are apt for fertility and birth, but contrary to wisdom,’ he explains. Luckily, he’s able to give advice to men to find a wife who can be fertilised easily to produce an intelligent male child.

He divides women into three grades of ‘coldness and dampness’, recognisable through five qualities – intellect, behaviour, voice, fatness or thinness, colour of the skin, hair and whether they are beautiful or ‘deformed’. The best women are ‘grade two’ – they are beautiful, soft, gentle and laugh easily. They are naturally almost completely free of body hair, and the hair they do have is golden. They are obedient by nature (a manifestation of fertility), and men are safe to marry them without regard to their own humoral temperament. ‘Grade three’ women are ‘foolish and ditzy’. They are fat, with very white skin, platinum blond hair, a completely hairless body, and are not very beautiful. They should only marry men who have hot and dry humours to mitigate their coldness and dampness. A ‘grade one’ woman has overly high levels of heat and dryness, and thus should be avoided as she is likely to be unfertile. She is of great intelligence and ability, has a good imagination, and never cedes an argument ‘no matter how small it is, and therefore become insupportable’. ‘Usually these types are good in conversation,’ he goes on, ‘and aren’t afraid to look men in the eye.’ They have coarse, deep voices, are thin, dark-skinned, and have a lot of body hair – even a bit of a beard. They are ugly and have lots of dark unruly hair.²⁰

Huarte’s observations built on the pseudoscience of physiognomy, which was popular during the sixteenth century. Illustrated handbooks promised to give their readers insight into the personal inclinations of the people around them, just through observing their appearance. A Latin edition of Bartolomeo della Rocca’s Physiognomy of 1536 aimed to coach its readers in this art.²¹ In the illustration, at the upper left are illustrated the signs of ‘dry humours’, to the bottom right a man whose humours are disordered. The couple to the upper right have a ‘perfect’ balance of humours. The man, in profile, stares resolutely ahead, framed by his improbably large hat. The woman’s hair is golden blond with soft curls that tumble onto her shoulders – she is naturally bashful and has lowered eyes. Women with the perfect balance of humours are ideally beautiful and healthy and make obedient, diligent wives.

Bartolomeo della Rocca, Compendium of Physiognomy and Palmistry (1536).

The use of cosmetics undermines all these diagnostic strategies. What happens if your betrothed’s hair turns out not really to be blond, her face to be blotchy, her body hair to be only temporarily removed? Juan Luis Vives’s The Education of A Christian Woman was a bestseller all over Europe. The book argued against women’s cosmetics for various reasons, but a major concern was that they deceived suitors: ‘Miserable you, if you attract a husband solely through make-up! Because then when you have washed it off how will he feel about you?’ It would be mad, he goes on, to buy a horse only having seen it covered with ornaments rather than how it’s made by nature. We buy slaves and animals unadorned, he says, but not wives.²²

There is a much-revisited male fantasy in this era: to catch women unawares so as to check what they look like without make-up. Lodovico Domenichi in his ‘Dialogue on Love’ (1562) advises potential suitors to see their love interest ‘immediately after she has got out of bed, before she has made up and arrayed herself to please others. This way you will easily discover and understand all her defects.’²³ Sources also endlessly repeat a story about a spectacularly unenjoyable party game allegedly devised by the ancient Greek courtesan, Phryne:

Phryne, loved by Praxiteles the sculptor, was at a party with many other women, and invented a game, where they all washed their faces, and thus revealed all their wrinkles, and only she appeared beautiful.²⁴

However, rather than things that could be washed off, many canny Renaissance women used substances like mercury that changed the colour of the skin directly, and rouge and lip colour that stained the skin and lasted for several days. Perhaps Phryne was not such a ‘natural’ beauty after all – she may just have been successfully displaying her sprezzatura.

Manipulating Nature

One of the seismic changes in the history of cosmetics at this time was the increasing engagement of physicians with beauty culture, and the belief that beauty could be manipulated ‘from within’. After all, it was thought that you could influence the body’s humoral balance through manipulating external factors, so why not? These factors were called the six ‘non-naturals’ – air, motion/rest (including what we would call exercise), food and drink, evacuation and retention, sleep/ waking, and emotions. In the health regimens that became popular all over Europe in this period, women and men were urged to spend about half an hour cleansing their heads in the morning, to purge the body of what in the Renaissance they called ‘excrements’ that had built up in the stomach overnight – Spit! Cough! Blow your nose! Sneeze! Remove sleepy dust! Scoop out your earwax! Clean your teeth! These ablutions served both health and beauty.²⁵

Developments in medical science saw a new academic interest in cosmetic medicine, an interest that was to reach its peak in the University of Padua medical school in the second half of the sixteenth century. There students received lectures on this subject from some of the most prominent physicians of the day, including Gabriele Falloppio. He gave his lecture ‘On Decoration’ in Padua at some point in the 1550s, and it was published after his death as part of his collected works.²⁶ His discussion of cosmetic health starts with a consideration of how health and beauty are related. External beauty is a sign of the perfect harmony of the interior of the body, with all the humours in balance. Thus, ugliness could be understood as a medical problem. He argued for natural proportion, and was firmly against beauty that was ‘painted on’ – this was ‘harlotry’, he explains. But if a person’s ‘natural beauty is destroyed by ugliness, we can say that the power of the doctor is definitely required’.²⁷

Giovanni Marinello (who we met earlier, and who pops up frequently in this book) was probably one of the student doctors avidly following Falloppio’s lectures, and he was later to translate and adapt many of his teachers’ precepts in his The Ornaments of Ladies. Marinello was a strong believer in the ability of humoral medicine and saw the female body as raw material to be moulded into perfect shape. He often recommended purgatives (medicines to provoke diarrhoea and/or vomiting) as beauty remedies, and at times took the logic of humoral medicine to fascinating extremes, such as in the following passage where he defends his advice to make eyes bigger:

Many are firm in the opinion that eyes that are small by nature cannot become bigger, because either they have been inherited from relatives, or produced that way because their forefathers have shaped them that way, or their grandmothers were lacking material when they were produced… Nowadays as we are adopting many things, and have the ingenuity to imitate [nature] where we can, why can’t we do it in this case, like we do in infinite others? I believe strongly that there is nothing to which we cannot give growth through some means, and I am more confirmed in this belief as we know much in the work of how to transmute fat to thin and skinny and from thin to very fat.

Because small eyes were down to cold and dry humours, his advice is that sufferers should take a sponge dipped in warm water and bathe around the eye several times – or for an even better effect use warm milk. White wine and nourishing food, frequent warm baths, and head-washing should also help. The best thing to do, however, are ‘ball sports, head exercises and holding your breath – all these are most helpful to the eye’.²⁸

Marinello’s beliefs here, however ridiculous, also expose the shaky foundations at the heart of the natural look. Human bodies are always, more or less, products of artifice, from cradle to grave. Leaving a body, face and hair without care (and care inevitably combines hygiene with aesthetics) is less natural than neglectful. Renaissance physicians drew the line between their ‘natural’ medical manipulation of the humours and the ‘paint’ that they linked to errant female sexuality. But – as we’ll see – this distinction had ideological roots, relating to a wider move for physicians to take over women’s knowledge in a broad range of fields.

When applied successfully, cosmetics can transform our external appearance in ways that can defy and disrupt preconceptions about age, gender, social class or race. It’s this potential for subversion, perhaps, that causes such strong visceral reactions in some onlookers, today and in the past.

Part Two JUDGEMENT

4 WAS RENAISSANCE BEAUTY CULTURE OPPRESSIVE OR EMPOWERING?

THERE IS AN ASTOUNDING amount of cultural amnesia in relation to the history of hygiene, beauty and cosmetics. People from all periods in history who worry about the pressure to look good tend to talk about it as if it’s a new thing; it’s been brought about by the emergence of women’s literacy, or women’s magazines, or social media. Of course all these things change how we understand our appearance; but, historically speaking, Instagram, selfie culture and so on are just the most recent flashpoints in a long saga. Debates over female beautification have tended to be complex and seemingly self-contradictory, on one side insisting on women’s freedom to adorn themselves as they choose, and on the other arguing that beauty culture is nothing more than another pressure on women to conform. As we’ll find out in this chapter, women themselves have been arguing about beauty’s oppressive and empowering potential for at least 600 years.

Cosmetics: The Case Against

The Brescian humanist, Laura Cereta (1469–1499, pictured overleaf in a posthumous portrait of 1640), was a bookish girl who was educated in a convent from the age of seven. When brought back home at eleven to help out in the household, she secretly read classical texts in her room at night. In her Latin correspondence, which she intended for wide circulation, Cereta forcefully put forward women’s intellectual equality, or even superiority, to men – arguing, as Moderata Fonte was to do a century later, that girls only suffered from a lack of proper education. Citing numerous famous and educated women from history, Cereta berates one of her correspondents for describing her as ‘exceptional’, and argues that ‘nature imparts one freedom to all human beings equally – to learn’.¹

Portrait of Laura Cereta. Frontispiece from her Letters (1640).

During her life, she experienced the all-too-recognisable problem of domestic duties not leaving her sufficient time for research and writing. She had no children – her husband died after two years of marriage, when Cereta was only seventeen – but she had been called back from her studies to look after her father’s household as a teenager, and was constantly exasperated by the needs of her family. ‘Time is a terribly scarce commodity for those of us who spend our skills and labour equally on our families and our own work,’ she complained in a letter of 1486.² It was necessary to make sacrifices, to get up early, to read through the night, to gain knowledge. In her view, all women had the opportunity to become educated if, like her, they chose the path of learning. Why did they not do so? Beyond their treatment at the hands of unsympathetic men, they also had themselves to blame. Women were too concerned about trivialities, including appearing attractive:

For some women worry about the styling of their hair, the elegance of their clothes, and the pearls and other jewellery they wear on their fingers. Others love to say cute little things, to hide their feelings behind a mask of tranquillity, to indulge in dancing, and lead pet dogs around on a leash.³

In other letters, Cereta berates her peers who resort to gossip, and criticises women who are interested in fashion and beauty:

Many women press bread on their faces to soften it, and many erroneously polish skin that is full of wrinkles. Truly, there are few women who do not paint their bloodshot faces with a snow-white powder made from white lead. Some strive to seem more beautiful in their exquisite and exotic dress than the creator of beauty intended them to be. One is ashamed of the irreverence of certain women who redden their milk-white cheeks with scarlet dye, and who use their furtive little eyes and laughing mouths to pierce the hearts, already poisoned, of those who gaze on them… Alas, how crooked is the weakness of our sex in its delights.⁴

In condemning an interest in external appearance, Cereta was aligning herself with the life of the spirit and the mind. She saw women’s interest in appearance as a kind of false consciousness, something that they would be wise to eschew if they were ever going to achieve parity with men through education.

Cereta’s sensitivity to women wasting time on their appearance is perhaps linked to the difficulties she had throughout her life in being taken seriously as a scholar. In an era when women’s verbal fluency was often equated with promiscuity, Cereta is insistent that her value lies in the superior qualities of intellect rather than looks. In a letter to a friend she describes herself as ‘a little woman who is humble in both her appearance and her dress, since I am more concerned with letters than adornment’.⁵

Her intellectual predecessor Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) suffered even more harshly due to her prominence as a rare learned woman on the public stage. She was accused of adultery and promiscuity, even of incest, in gossip that she at times found unbearable: ‘they jeer at me throughout the city, the women mock me,’ she complained in a letter of 1439.⁶

Cereta’s call to women to eschew their concern with appearances is a strand of feminist thought that reappeared in subsequent centuries. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), for example, has much in common with Cereta in her attitudes towards female beauty in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792, when she argued that her female peers were ‘taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre’ and the mind ‘roaming round its gilt cage only seeks to adorn its prison’. It seems that the rights and wrongs of female beautification are rehearsed every time social shifts challenge gender categories in any way – as in the twentieth century when women gained active roles in wartime, with the rise of new media such as photography, or, now, with the ubiquity of social media.⁷ In the later twentieth century, women were implored to resist the ‘beauty myth’, which was said to sell unattainable beauty standards to women in order to hamper the progress of feminism, or, in recent years, to remind themselves that they are ‘already enough’.⁸

A woman visiting an apothecary shop. From The Evil and Shrewdness of Women (1530).

However, condemning an interest in clothes and make-up can also smack of misogyny – and this was certainly true of many Renaissance pamphlets and books, which revelled in satirising women’s beauty culture. Frequently reprinted pamphlets such as The Evil and Shrewdness of Women laughed about the ‘thousands of ampules and little packets and jars’ full of the ‘shit women cover themselves with’. Attacks on women’s cosmetic practices were common and become increasingly virulent in the era of the Catholic Church reform of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The writer Giuseppe Passi makes many observations about women and cosmetics, all of them damning, in his treatise, The Defects of Women, published in 1598. Some of his thoughts echo Cereta’s:

All their attention and thought is dedicated only to cleaning themselves, adorning themselves, beautifying themselves, curling their tresses, making their fringe into ringlets, crimping their hair, whitening their face, and coloring their foreheads with various lotions and cosmetics… they have always in front of them mirrors, combs, cloths, ceramic jars, glass vials, little boxes, small vessels, small chests full of a thousand vanities, prepared according to their invention.⁹

Women are obsessed with beautification and ornament, this argument goes, at the expense of every other potential pastime.

The Feminist Case for Beauty

With this thread of misogynist thinking in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that Cereta’s damning attitude towards women’s beautification made her an outlier, particularly among the feminist female writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Many women argued that the problems they had being understood as equal weren’t because they spent too much time on thinking about appearances, or how they wore their hair, or the money or time they spent on cosmetics – to the contrary, their appearance was one of the few areas where they had some agency. They argued that the problem was not with women’s attitudes to beauty. The problem was men.

Even now, some men are baffled when you explain to them that women’s interest in clothes and make-up isn’t simply to attract male attention. Christine de Pizan (1364–1431) was probably the first woman to discuss this issue. She was a Venetian-born physician’s daughter, who moved with her father to the French court when she was a little girl. Widowed at twenty-five, and facing destitution, she started to make a living for herself as a writer. In 1405, she authored two texts that were to become landmarks in the history of feminist thought, The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies.¹⁰ Her character ‘Lady Rectitude’ answers a question from the author about whether it’s fair that ‘women who love wearing pretty clothes and accessories receive a great deal of criticism, because people say they do this in order to seduce men’. Presaging much feminist criticism since, Rectitude suggests that although being overly interested in one’s looks is a flaw, she also wants

to make sure that women who look pretty are not excessively criticised – I assure you that not all women do this to seduce men. Some people, both men and women, are just naturally inclined to enjoy elegance and attractive, rich clothing, cleanliness and the finer things in life.¹¹

She goes on to discuss how St Bartholomew was something of a dandy, and points out that Lucretia, the famous virtuous Roman woman who stabbed herself after she was raped, was not attacked due to her beauty, but because of the evil thoughts of her rapist.

Almost 200 years later, Moderata Fonte made a very similar point in her Worth of Women:

It’s not unfitting for us women to express our natural inner refinement outwardly, in feminine dress and adornment. Of course, men say that all this finery we wear betrays a corrupt heart and often endangers our virtue. But they’re quite wrong [… ] women’s dress could hardly endanger our virtue if men would only stop pestering us.¹²

That men should take responsibility for their own actions was a central plank of Renaissance feminist thought – and a battle still being fought.

Some female writers argued that it was fitting for women to be interested in beauty because they are naturally more beautiful than men. An important exponent of this argument was none other than Giovanni Marinello’s daughter. Lucrezia Marinella (1571–1653) is pictured in an engraving copied from a painting of 1601. Her dark arched eyebrows and blond curled hair could be derived from recipes in her father’s book. The searching gaze suggests that beauty is not all she has to offer. In fact, Marinella became one of the most famous female writers of the early modern period; she was described during her lifetime as ‘a woman of wondrous eloquence and learning’, ‘exceptional in writing prose and poetry’, and a ‘marvellous and truly learned woman’. She was a testament to the power of women’s education.¹³

Giacomo Piccini, Portrait of Lucrezia Marinella after a lost painting by Giovanni Battista Papa of 1601 (1652).

Her most famous work, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, was published in Venice in 1600, just before this portrait was made. This treatise on the superiority of the female sex is deeply erudite, witty and thoughtful. Unlike the back-and-forth dialogue of Fonte’s Worth of Women, Marinella’s book is a polemic that not only argues for the superiority of women’s intellects, but seeks to prove it in a dazzling display of knowledge, a massive range of references, and through her fluently confident and lucid writing, which repeatedly bashes misogynists on the head with erudition. In the section on ‘the nature and essence of the female sex’, beauty is used to argue for the greater nobility of women’s souls: ‘The more beautiful the woman, the more [poets] affirm that it is her soul that renders grace and loveliness to her body.’ She cites sources from Plato to Petrarch to Giovanni Ebreo, to argue that women’s beauty is ultimately derived from the divine. She summarises:

So, if women are more beautiful than men, who, as can be seen, are generally coarse and ill-formed, who can deny that they are more remarkable? Nobody, in my opinion. Thus it can be said that beauty in a woman is a marvellous spectacle and a miracle worthy of respect, though it is never fully honoured and respected by men.

It’s not women’s fault that ‘women’s pleasing qualities, and lovely, delicate faces force and oblige men to fall in love with them against their wills’. Women on the other hand love men through courtesy, as ‘compared to women all men are ugly’.¹⁴ Her comments on women’s cosmetics and skincare could be taken straight from the letter of dedication to her father’s Ornaments: ‘Since beauty is women’s special gift from the supreme hand, should she not seek to guard it with all diligence?’ She compares women who use cosmetics to men who are naturally timid but train themselves in fighting:

Since men behave in this way, why should not those women who are born less beautiful than the rest hide their less fortunate attributes and seek to augment the little beauty they possess through artifice, provided it is not offensive? Why should it be a sin if a woman born with considerable beauty washes her delicate face with lemon juice and the water of bean flowers and privets in order to remove her freckles and keep her skin soft and clean?… Let us then say that women who are born beautiful should conserve their beauty, and women who lack beauty should improve themselves.¹⁵

Like Fonte, she believed that men should leave women to their own devices when it came to hair and make-up. In Fonte’s words:

what on earth has it got to do with men, whether we dress our hair on one side rather than another? And what has it got to do with them if we do what we can to look beautiful, and do what we like with our hair?¹⁶

Although we might applaud Fonte’s sentiment in theory, in practice women’s appearance could very much be the choice of men, and was frequently subject to legislation. Nicolosa Sanuti (c. 1430–1505) wrote An Oration for the Restitution of Vain Ornamentation in 1453, to counter the stipulations of a sumptuary law introduced in her home city of Bologna. Sumptuary legislation was common across Europe in this period. Through these laws restricting certain items of clothing to certain groups, governments sought to maintain social order and morals. This legislation often sought to prevent women from spending too much on clothing or jewellery, and ensured that they weren’t wearing clothes that fell foul of propriety – masculine haircuts or overly revealing clothing, for example. Many women struggled under these constraints, as hairstyles, beauty and clothing were among the very few creative social outlets allowed to them. In 1437, for example, when the Venetian noble-woman Cristina Corner was excommunicated for breaking a new sumptuary law, she argued that she should ‘be permitted to wear [her fine dresses and jewellery] publicly in honour of her parents, and of her own beauty’. Five other aristocratic women also appealed to the pope for an exemption to the law, stressing that looking their best was important for the well-being and reputation of the Venetian Republic.¹⁷

Sanuti expands on this argument and writes what is, essentially, one of the first treatises in favour of the female sex. She lists powerful women from history before going on to consider those of her own time. She suggests that exterior ornamentation was no symptom of vanity but rather a testament ‘to virtue and the herald of a well-instructed mind’. In other words, external appearance suggests nobility of intellect. She also links women’s beauty to the good of the commonwealth. As women were denied an active role in political life, the only way to achieve public virtue was through wearing finery:

State offices are not allowed to women, nor do they strive for priesthoods, triumphs, and the spoils of war, for these are the customary prizes of men. But ornaments and decoration, the tokens of our virtues – these while the power is left to us, we shall not allow to be stolen from us.¹⁸

Sanuti’s model seems to have inspired other women to follow suit. In 1575, the ‘Gentlewomen of Cesena’ (a city near Bologna in central Italy) published a six-page pamphlet titled A Declamation about Ostentation. In it, they made an extraordinary argument about why women needed to engage with fashion and beauty:

We cannot legitimately be forbidden from wearing clothes, drapes, furs and other ornament, because… we are banned from all public office, stripped of all magistracies; we are deprived of all large or small dignities, and we are relieved of such misery only by our religion and our adornment. These are (oh men!) instead of your dignity, of your magistracies, of your offices [… ] perhaps if ornament is forbidden to us, we wives, daughters and sisters will be less willing to be subject to you, to the extent that we will no longer be able to ensure that we will never wave goodbye to our family and break the chains of female servitude.

These stirring words are all marshalled to support women’s right to make themselves beautiful. Dismissing the idea that women should keep quiet, they argued that they were taking on the role of the ancient female philosopher Diotima of Mantinea, the teacher of Socrates, in not holding back on their opinions. They wanted ‘the whole world to know the uneasiness they felt’ on learning of a new sumptuary law. In a carefully argued text, the Cesena women draw on a wide range of classical and contemporary sources – ‘fighting with the sharp sword of reason’.¹⁹

Effectively these women threaten rebellion against patriarchal authority and the desertion of their families in response to this ban on adornment. On one hand, these writings show how fighting for the right of women to beautify themselves could be considered a central plank of feminist thought at the time. On the other, they suggest that a focus on beautification may, indeed, have distracted women from struggling against injustice, just as Cereta argued.

IN 1645, WHEN SHE was seventy-four, Lucrezia Marinella wrote the last book of her successful literary career. Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please is a conduct book for women that seems to entirely recant her earlier feminism.²⁰ Certainly at face value, contrary to her earlier works (and disappoint-ingly for the modern reader), Marinella suggests here that women are best employed in raising children and focusing on domestic life rather than on learning. Her fifth ‘exhortation’ is against women’s ‘ornaments’:

Some women’s pride, luxury and folly are so great that they devote all their attention to their personal hygiene and make up… So powerful is this servitude, which they mistake for happiness, that when they are all made up, they think themselves superior to noble, rich and virtuous women.²¹

Echoing Cereta here, Marinella’s condemnation of women is damning, and betrays one of the key anxieties many people have always had with cosmetics – that women can use them to pretend to be something that they are not. We’re a long way from any sense of a universal sisterhood here. Indeed, one of the reasons why Nicolosa Sanuti and other noblewomen fought for their right to ornament themselves is precisely that it distinguished them from poorer women. Once again, we see cosmetics under fire for disrupting what is perceived to be the natural order of things – with beautiful aristocrats and patrician ladies resting on the shoulders of their less well-adorned, poorer counterparts.

5 BEAUTY TIPS FOR BRIDES

ISABELLA PALLAVICINA (1550–1623) was a sophisticated patron of art and literature – and one of the most important supporters of pastoral plays and poetry in late Renaissance Italy. As an influential widow, like several north Italian noblewomen of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, she founded, then presided over, a lively literary academy that gathered in the family’s stately castle and grounds in Soragna and in her well-appointed palace in nearby Parma.

But there was a moment in young Isabella’s life when her future was in the balance, and largely out of her hands. In 1562, her mother, Camilla – thrillingly, a suspected spy – died aged only forty-six, when Isabella was twelve and her sister, Vittoria, fourteen. Camilla had been anxious to secure her daughters’ futures, and frantically wrote letters to important figures during her final weeks, while the girls were staying at the convent of San Paolo in Parma. Their father had died in 1559, but, as was common when there were only female heirs in the direct line, their inheritance was contested. Knowing only too well that she wouldn’t live to see her daughters grow up, Camilla spent the last weeks of her life writing to powerful friends, attempting to secure her girls’ future by finding them wealthy husbands. She managed to find a good match for Vittoria, who married a cousin, Count Ranuccio Gambara. Isabella’s fate, however, was still unknown at the time of her mother’s death. This is perhaps why Camilla specified that her daughter should look the part, carefully listing in her will the jewels Isabella should wear, including two pearl necklaces, a golden crucifix pendant, a gilded girdle decorated with tiny pearls, and several hairpieces made of lapis lazuli and silver. ¹

Giovanni Marinello, frontispiece from The Ornaments of Ladies (1562).

Isabella and her sister were to receive another item just after her mother’s death: the soon-to-be beauty bestseller, Marinello’s Ornaments of Ladies. Marinello had hoped to dedicate it to Camilla before ‘cruel death seized her’, he explains in his opening letter. Instead, he bestows the gift of his comprehensive beauty advice book to two little orphan girls recently launched on the marriage market. This dedication is telling, as it indicates a key reason for the popularity of Marinello’s book: it made beauty tips respectable. Rather than being the province of poor women, sold for a few soldi in the market square, Marinello’s book brought together academic medicine with this vernacular tradition and brought an air of respectability to beautification through his status as a physician. His stance that there was a ‘science’ to beauty was just what was needed for girls about to enter the cut-throat Renaissance dating scene.

Finding a Wife

It was no accident that Marinello dedicated his book to two young girls in need of husbands. The idea that women are essentially in competition with each other to keep or find the best man was commonly implied in cosmetic texts. This is made explicit in a fancy vellum manuscript of another collection of cosmetic recipes, made around 1500, most probably as a gift for a patrician Venetian bride.²

The frontispiece (see plate section, image no. 8) shows the Judgement of Paris, the story where the shepherd boy Paris has to select the most beautiful goddess from Minerva/Athena (the goddess of war and wisdom), Juno/Hera (the goddess of marriage, women and family) and Venus/Aphrodite (the goddess of beauty and love). Inevitably he chooses Venus, who has promised him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy – and the Trojan War ensues. Despite its bloody end, this story is commonly depicted on Renaissance cosmetics tools. It turns up, for example, on fancy carved ivory combs, on pomanders, and on musk-scented gesso boxes, exactly the kind of gifts that suitors would give to women who had won the pick-me dance of Renaissance courtship.³ This gave a mixed message about beauty, warning women that attractiveness had its perils as well as its rewards. Overall, though, it was a reminder that women’s faces and bodies were constantly subject to an assessing gaze.

This is why a book like Marinello’s was so essential for a teenager like Pallavicina. Orphaned and with a doubtful inheritance as she was, pretty much her only chance to maintain her aristocratic status and financial well-being was to marry well. Although the Italian elite always took a range of considerations in account while choosing a bride – including of course the political and social standing of her family and the wealth she would bring to the wedding – the potential wife’s looks were also minutely assessed.

In 1465, the matriarch of the Florentine Strozzi family, Alessandra (c. 1408–c. 1471), was trying to persuade her sons, Filippo and Lorenzo (thirty-seven and thirty-three years old respectively), to get married to girls from their hometown. Alessandra’s life had been tough. Her husband, Matteo, had been exiled in 1434 due to his opposition to the political rise of the powerful Cosimo de’ Medici. Unfortunately for his family the sentence didn’t end when Matteo died, but his punishment was handed down to her sons. After she lost her husband and four of her children to plague in 1435, Alessandra returned to her native town of Florence, but ensured her remaining sons gained work in banks in Naples to help rebuild the family’s shattered finances.

The prospects for rescinding the banishment finally started to look rosy after Cosimo’s death in 1464, and her sons were eventually allowed to return to Florence a couple of years afterwards. By 1465, the need to find a good local bride for both of them started to seem increasingly urgent. Alessandra’s seventy-three extant letters yield many rich insights into the relationship between Renaissance mothers and their sons, including the criteria wealthy mercantile families used for choosing brides. Alessandra and a friend of the family, Marco Parenti, considered all the eligible girls of the right age and family standing, working out which would suit the Strozzi sons best. This extract is from Alessandra’s letter to Filippo:

If Francesco Tanagli wants to give you his daughter, that would be a good match as far as it goes, and is the best of those that is available. I like the da Vernia girl, but she is clumsy and has country bumpkin airs, according to what I’ve heard.

Money and family standing are clearly crucial in these discussions, but so is appearance. Alessandra reassures Filippo that they are looking above all for a match who ‘is of good character and is beautiful, and isn’t rustic in manners’. Tanagli was initially keen on the proposal – perhaps because, in Alessandra’s words, ‘he has thirteen children and would like to get one or two of them off his hands’. He invited Parenti round to his house to inspect his seventeen-year-old daughter at first hand (her name was Caterina, but she’s referred to as ‘the Tanagli girl’ throughout):

and he called the girl down in her underdress… and he said that if I wanted to see her… he would show us her whenever we wanted… Marco says she has a beautiful form, and it seemed that she was a receptive girl… Get the jewels ready, and let them be beautiful ones, because we have found you a wife.

The underdress – or gamurra – consisted of a tight bodice, normally with sleeves attached, that was sewn to a full skirt. It was the second layer of clothing over the undershirt, or camicia, which was worn by both men and women and was normally covered by a looser gown that was placed over the top. The tightness of the underdress would have allowed Parenti to assess the appearance of a prospective bride’s chest, shoulders, neck and arms. Alessandra went to see her at the cathedral during mass – church was one of the few places where ‘respectable’ girls could be seen outside the house – and the older woman took the chance to have ‘a good look at her’:

She seemed to me to have a beautiful figure and to be well put together; she’s as tall as your sister or taller, with good skin, though it’s not white, and she looks healthy. She has a long face and her features aren’t very delicate, but they’re not like a peasant’s. It seemed to me, from looking at her face and how she walks, that she isn’t lazy, and altogether I think that if the other considerations suit us, she wouldn’t be a bad deal.

Perhaps due to this less-than-glowing recommendation, Filippo was slow to act. That November, Alessandra needled her sons about marriage again.

We know so much about what you both want, and we are people who care about both your pride and your pocket… More than anything else we want the qualities we’ve discussed, and beauty more than anything. I would still like Francesco Tanagli’s daughter for you, Filippo, and the Adimari girl, who is younger, for you, Lorenzo. They’re among the most beautiful girls out there, if we could get them… And those we think might be for you, like the Borghini [girl], we’ll parade them all in front of you. With the Adimari girl’s sister, nothing has been said about her and there may be something lacking there; she’s sixteen, but from the outset we gathered that the younger one is more beautiful, and we set our heart on her, because, if we can, we would like to give you beautiful wives.

In the end, Filippo prevaricated so much that Francesco Tanagli pulled out of the deal. Filippo married the young ‘Adimari girl’, Fiammetta, the next year, on his return to Florence. She bore him five children in as many years, then died in 1476.⁴ Who knows what she thought about marrying a man she didn’t know, around twenty years her senior. How little agency these girls had in their marriages, how little we understand about their opinions – their role was to look the part, to impress potential in-laws and suitors. Tellingly, the most information we have about Fiammetta after her marriage is that she wore an expensive cloth-of-gold and silk outfit for Lorenzo de’ Medici’s wedding; it is minutely inventoried in her husband’s account books.⁵

We know a little more about Isabella Pallavicina. Having followed some of Marinello’s tips, perhaps, Isabella found a young and wealthy husband. In 1568, at the age of eighteen, she married Giampaolo Meli Lupi, the heir to the marquisate of Soragna, a town between Parma and Bologna. Unusually for the time, the bride and groom were about the same age, suggesting that this may have been a love match. They had two children – a girl, who they named after Isabella’s mother, Camilla, and a boy, Giampaolo. Isabella’s husband died in 1571, leaving her a widow. She remained unmarried until her death in 1623.⁶

In the Renaissance, as now, women were most prominently on display when they were getting married, and they were expected to wear the wealth of their lineage on their backs. Many of the portraits of Renaissance young women were made on the occasion of their marriage, showing them wearing the clothing and jewels that formed part of their dowry. In these images, the women are typically presented as simply decorative; sometimes to the extent that it’s hard to tell if they are real women or imaginative representations of ideal beauty, spirited up, Pygmalion-like, by painters.

There is no surviving portrait of Pallavicina, but the image of another northern Italian woman of the minor nobility, gives us a sense of marriage finery worn at the time (see plate section, image no. 6). The sitter – perhaps the poet Countess Lucia Albani Avogadro of Bergamo (1534–68) – perches awkwardly on a chair, a fashionable fan lowered in one hand, her form enclosed in fabric so shiny it looks like it would give you an electric shock. The bodice of the red overdress seems to imprison her torso, even as it opens to reveal the pale skin of her upper chest. Beyond the outward sheen, the layers of clothing are revealed – the yellow under-dress with matching sleeves, the clean white lacework of the undershirt that peaks out through slashes at the shoulders, and in the starched collar. The subject’s golden hair is held back in tightly coiled braids, with ringlets around her face. Her flushed cheeks, rosebud lips and arched eyebrows are so generic as to risk anonymity. Giovanni Battista Moroni is too skilled a portraitist, however, to omit the personality of his sitter. An eyebrow half raised, she looks towards the viewer quizzically, as if pondering the question – ‘what do you think you’re looking at’?⁷

This quality of ‘looked-at-ness’ continued beyond the wedding. Once married, beauty remained important, as it was a wife’s job to stop a husband from straying. This was an old rationale for cosmetics, popularised by the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and repeated by many sixteenth-century writers.⁸ For some, a commitment to beautification was less a woman’s pleasure and more a household duty, alongside domestic cleanliness, care of the family’s health, and cookery. We can see this presented visually in a seventeenth-century English household advice book by Hannah Woolley (1622–c. 1675), The Accomplisht Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and Cookery, from 1675.

Hannah Woolley, frontispiece from The Accomplisht Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and Cookery (1675)

Woolley was one of the most successful women writers of the early modern period and made her name writing books on household management. In the three sections of the front cover, you see the lady of the house with her maid in the kitchen, busy at a fire, an alembic for distillation next to her; she is most likely making medicines. In the bottom panel, the same pair are in a kitchen, meat hanging behind them, busy preparing food. In the middle the lady stands alone at her mirror, improving her face with ‘some Rare Beautifying Waters, to adorn and add Loveliness to the Face and Body’, to quote from the book itself.⁹

Unlike the earlier beauty pamphlets, which focus on finding a husband, Marinello’s Ornaments is peppered with grave warnings to wives who don’t keep up appearances for their existing spouses. ‘What is more displeasing to a husband than a wife whose nose is always running?’ he asks at one point. At another he notes, ‘It is an indecent thing for a lady who sleeps at the side of her husband if, whilst sleeping, saliva or spit dribbles from her mouth; because, as well as being derived from some defect of the stomach or the brain, because of this disgusting thing he can start to hate her.’ He also warns of the dangers to marital harmony of smelly feet, breath and armpits.¹⁰ Although men should also keep themselves clean and odour-free, it is clearly most important that women don’t – to use a modern phrase – ‘let themselves go’. Right at the beginning of the book, in his discussion of body hair removal, he explains to his imagined middle- and upper-class reader:

All my work aims to please you, and to make sure you are loved and caressed by your husbands, who, because of some bodily defect of yours, will not keep their promises of faithfulness and will go behind your back to some other woman.¹¹

Essentially, women who didn’t maintain their looks were pushing their husbands into adultery.

Mothers and Daughters

Isabella Pallavicina was widowed at twenty-one. For the rest of her life she put her considerable energy into being a powerful patron of literature. In 1580 she founded the ‘Academy of the Enlightened’, a literary salon that provided a focus for erudite conversations, pastoral plays and poetry readings.¹² In 1593 she moved to Parma and held court there.

As with other accomplished widows of this period, Isabella’s appearance remained a matter for constant comment, particularly from the artists she supported. Her beauty is ‘resplendent’, gushes a letter of 1581 that prefaces the edition of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Jerusalem Delivered, a publication that she sponsored.¹³ In the sonnet of thanks that Tasso sent to Isabella the subsequent year, he describes her as being like the wood nymph Calisa, with ‘golden hair like a summer breeze’.¹⁴ She was later identified as Calisa by several more poets, who all sang hymns to her various virtues. She is as beautiful as Venus, her face glows like the sun, eyes shine like the stars; ‘the beautiful ray of light that shines from the beautiful face of this wondrously beautiful woman inflames me’, according to the writer Mutio Manfredi.¹⁵ Even in a poem dedicated to Isabella’s studies in astrology, the writer still manages to talk about her ‘beautiful face’ and ‘golden hair’.¹⁶ For readers today, this scrutiny of the appearance of women in public life may well be depressingly familiar. The praise of Isabella’s beauty by most of her poet-groupies is rather conventional, and would tick off much of the Renaissance beauty bingo card. Wavy blond hair? Eyes like stars? Clear white skin? Full house!

Unfortunately, the poetry that Pallavicina seems to have written herself has been lost, and much of the evidence that currently exists about her life are these conventional hymns of praise that tell us so frustratingly little. Was it exasperating for her to be stuck in this ‘gilded cage’ of beauty? How might one escape? How might she have felt about launching her own daughter onto the harshly judgemental marriage market?

One divergent path is suggested by an important protégée of hers, the poet and playwright Maddalena Campiglia (1553–95). In her portrait of the late 1580s (see plate section, image no. 7), Campiglia looks at us with a steady, piercing, half-amused gaze. She is swamped in a massive black mantle that looks more like a tent than a dress; this is clearly not a woman interested in conventionally flaunting the ‘ornaments’ of beauty. Her dark hair simply hangs there, cropped at chin length like a boy’s; her face is quizzical, her laughter lines and eyebrow creases unfashionably emphasised.

Campiglia wrote a pastoral poem, ‘Calisa’, in honour of Pallavicina’s son’s wedding in 1589. The story explicitly celebrates lesbian desire – ‘I know that I, a woman, love a woman’. When these feelings were questioned by other writers as potentially unseemly, Campiglia explained that Pallavicina was so beautiful, even women fall in love with her.¹⁷ Campiglia had already gone further, however, than this unconventional use of conventional praise. Her play of 1588, Flori, includes one of the few descriptions of a romantic relationship between women to survive from the sixteenth century. In the opening act, the eponymous nymph-poet-heroine cannot get over the death of her beloved companion: ‘Who snatched from me my darling Amaranta? O death! O sweet nymph! Where do you flee and abandon me? O death, return! Do not leave me!’ Due to a magic ceremony, Flori then falls in love with a passing male shepherd, but, rather than marrying each other (as is the traditional ‘happy ending’ of pastoral plays like this), they become platonic lovers, so that Flori can avoid the yoke of marriage and carry on with her literary pursuits.

Flori is, of course, a barely fictionalised projection of Campiglia. Born out of wedlock to a Vicentine noble couple who had both been widowed in their previous marriages, Campiglia was married in 1573, but left her husband seven years later, avowing in her will that ‘in the sight of God’ he had ‘never truly been her husband’. Moving back to her parents’ house, she inserted herself into Vicentine literary circles and was then taken up by Pallavicina.¹⁸

In the preface to Flori, addressed to Pallavicina, Campiglia critiques the way mothers prepare their daughters for the marriage market. She explains:

Mothers today, when they are sending their daughters out into the world, always dress them in the most graceful way that one can imagine, drawing on all the most recondite and abstruse artifices at their disposal. But this is not my way; on the contrary, I seek to depart from the normal habits of women.

Rather than prettify her theatrical creations, Campiglia urges Pallavicina to look deeper:

Let your serene eyes not seek in her the gaudy vanities of extrinsic appearance, for she was born in the wild woods and learned from her mother to disdain all such vain, politick trappings.

Campiglia’s plea was for her viewers to give women credit for value and substance beyond the superficial.

Did Isabella, who had enjoyed the agency of widowhood for so long, feel emboldened to forge a different path for her own daughter, Camilla (1569–1611)? In 1583, at the age of fourteen, Camilla played the role of Amarilla, chief nymph to the hunter-goddess Diana, in yet another pastoral play, Angelo Ingegneri’s Dance of Venus, which was dedicated to her mother. The play tested Camilla’s accomplishments – she appears in all five acts, and has more than 400 lines – as well as requiring her to dance and sing solo. It was reputed to show off her ‘ready memory, most lively mind, and incomparably elegant grace’. It was also undoubtedly a plan to launch Camilla onto the social scene. Fourteen was the age when the hunt for a husband began. As well as showing her to be intelligent, graceful and musical, Camilla’s performance in the play demonstrated her obedience to patriarchal authority. When urged to resist a forced marriage by her friend, her character argues that ‘it is most inappropriate for a good daughter to contradict’ her parents: ‘Don’t urge me to rebel against my venerable father… I want to obey him always’.¹⁹

Camilla secured a good match at the age of seventeen, to Mario Farnese, the Duke of Latera, and, when she in turn eventually had a daughter, Grandmother Isabella was in charge of giving her a well-rounded education: ‘to learn to read and write, to play instruments and dance, and to perform plays and pastoral performances’. But all this came to an end when, at the age of eight, Camilla’s daughter caught smallpox. After this, she was deemed too disfigured to be a good marriage prospect, so had lost her essential function – there was no need to educate her further and she was destined for the convent.

Brutal, perhaps, but hardly surprising. The beauty of daughters, for upper-class families, was always strategic. It could secure favourable dynastic alliances and ensure financial stability. It was a way of showing off status and wealth in a world where there were many expert assessors, judging each part of the body minutely. This wasn’t a matter of men forcing their views on unwilling women – mothers, in-laws, friends of the family both male and female, played a central role in evaluating the appearance of brides for their sons and preparing their own daughters to compete. No wonder books like Marinello’s proved so popular in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries – reinforcing this beauty regime, but also perhaps giving women at least the illusion of some agency and control over their ever-errant suitors and husbands.

6 WHITEFACE

TITIAN’S EARLY-1520S portrait of the concubine of the Duke of Ferrara, Laura Dianti, with her young black attendant (see plate section, image no. 9), is probably the first image that juxtaposes a refined, well-dressed white woman with her dependent, adoring black slave – but it is far from being the last. This iconography blossomed over the subsequent decades, and was, perhaps, to morph into the ‘mammy’ caricature so common in US culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹

Although it’s rarely talked about in grand triumphal accounts of the cultural achievements of the Renaissance, it was normal for well-to-do Italian households of this era to own female slaves. From classical times and throughout the Middle Ages, girls and young women were snatched from their homes in Crimea, Russia and the area around the Black Sea, then traded in slave markets in Genoa and Venice. From the later fifteenth century, the ethnicity of this slave population started to change. The opening up of Portuguese trade routes to sub-Saharan Africa from the 1440s, coupled with the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453, meant that slaves from both north and sub-Saharan Africa started to become more readily available – so from that time, darker-skinned slaves became increasingly common. By the mid-sixteenth century, European port cities, especially in the Iberian Peninsula and Italy, included a high proportion of inhabitants from sub-Saharan Africa – as many as one in ten of the population in major trading cities such as Seville, Venice, Antwerp, Livorno and Naples were black. The historian of slavery Salvatore Bono has estimated that more than 2.5 million slaves lived in Europe in the early modern period. Young black women aged between eighteen and twenty-five were the most expensive category of slaves at this time, and beauty was one of the criteria used to price them. Once bought, slaves were often branded on the face – sometimes with the full name of their master – so they could be easily recognised if they ran away. These women acted as skivvies in wealthy households, as sexual playthings for the men of the family, and, if they got pregnant, could be hired out as wet-nurses.²

As the skin colour of slaves got darker, the demands on the ‘ladies’ of the house to have whiter skin intensified. Skin whitening was the goal of many European cosmetic recipes during the Middle Ages, but the recipes grow in number and complexity during the sixteenth century, hand in hand with increased European contact and colonisation with darker-skinned peoples overseas. Marinello’s Ornaments, for example, has a chapter on ‘ways to make the face, the neck, the chest, the hands and every other part of the body white like alabaster’ that contains no fewer than seventy-four recipes, running the full gamut of ingredients from the (traditional) white lead ceruse, to pastes made from marble, wheat and bryony. Recipes to whiten the skin were ubiquitous in books of secrets all over Europe and beyond.

Scholarship on Renaissance England has shown the relationship between women’s skin-whitening practices and the English state’s colonial expansion. As Kim Hall has influentially noted, ‘The English/European division of beauty into “white” or “black” not only served aesthetic purposes but supported an ideology that still continues to serve the interests of white supremacy and male hegemony.’ ³ In other words, it’s possible to discern the beginnings of racial ideology in early modern beauty books. As we have seen in the advice book of Juan Huarte, white skin and golden-blond hair were associated with feminine delicacy – fetishising such qualities was just one of many ways to justify the brutal and dehumanising treatment of darker-skinned women.

Huarte’s ideas about temperament and appearance – so rooted in ideas about the colour of skin and the texture of hair – were formulated in a Europe that was expanding abroad, and increasingly ethnically diverse at home. Because humours were considered to be affected by external factors – such as the heat of the sun, the clarity of the air, the quality of water – people were considered a product of their environment, and seen as fundamentally different depending on where they were born and raised. This division of people depending on geography, which scholars have called geohumoralism, was to merge with racial ideology as the transatlantic slave trade grew in importance for the European economy.⁴ Renaissance ideas about beauty – whiteness of skin, blond sleekness of hair – reinforced the idea that exterior appearance related to interior worth, and that some bodies were ‘naturally’ superior to others.

A shocking painting of 1632 by the Dutch artist Christiaen van Couwenbergh (see plate section, image no. 10) shows the sexual assault of a black woman by two laughing near-naked white-skinned men. She holds up her hand in horror and tries to escape, but is firmly held down on the lap of one of her attackers. Another man, fully dressed and darker-skinned, has an uncertain relationship to the attack. He raises his hands, seemingly in shock, as he witnesses the scene. In this image the darkness of the victim’s skin, a negative outline against the white sheets, leaves her body practically unreadable, but the horror on her face, and the fear in her eyes, is clear.

There is not much known about this painting. It has been associated with Aesop’s fable, ‘Washing the Ethiopian White’, newly popular in the Renaissance, but it does not look like any other visualisation of this subject. The only thing it shares with this story is its dehumanising quality. It is difficult to look at. The viewer is implicated in the rape, as the standing white man looks at his audience, laughing and pointing with his finger towards the victim. It’s hard not to see this painting as a kind of allegory, to show the systematic and often unthinking violence that many Europeans unleashed on much of the rest of the world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Poor, black and female, likely stranded in Europe without any family ties, this woman is stripped of her individuality, and literally constrained from expressing any agency. The woman in this painting is reminiscent of Saidiya Hartman’s description of women in the transatlantic slave trade:

Torn from kin and community, exiled from one’s country, dishonored and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage.⁵

The stories of people of colour in this period can be hard to trace, and sometimes clues can be found in unexpected places. The painting Women at Their Toilet, of around 1545 (see plate section, image no. 11), is by Paris Bordone, a French artist who immigrated to Venice to work with Titian. Bordone specialised in painting ‘ideal women’, like the two to the centre and right here, women with ample wavy blond hair, white skin flushed with red, small round breasts, fleshy solid arms. These are women who, according to the fashionable physiognomic analysis of the later sixteenth century, would make good, fertile, obedient wives. Yet, the artist here shows that their ‘beauty’ may be skin deep. With a comb in her hand, and a discarded cosmetic pot and sponge at the bottom of the canvas, it seems that the central woman has been brushing something – bleach? – through her hair. The white of her arms and face, the pink of her chest and cheeks – are they too white, too pink, inauthentically perfect? The older woman to our left points towards a hand mirror, with a gesture intended to remind the audience of the transient nature of beauty, which, like a mirror image, is fleeting.

This woman is by far the most fascinating thing about this painting. When you look closely you can see blue-ink tattoos going from under her eye to her cheekbone, and on the rounded surface of her chin. These details, especially when compared to her beauty-by-numbers companions, are like a half-hidden key, an easy-to-miss detail.⁶

It is rare to see tattoos like this today, but some women do still have them, generally older women from Amazigh (Berber) communities in the north-west African region known as the Maghreb, which includes parts of Algeria and Morocco. Amazigh tattooing is a centuries-old art form that was associated with girls’ first menstrual period, and which became increasingly rare from the 1970s. In the earlier twentieth century it was an intrinsic part of women’s social and cultural lives, with female friends and family members joining together to tattoo several girls at a time. Designs were draw on the skin with charcoal, then pricked into the skin with a needle, and alfalfa or indigo pigment applied and left for around three days to fix the colour.⁷

Although this woman’s tattoos must have been done (by her mother, her sisters, her friends?) in the first decades of the sixteenth century, they are similar to twentieth-century designs. The exact meaning of each motif is unclear, but it’s generally agreed that the combination of shapes in these tattoos linked women to their place of origin, and distinguished them from other groups; they were an indelible sign of identity, of belonging. They still allow us to understand a little about the past of Bordone’s model – or at least a little more than is generally the case with the lives of the servants and slaves portrayed in Renaissance imagery.⁸

Her facial tattoos indicate that this woman is likely to have been taken after adolescence from her home in North Africa, probably present-day Morocco, as part of the thriving Mediterranean slave trade. Many slaves came into Italy as a result of violent exchanges at sea between Christian and Muslim corsairs, or raids on coastal settlements across the Muslim Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, from Morocco to the Black Sea. Men who were captured were often destined to row Italian galleys, while women and children typically became domestic slaves. Salvatore Bono has estimated that between 90,000 and 120,000 Muslim slaves entered Italy from the period around 1500 to 1700; there were around 20,000 Muslim slaves in Naples in the years around 1600 and in Sicily they accounted for 4 per cent of the population.⁹

Slave women in Italy were more often than not permanently separated from their families and friends; they were forcibly converted to Christianity, and often had to give up their own names as their new owners baptised them with common Italian names like Caterina, Lucia or Maria. Their true names are in most cases forever lost from the records.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, the voices of women and girls forced into slavery are notoriously difficult for scholars to recapture. Recently, the historian Noel Malcolm has come across the 1606 account of a 29-year-old Muslim convert, Theodora Tedea, whose fragmented sense of identity must have been common to many of those snatched from their homes, sometimes repeatedly. A dislocated home life, rape and other forms of sexual coercion were common, almost defining, experiences for female slaves. Theodora spoke to inquisitors in Naples:

… when my father died, and I was staying with my mother, the Turks came by sea with galleys, and… they seized me, and took me to a district of the Turks called Balliciauso. This happened five years ago. As I was a virgin, my master gave me to a Turk, his servant, as his wife, and for some years I stayed with that Turk, my husband, and I became pregnant. And while I was married to that Turk, a Greek man called Marino took me away from that Turk, telling me that he wanted to take me to the place where my mother lived; I was happy with that, as I believed him. He took me to Lecce [a town in southern Italy], where he sold me as a slave to Giovanni Battista Moles, who brought me here. I’ve been here for two years, And because Giovanni Battista Moles died, I am the slave of signora Amelia Branci, his wife.¹¹

This disarticulated life may have been familiar to Bordone’s model too. Perhaps a freed slave, she may have been one of the many who were converted to Christianity by Venetian religious bodies – from 1557 all came under the umbrella of the Venetian ‘Holy House of the Catechumens’, an institution that sheltered, instructed and ultimately converted Muslim and Jewish children and young people to Christianity. Many Muslims who worked as domestic slaves in Venice were converted under its auspices, with just over one in ten of them coming from North Africa.¹²

In this painting she’s taking on the guise of a female pimp or ruffiana. These figures, commonly former prostitutes who sometimes acted as procuresses for their daughters, frequently turn up in court cases, where they are often marked out as immigrants. They include women like ‘Greek Lena’, who in 1522 was whipped publicly and tied to a column for allowing two of her prostitutes to sleep with non-Christians (‘three moors from Barbary’); ‘Catharina the Smuggler’, who in 1552 and again in 1559 was convicted of pimping; ‘Lena the big slave from Zara [probably Zadar in Croatia]’, convicted in 1560; or Polish Sicile, a Jewish prostitute and ruffiana who was expelled from Venice for blasphemy in 1650.¹³ Some of these women were also known for selling spells and remedies.¹⁴ There are several women discussed later in the book who made a living by selling cosmetics, love potions and other magic spells, as well as renting out rooms to sex workers – and this context might suggest the type of woman Bordone is depicting here.

However, the reason why this painting is so intriguing is that this outsider figure, the Amazigh woman with her tattooed face and indigo headdress, is playing a pivotal moral role. She is asking her cosmetically enhanced younger companions to look in a mirror, a gesture associated with self-knowledge and prudence. These women may tick all the boxes for beauty ideals but they are not, it seems, virtuous. Their beauty comes out of bottles.

As the painting suggests, even against the backdrop of widespread suspicion of black and brown-skinned people, several European artists and writers were able to explore alternative ideas about female beauty that highlighted the aesthetic appeal of darker complexions. This is the era when sculptures of the ‘black Venus’ start to appear in some quantity. These small sculptures, made for wealthy households, were meant to be seen from various angles and held and turned in the hand. They typically exploited the colours of materials like ebony, bronze and semi-precious stones to evoke smooth, glowing brown and black skin. The tactile statuette of a crouching Venus (see plate section, image no. 12) dates from around 1600. The artist has used the swirling grain of rosewood to echo and enhance the woman’s twisting posture. This pose is a well-established one used since classical times to depict the goddess of beauty and love being surprised while bathing. Any educated early modern viewer would have immediately recognised the figure as a classical deity.¹⁵

There are also several intricately carved cameos of black women from around the 1560s to 1610s, associated with the workshop of Girolamo Miseroni in Milan. The one in the plate section (see image no. 13) just 6 cm tall, exploits the natural variations in the semi-precious stone agate to represent a black woman staring intently over her bared shoulder. She combines the fashionable ‘v-shaped’ late-sixteenth century hairline with a swirling robe and intricate fringed headdress and diadem.¹⁶ This diadem indicates a woman of high social status – and many Europeans will have heard tell of powerful African queens, particularly Njinga (1583–1663, sometimes also Nzinga), the queen of the Ambundu Kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba, located in present-day Angola, who dazzled the Portuguese in Luanda in 1622 when she led a delegation to meet them wearing Mbundu-style costume, including precious jewels, and colourful feathers in her hair. European sources depict her negotiations with the Portuguese, or celebrate her conversion to Christianity.¹⁷

Black women’s beauty is also explored in Italian poetry of the period, though in the context where women in general, and (forced) immigrant women in particular, tended to be stripped of agency, the inherent power dynamics in these verses can be disturbing. A poem by Giovan Battista Marino on his ‘beautiful slave’, published in 1604, shows how his desire was entangled with Renaissance racist hierarchies:

Black, yes, but you are beautiful, or by nature

Amongst the beauties of Eros, a comely monster;

You are as dusky as dawn, which dwindles and darkens

Compared to your ebony, ivory, and scarlet.

Now when, or where, in the antique world or ours

Was ever seen living, ever felt, so pure

A light emerge from obscure ink

Or a burning born from extinguished coals?

I am the servant of my slave-girl. Here wound

Around my heart, I wear a brown binding-lace

That by a bright white hand could never be loosened.

There you burn brightest, oh Sun, where only through your hot scorn

Another sun is born, a sun who in its beautiful face

Wears the night, and has, in its eyes, the day.¹⁸

The first line is derived from the Bible, the Song of Solomon 1:4 ‘I am black but beautiful’, (now more often translated as ‘black and beautiful’), which, as Joaneath Spicer has noted, forms the foundations of many descriptions of black women’s beauty in Renaissance Europe.¹⁹ If only we could hear more from these women of colour themselves – and hopefully as historians continue to work in this area, more sources will be found. Could being an object of desire give some reprieve from a life that was so lacking in agency? Was there the possibility of real affection, and reciprocated love? Or was this fetishistic admiration merely a pretext for exploitation?

ISABELLA D’ESTE, Marchioness of Mantua (1474–1539, see plate section, image no. 14), was seventeen when she bought a black slave girl in 1491. She had perhaps been influenced by seeing her cousin, Isabella of Aragon, arriving from Naples for her wedding in Milan in 1490 with thirteen slaves in tow – three white women, seven black women and three black men.²⁰ The trade in sub-Saharan African house slaves was still in its infancy during these years, and girls, particularly, could demand high prices and thus were status items.

Isabella asked her agent in Venice, Giorgio Brognolo, to buy her ‘a little black girl (‘una moretta’) who is no more than four years old, nor less than one and a half ’. She reminds him later that she wants ‘the little black girl… to be as black as possible’. Brognolo ran into difficulties – most of the slaves on sale were from Slavic countries and ‘Tartary’ (Central Asia), so insufficiently dark-skinned.²¹ He did, however, manage to find a potential purchase:

I looked with every diligence to find a little black girl that would meet your requirements, and they suggested to me one of around four years old, very black and well built, not ready to sell [i.e. not a slave], but the daughter of a gondolier, for whom I sent yesterday, and speaking of this infant he told me that the Ferrarese ambassador has already made a big thing of her: having then spoken with his Magnificence the ambassador, he told me that his mistress, your mother [Eleanora of Naples, Duchess of Ferrara] is asking the same thing of him as your lady is of me; and that he cannot have this little girl [without the entire family], so he has taken the mother and father with a male child as well as this girl in the service of her majesty your mother, and that the wife is six months pregnant, so that her excellency will be able to have a race of blacks and will be able, in time, to send one of them to your excellency.

Isabella didn’t want to wait that long. A few days later Brognolo found another little girl, ‘two years old or a little more, who is very black’ in the Ospedale della Pietà, a charitable institution that took in foundlings and orphans. He explained to Isabella that she was not a great purchase, however. This poor little girl was ill and couldn’t stand on both feet due to falling out of her cot six months previously. They got her medical attention, and she went to Mantua fully able to stand. Then Isabella sent off for a black male slave – perhaps to compete with her mother in creating a so-called ‘race’ of black servants.²²

Could the child in Titian’s portrait of Laura Dianti (see plate section, image no. 9) be a relative of Eleanora’s new servants? Laura Dianti was the concubine – and perhaps later the wife – of Isabella’s brother, Alfonso d’Este. Once again, however, what seems on the surface to be a simple story of social and racial hierarchies has complex hidden depths. Laura, who was from a humble background, a hatmaker’s daughter, is shown here, half dressed with her undershirt showing. She wears the yellow veil associated with prostitution. Later on, the clothes Laura wears in this portrait were used to contest the legitimacy of her children with the duke. In a tussle over the succession of her grandson to rule over Ferrara, the Vatican argued that Laura was depicted ‘in the garment of a lascivious woman’ and thus was never married. In fact, it’s likely that Duke Alfonso attempted to hide Laura’s humble origins here by dressing her in clothes associated in Italian minds with Turkish noblewomen, who were known to have black slaves and were admired for their perceived grace and splendour. Both figures in this image are depicted as beautiful exotic ornaments.²³ It’s still not clear if Laura ever actually married the duke, and, though her children and grandchildren were eventually legitimised, the Vatican’s objections meant that they lost the right to rule over Ferrara. During her lifetime, Laura lived apart from the rest of the family, and was treated differently even in death, buried away from the family tomb. In her will, she bequeathed some money to ‘the black man who was formerly an ensign of the duke’, likely her companion in this portrait.²⁴

IN 1989, THE LEGAL SCHOLAR Kimberlé Crenshaw famously coined the term ‘intersectionality’ to describe the way that race, gender and class interact to shape opportunity and inequality. Although on occasion we find that individual women of colour in Renaissance Europe could be cherished and respected, the vast majority experienced threefold suffering from the dehumanisation of women in this patriarchal society, colour prejudice and racism, and through their social isolation and lack of neighbourhood identity, and family ties. These (mostly forced) immigrants generally did not have parents to guide them, uncles or aunts to take them in and support them. The law didn’t respect their bodily integrity, and they were open to sexual attack with few consequences for the perpetrator. While poor white women could sometimes find wealth and agency through their attractiveness to wealth-ier men, even this uncertain path – discussed in more detail in Chapter 10 – was difficult to follow for people whose faces and bodies were deemed simply too far from the white-skinned, golden-haired ideal.

Part Three RENAISSANCE BODYWORK

7 GETTING IN SHAPE

IN 1499, ISABELLA D’ESTE apologised to the Duke of Milan for looking too fat in the portrait she’d sent him. ‘It’s not a good likeness, as it’s a bit fatter than I am,’ she anxiously explained. The duke replied, rather ungallantly, that the likeness seemed very good: ‘It is true that it makes you look somewhat fatter than Your Ladyship seemed [the last time he saw her], although perhaps you have grown fatter since.’¹ Most famous now for her extraordinary art patronage and political acuity, Isabella (see plate section, image no. 14) struggled with her weight for years. As early as 1492, when she was just eighteen, she asked her sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, not to send her figs again as she was ‘eating to get thinner’ rather than on a fattening diet.² She also gossiped about fatness in others, in 1491 telling her husband Francesco Gonzaga that her sister, Beatrice, Duchess of Milan (1475–97), had got so fat since her marriage to Ludovico Sforza that she risked turning out like their mother.³

Isabella was still dieting a decade later: in June 1509 she told her husband off for sending her a gift of partridges, which – like countless boxes of chocolates given today as testaments to marital love – ran the risk of scuppering her slimming diet. In fact, she testily explains in her letter, if she’d been trusted more to deal with political matters she probably wouldn’t have got so fat.⁴ Isabella was not being obtuse here: increasing one’s anxiety featured as part of Renaissance slimming advice, as we’ll see. It’s reminiscent of the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when the eponymous ruler suspects a plot by his wily thin opponent:

Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

Male rulers, too, could be anxious about piling on the pounds. In 1476 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, refused to put on his protective under-armour before going to the cathedral for a church service because it made him look ‘too fat’. Better fat than dead, however, as he was to find out later that day, when he was assassinated by stabbing with knives that easily pierced his doublet and shirt.⁵

We could laugh at Isabella and Galeazzo Maria – and some scholars have – for being both fat and vain. But I think most of us will, and should, sympathise. After all, most of us are fat, or worried about becoming so. The latest figures from the World Health Organization show that obesity has tripled worldwide since 1975. In 2016, almost 40 per cent of the world’s adult population was overweight; in the United States that figure is around 70 per cent, with about a 40 per cent obesity rate.⁶ As with all matters pertaining to the body, changes to the weight of an entire population suggests it is wise to look for a wider historical picture.

While it used to be assumed that fatness was desirable in the pre-modern period – largely because thinness was associated with malnutrition and disease – over the last two decades, scholars have shown this to be untrue. Being neither too thin nor too fat was most desirable.⁷ The earliest printed book aimed specifically at helping people keep weight off (and advice on how to put it on) was published in 1481. This Treatise about the Conservation of Health, with a Book about Keeping the Body Healthy was aimed at male readers, and had been around in manuscript form for about fifty years. It was attributed to the physician to the Ferrarese court, Ugo Benzi (1376–1439). Much of the second half of this short volume is dedicated ‘to conserve and defend a healthy body with regular and measured habits, with tips and suggestions to gain weight, and also so that one does not get too fat over the passage of time’.⁸ Interestingly, there was a copy in the Sforza library, so it’s possible that Duke Galeazzo Maria would have lived for longer had he taken its advice.

For women also, a little fatness was thought to be a good thing, and in fact ‘fat’ was often a complementary term. In a letter of 1543, for example, the 21-year-old Eleonora di Toledo, the Duchess of Florence (pictured in plate section, image no. 3), is reported to be bursting with health after the birth of her second child: ‘fat and fresh like a rose… I have never seen a better complexion on a woman’.⁹ Like everything in Renaissance medicine, however, balance was the key.

Why did the later fifteenth century see Italian grandees worrying about getting fat? There are a few possible reasons. One factor may have been the new focus on appearance and demeanour that started to dominate the Renaissance court, exemplified in the early sixteenth century by the rise of etiquette books like Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Grace and beauty became key attributes of social success. Fatness was much more noticeable in men from the later fifteenth century too, because of the new fashion for very short doublets skimming the buttocks and leaving the legs, tightly encased in hose, visible for the discerning judgement of peers.¹⁰

Perhaps the new concern with fatness may also relate to a change in diet. The later fifteenth century saw the cost of sugar plummet. This was due to a new form of sugar production on the Portuguese-governed Atlantic islands of Madeira, Tenerife and São Tomé. Here Genoese merchants used slave labour, both of natives and of imported captives from the west coast of Africa, to do the backbreaking work of harvesting sugarcane.¹¹ The richer you were, the more sugar you were likely to eat. Sugar sculpture started to become increasingly common at banquets in the fifteenth century, perhaps reaching a peak in 1513, when, the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci reports, the Portuguese king gave Pope Leo X ‘a Pope and twelve cardinals made of sugar, all life size’ as well as 300 sugar torches, each a yard long, 100 chests full of sugar, chests of spices, a beautiful white horse and a Moor ‘one of those from Calicut’, reportedly ‘about four braccia (more than 7 foot 6 inches) high’.¹² Eating all that sugar must surely have had an effect on the waistlines of the rich.

In a world without the bathroom scale, how did you know that you were too fat? It’s not entirely accurate to say there were no scales at all to weigh yourself during the Renaissance. There was at least one, designed and built by a Paduan physician called Santorio Santorio (1561–1636). He was interested in finding out what the body did with food, so he created a weighing machine that could accommodate an entire person. He said he weighed ‘hundreds’ of people on his machine, plus the weight of all the food and drink they ate, and the weight of their urine and faeces, thus proving that the body somehow used up some of what it consumed. Santorio’s weighing chair is illustrated in the 1625 edition of his Art of Static Medicine – an account of the result of his experiments. It’s a huge wooden frame, linked to the ceiling with metal bars, and with a table alongside so you can be weighed while eating.¹³

Weighing machine. From Santorio Santorio, Art of Static Medicine (1657).

For most people, however, the measure for fatness – taken from antique sources – was simply related to whether it hampered your life in one way or another: for instance, ‘when a man cannot wipe his own bottom without effort, or when he gets tired to walk about, or when he’s prevented by fatness in bending over to hold his ankles,’ Ugo Benzi explains in his 1481 manual.¹⁴ For women, excessive fatness was also diagnosed through its effects on the body, as Marinello explains in his section on dieting: ‘fatness is often the cause of lameness, of problems of the soul, malign fevers, death and, what is much worse, of making one sterile and of pregnant women miscarrying’.¹⁵ Thus for Marinello’s university doctor contemporaries, fatness was only a concern if it caused secondary complications: if conception and sexual activity were impeded, if it caused heart palpitations, and if movement was hampered, then obesity needed to be treated, whereas healthy fatness that allowed people to observe civic and family life was not something that physicians need worry about.

In the new medical manuals written in the later sixteenth century, unhealthy fatness was defined as ‘obesity’, and people who suffered from this ailment were separated into two camps – those with ‘natural’ obesity, destined to be fat from birth due to their God-given balance of humours, and ‘unnatural’, which was related to an imbalance of humours caused by intemperate food intake (among other things).¹⁶ For physicians to diagnose which type of fatness applied, they needed to scrutinise the patient’s appearance. According to Gabriele Falloppio, naturally obese people are ‘moist and cold… white and soft… with fine veins… sparse fine yellow hair.’ If ‘their hair is hard, black or curly then this is not natural obesity, and the body will likely be red, they will be hirsute, and their veins will be thick and coarse.’¹⁷ There was no treatment deemed suitable for the naturally obese, as you would just be fighting against an innate humoral balance. Then, as now, moral opprobrium was heaped on people who were thought to be too fat – though in the Renaissance it was due to the belief in fatness being a humoral condition that changed the ‘complexion’ of the mind and body: those who got fat by gluttony, the physician Girolamo Mercuriale argued, also gained a fat and sluggish intellect.¹⁸

Probably the most famous Renaissance diet book was Alvise Cornaro’s (1484–1566) Short Compendium for a Sober Life. First published in 1558, this book has been more or less consistently in print since, but should be understood as just one of many health regimens that were pouring from the Venetian presses.¹⁹ Cornaro advises his readers on how to use the six non-naturals to manipulate their humours to live a long life. He explains he is writing to ‘benefit those born with a poor complexion’ (or humoral balance) as well as helping those who were lucky enough to be born well balanced, but lived a ‘disordered life’, squandering their natural humoral advantage so that when they reach the age of sixty or so, they find themselves afflicted with various ailments. Cornaro recommended that the reader eat progressively less food as they age, moderate the amount of wine they drink and only eat as much as the stomach can easily digest. The moral implications of Cornaro’s work are clear: people who are fat, or ill as they age, only have themselves to blame.

The Renaissance Diet

Most of the advice in Marinello’s Ornaments focuses on women who are too thin, perhaps not surprising in an era of occasional famine and devastating diseases like smallpox. His extensive plan for fattening up is rather delightful, so I think worth quoting in full:

How to Make the Whole Body Fatter

I suggest you find some humid rooms in which you can rest. You can, without making too much effort, decorate these chambers with roses, lilies and similar fresh flowers; or perfume them with rose or lily water, amber, camphor or other similar fresh fragrances… An hour before eating you should rub yourself gently to redden the skin. Then leave the room slowly, accompanied by servants. At lunch, choose foods that are not salty, acidic, or sharp… but fatty, sweet and nutritious such as fresh eggs, wheat, rice, broad beans cooked with milk, cream cheese, almonds, pistachios, pine nuts, walnuts, figs, grapes; fat capons, chickens, lamb, duck, pigeons, veal and meats of this type…

After eating, give yourself over to pleasant dances, games, songs and other pastimes, and spend three hours on things that delight you. But if you desire to be beautiful, you must overcome carnal appetites and abstain, because this is necessary for the conservation of your health – not that such things are required very much of you ladies who are thin and skinny anyhow. Above all, leave aside anger, because it heats up the limbs and disturbs the soul, which is worse. Don’t live alone, or in a melancholy way as this sadness spoils our nature, it makes us lazy, it consumes us, it emaciates; it saps our strength, making the intellect course, it deprives us of reason, of judgement and of memory.

Now that you have happily got through the tedious part of the day, have a delightful walk around the city, take a bath with fresh water made up with camomile, or rose, or mallow. These things soothe the limbs, revive and soften the skin… After dinner, avoid melancholy for an hour and a half with pleasant delights; then go to bed to rest; because you cannot have better or more youth-bringing rest than measured sleep gives you. This allows you to digest food, fattens the body, removes pains, comforts the soul, raises natural heat, balances the humours and clears the mind.

When we say ‘diet’ today, we normally mean a plan to change our food intake to help us lose weight. Attitudes to dieting in the Renaissance makes the typical calories-in-calories-out idea (‘eat less, move more!’) seem crudely mechanistic, reducing human physiology – let alone the complex emotional relationship with food – to the clean lines of a maths equation. As you can see from Marinello’s advice above, ‘diet’ in the pre-modern era went far beyond food and related to that whole swathe of activities or ‘non-naturals’ which formed the basis of ‘healthy living’ more generally.²⁰ The aim was to make the body as well balanced as possible. This could include making yourself thinner or fatter – but also more resistant to disease, more fertile and so on.

It was believed that thinness was caused by overly dry humours. Thus, for Marinello, the air of a thin lady’s chamber should be made humid and sweet-smelling, she should walk slowly, eat special foods, avoid ‘evacuation’ through sexual intercourse (not that men would likely be interested in sex with her, he wryly comments), have much ‘youth-bringing’ rest and, above all, avoid melancholy and anger. Being happy was very important for putting on weight. The food recommended was itself happy-making, involving almonds, sesame seeds and honey, or sweetened and fortified milk – you can find Marinello’s recipe for delicious fattening honey nut balls on p. 254.

Getting thinner was (mainly) less fun. It involved making the body’s humours hotter and drier. In his lecture ‘On Decoration’, Falloppio advised men diagnosed with ‘unnatural obesity’ to sit in the hot sun, naked, to dry the body out. They should also have hot baths, do exercise such as horse riding, stay up at night studying, sleep on a hard board and have little food but lots of sex.²¹ Frequenting spas could also help, according to some. In a gossipy letter of 1578, a Medici functionary reports that the sixty-year-old Sienese postmaster Francesco da Marradi ‘returned a great and extraordinary corpulence in the stomach back to a pristine state’ by taking the waters at Sarteano: a Renaissance miracle diet.²²

WOMEN’S EXERCISE could be a controversial topic. It may have been difficult for aristocratic women to move around much, as it was deemed more suitable for them to spend much of their time indoors. Some, such as Isabella de’ Medici (1542–76) and her sisters in Florence, rode horses from early childhood, and went hunting along with their male peers, but this does not seem to have been the norm.²³ By the end of the sixteenth century, sedan chairs had become a popular way for rich women to move around cities in Italy, an innovation that was frequently blamed for its ill-effects on health.²⁴ We see the dilemma for women who might want to be active in The Book of the Courtier. One interlocutor claims that he has ‘seen women play tennis, handle weapons, ride, go hunting, and perform nearly all the exercises that a knight can’, but the general feeling of the company is such ‘vigorous and rugged manly exercises’ are unfitting for a lady. They are better off exercising only through graceful dancing, with slow movements, executed with a becoming ‘gentle daintiness’.²⁵ Even for men, Mercuriale advised that refined people should stop their exertions as soon as their breathing changed or their face reddened – acrobatics were for entertainers, wrestling for peasants, whose constitutions were cruder and could take more roughhousing, he explains. The best exercise, he said, was walking:

How much benefit walking provides in human life, wisest nature has openly demonstrated… if any physical exercises are found that preserve health, drive away weakness acquired from disease, and strengthen a good habitus of body that are in rather frequent use among all men and all nations, one is certainly walking.²⁶

By the end of the sixteenth century, walking was agreed by most authorities to be the best exercise. Streets were paved, and parks and villa gardens were designed with long avenues to enhance promenading. In inclement weather, if you were wealthy enough you could even walk inside, as long galleries, normally lined with paintings of landscapes or still lives of plants and animals, were created in the houses of the aristocracy for them to stroll through. Walking was also one of the few physical exercises deemed suitable for women.²⁷

Women swinging. From Girolamo Mercuriale, On the Art of Gymnastics (1573).

Tellingly, in Mercuriale’s On the Art of Gymnastics (1569) with its multiple images of men exerting themselves, there is only one image that includes women – and it shows them swinging.²⁸ One woman sits, rather precariously, on a stool that has been tied to ropes suspended over a high bar. Her two companions strain to keep her up in the air. Body movement in any form, including being moved by outside forces such as a carriage or, as in this case, a swing, was deemed ‘exercise’ by Renaissance physicians. It’s hard to see how the woman in the chair would have benefited much, but her companions (presumably servants) pulling on the ropes would certainly have got a decent workout. It’s a reminder that, of course, many women who don’t appear in the written sources aimed at merchant-class or noblewomen would have had plenty of exercise as part of their daily life through the demands of work – in domestic service, the family business, tending gardens and farms.

Getting the Body in Proportion

You may be familiar with Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, one of the most famous images of the Renaissance: a naked man within a circle and a square, two sets of arms and legs outstretched. Leonardo was engaged in an intellectual exercise here, one that was taken up by many artists of this time – to work out the ideal, God-given proportions of a body untainted by sin, natural quirks, illness or age. The idea of a perfectly proportioned body had been around for centuries before Leonardo’s drawing, and we still use the term ‘proportion’ today to judge our own and other’s bodies, but it significantly dominated the discussion of beauty in Italy during the sixteenth century. This preoccupation in art and theory inevitably filtered through to real life.

This renewed fascination with bodily ratios started in the early fifteenth century, as theorist-practitioners like Leon Battista Alberti attempted to work out perfect proportions from observation. Alberti measured several young men – those deemed ‘beautiful by the people that know’ he explains – and worked out the average mathematical relationships between different parts of their bodies. Originally, the rules were not meant to be applied to real individuals – indeed, the point was that perfect proportion did not exist in a single person. The perfect body was a figment of the artist’s mind.

In these fifteenth-century investigations, women’s bodies were largely ignored – men, after all, had been made in the ‘image and likeness’ of God; women were just an afterthought. In the words of the painter Cennino Cennini around 1400, ‘I want to give you, to the letter, the measurements of a man. I will leave be those of a woman because her measurements are not at all perfect.’ In the fifteenth century, the idea of a ‘Vitruvian woman’ would have been deemed ridiculous.²⁹

This all changed in the early 1500s, with the insistence on the superiority of women’s beauty to men’s in the pro-women literature of early feminist figures like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Precise ‘correct’ proportions were given by some of the authors discussing female beauty. Most authorities think that a woman’s height should be ‘seven times the length of her face’, according to Niccolò Franco in his 1542 tract on beauty, ‘the face should be three noses long’, ‘the arms should be two and a half times as wide as the biggest finger is long, the leg one and a half times as broad as the arm, and the thighs three times the arm,’ and so on and on and on in minute detail.³⁰ Agnolo Firenzuola’s On the Beauty of Women, a dialogue minutely discussing ideal female beauty, was particularly influential. Notably, the second edition of his text showed a ‘Vitruvian woman’, as well as a diagram of a perfectly proportioned face for good measure.³¹

The proportions of ideal female beauty. From Agnolo Firenzuola, Dialogue on the Beauty of Women (1552 ed., first published 1548).

The influence of such images of the perfect, harmonious body became particularly marked over time. Such messaging even gets as far as England in the 1660s in Thomas Jeamson’s Artificiall Embellishments, where he discusses how ‘To reduce the body that is too fat to a meane and handsome proportion’, and ‘To make the body or any part thereof plump and fat, that was before too leane’. Jeamson doesn’t hold back: ‘It can be no pleasing sight, to see a soul prest under a mountaine of flesh and the body stretcht to such dimensions that make it represent a walking barrell,’ he says to women worried about being fat. If you were thin you didn’t fare much better: ‘In a contrary extreame to corpulency, are those breathing Skeletons that carry Lent in their face at a Christmas feast.’³²

Today if we feel our body is ‘out of proportion’ there are a few routes we can go down, depending on the problem – food restriction, targeted exercise, or even plastic surgery. Marinello’s influential advice to thin down parts of the body was, not surprisingly, steeped in humoral ideas:

You need four things to thin down or reduce any part of the body, such as the hands, arms, breasts and other parts. The first is that you should keep that part resting on something that makes it cold. The second is that you should shut down the path that food takes to nourish that part, and this can easily be done with continuous ligatures. The third is that you should encourage the usual nutrition to go elsewhere, which works when you want the opposite part of your body to become fat and soft.³³

Despite his opening sentence, Marinello doesn’t add a fourth thing in any of his editions or translations. Most of his suggestions for both fattening and slimming down parts of the body involve steeping material in various substances, and then adding wax to wrap it round the offending area overnight. The next morning you remove the wax wrap by using warm wine infused with herbs.

It seems that in the Renaissance, as now, people would go to elaborate lengths to alter the shape of their bodies to meet the ideal. Isabella d’Este’s struggles with her weight over a long period of time may be familiar to many today. Surrounded, as she was, by all the lavish temptations of sixteenth-century Italian courts with her husband away on military campaigns, pursuing a melancholy, sex-filled, hungry-making slimming diet must have been extremely difficult. Isabella, and others who found it hard to manipulate their bodies through willpower alone, did have other options open to them, however – as we’ll discover in the next chapter, new technologies invented from the fifteenth through to the seventeenth century meant that Renaissance bodies could be changed through more drastic means.

8 BREAST BAGS, NOSE JOBS AND LABIAPLASTY

The start of the scientific revolution is generally traced to the sixteenth century – often 1543, as in that year two key books were published: Nicolaus Copernicus’s groundbreaking work of astronomy, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and Andreas Vesalius’s magnum opus on human anatomy, On the Fabric of the Human Body. The Renaissance was undoubtedly a time of significant technological and scientific innovation, not however just by university-trained academics, but by male and female artisans too – these lower status individuals who were often excluded from formal higher education. Some of these technologies, both good and bad, were dedicated to ‘correcting’ human bodies so they more closely resembled the fashionable aesthetic of the day. We delve into three examples here.

Breast Bags, Busks and Bodies

Lengberg Castle sits serenely on a small hill in the East Tyrol in Austria. Placed as it is among green conifers, overlooking gently undulating farmland, with snow-topped mountains in the distance, even pictures of the castle make you feel like you are breathing in calm, cool Tyrolean air. Who would have thought that this charming yet forbidding facade could have hidden an intriguing secret for 500 years, a secret that – when revealed – shook the foundations of the history of undergarments?

In the summer of 2008, archaeologists started to investigate the castle as a part of reconstructive building works. On the second floor of the south wing they found a vault that had gone unnoticed. It was a gap between different levels of the building, bricked in since a new chapel was added to the castle in 1485. Although it sounds like the plot of a horror film, the archaeologists found something much more interesting than a bunch of undead attackers. This vault had been stuffed with various types of material – twigs, straw, old pieces of wood, shoes and more than 2,700 fragments of textiles. After painstakingly going through them, they discovered not one or two but four bras. These are the oldest bras in existence, and came as quite a surprise to most clothing historians, as the bra was meant to have been invented around 400 years later.

The splendidly named Beatrix Nutz, the archaeologist whose work lifted the veil on fifteenth-century bra-wearing, brought together important written evidence of ‘breast bags’, as they were called in fifteenth-century sources, and she suggests that this need for extra breast support was related to new fashions in tailoring. Rather than a tight bodice that supported the breasts through pressure, looser gowns accentuated the separation of the breasts. The Lengberg bras (the most complete one is pictured overleaf) were designed to lift and separate and to invisibly support.¹ ‘Many [a woman] makes two bags for the breast,’ claims an anonymous satirical poem written in southern Germany in the fifteenth century, and ‘with them she roams the streets so that all the men look at her and see what beautiful breasts she has. But those whose breasts are too large make tight pouches, so there is no gossip in the city about her big breasts.’²

Linen ‘bra’ found at Lengberg Castle in East Tyrol, Germany (c. 1400–1500).

Fashions changed soon after and the ‘mono-bosom’ – one smooth curve over the chest – became more popular, the kind of shape you can see in countless sixteenth-century portraits, where the breasts are flattened beneath a cloth bodice that was lined with a stiff material like linen, sometimes reinforced with felt or cardboard.³ The bra did not die, however, in that Austrian vault. The Renaissance fashion was for small, round breasts ‘like apples’ that stood proud on your chest, so attention was needed for most women to meet this idea, especially as they grew out of adolescence. Marinello suggests wearing a garment that sounds suspiciously like a bra to ‘conserve small breasts for your entire life’. After you bathe your breasts in a mixture of water, vinegar and camphor, you should ‘place under the breasts a band, or place them in some little bags, which keep the breasts high towards the throat, and they will become small’. He also suggests breast binding in this section, using a cloth that has been steeped in a cumin paste. Happily, men can also get in on the action here – ‘all this medicine… is also good to prevent the growth of the testicles’.⁴ Perhaps the fashion for small, neat testicles that you see on Renaissance nude males (think, if you will, about Michelangelo’s David, for example) meant that men had to suffer for beauty in intimate parts of their body too?

Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1593–1653) is the most enduringly well-known and influential of the many female painters of early modern Italy. In her Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (see plate section, image no. 15) – where she is probably taking on the guise of a travelling musician in some courtly entertainment – she presents the viewer with her own heaving bosoms, bursting out of her low-cut neckline.⁵ Given that the Lengberg bras were a relatively fleeting fashion, it’s worth considering how Artemisia achieved this impressive cleavage. Marinello notes the importance of clothing to give the breasts the desired shape, and this is likely the secret here. Artemisia’s first layer would have been the white linen undershirt you can see peeking out below her blue dress. Above this there is a blue bodice, and it’s this garment that provides the support that pushes up the breasts. The bodice was often laced at the back – getting dressed in this period could very much be a two-person affair – and the laces would be pulled tight and the breasts arranged so they showed a pleasing cleavage. Many women would add a neckerchief to cover the décolleté, but there tended to be more licence during court entertainments, such as masques, where some women would even perform bare-breasted.

As well as flattening or supporting the breasts, the bodice also shaped the abdomen. Although rounded bellies were praised, they were not expected to be loose-skinned, or baggy; the profile should be smooth, with blemish-free skin. This could cause problems for a female population that had often gone through pregnancy several times. Renaissance recipe collections typically contain several anti-stretchmark recipes. The following passage from Marinello’s Ornaments reveals why:

there are no, or few, women who have had babies who haven’t developed stretch marks and other blemishes on the body after they have given birth. And through this, they lose all their natural beauty. You would do well, therefore, Ladies (as you are created to create others), to remove this defect after the birth and make your belly look like it should.⁶

The implication of Marinello’s text is that if his readers don’t remove this ‘defect’, they will no longer be able to ‘create others’ as they will be too repellent for their husbands to have sex with them.

Given the limits of cosmetic creams (and what was then understood about exercise) in amending an ‘unfashionable’ stomach, new types of shaping undergarments were developed in the sixteenth century to give women’s torsos a more sculptural shape. Reinforcing bodices with stiff fabric to flatten the chest was common throughout the Renaissance, but from around the mid-sixteenth century tailors started to add unyielding materials such as hollow reeds (known as ‘bents’ in English), or wood, whalebone or wire to undergarments, so unruly flesh might be better controlled. Breasts and belly were flattened under a tight underbodice, called a ‘bodies’ in English – and this garment was reinforced by a busk.

These were – in the words of Randle Holme, who was ‘the sewer of the chamber’ for King Charles II of England – ‘a strong peece of Wood, or Whale-bone thrust down the middle of the Stomacher, to keep it straight and in compass, that the Breast nor Belly should swell too much out’.⁷ Busks resemble long gently curving rulers, with rounded ends, tapering towards the bottom. Their dimensions varied depending on the size of their wearer’s torso, but they could be around 30 cm long and 5 cm wide at the top to around 2 cm at the bottom. Not surprisingly, they were often the source of bawdy innuendo, often playing on their phallic qualities. There are some wonderful extant wooden and ivory busks that were clearly given as love tokens, replete with intertwined hearts and loving mottos: ‘Until Goodbye, My Fire is Pure, Love is United’; ‘Isaac loved Rabekah his Wife and why may not I love Fransys?’⁸ Busks were slid into the front of the underbodice and often held in place by ribbons.

The oldest underbodice of this type still in existence was worn by the Countess Palatine Dorothea Sabina of Pfalz Neuburg (1576–1598). Made from watered silk, and fastened with laces at the back, the stiffening whalebone or reeds have long disintegrated, but it is still possible to see the pouch down the centre where the busk would have regulated her belly and kept her breasts separated.⁹

These tight bodices of the sixteenth century prefigured stays and corsets, and were similarly intended to control the silhouette. Reconstructions of women’s undergarments from this period have suggested they were less constricting, particularly to the waist, than eighteenth- and nineteenth-century corsets. Lacing could be pulled tighter or left loose, depending on the comfort levels required. Nevertheless, these garments oblige the wearer to maintain an upright posture and a straight back, particularly while seated, when the legs (anyway swathed under skirts) cannot be completely closed.¹⁰

These undergarments were thought by some to be dangerous. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) exclaimed of his female contemporaries in 1588, ‘To get a slim body, Spanish style, what torture do they not endure, tight laced and braced until they suffer great gashes in their sides, right to the live flesh – yes, sometimes even they die of it.’¹¹ In Venice in 1547 the senate forbade women from wearing the newly fashionable long, pointed bodices (called in Venetian Italian ‘cassi longhi’) with stiff supports that seem to have been made with metal strips that were padded with felt or other soft material:

Beyond the damage of the great cost that go toward making them, it happens that due to the pain that women endure whilst wearing them, often times many pregnant women have miscarried, and many have also died, and their children were born weak, infirm and ruined, and some even were born dead for this reason.

These concerns about motherhood may have been because the long pointed bodice pressed on the genital area, particularly when seated. It was declared that all bodices should be ‘without stiff supports, all rounded and equal in length on all sides’.¹²

It seems that some women were advised to wear metal corsets for medical reasons; the French surgeon Ambroise Paré recommended perforated iron breastplates to be made ‘to amend the crookednesse of the body’. In 1549 Eleonora di Toledo commissioned her armourer for two such garments, needing extra support – not surprisingly, as she was pretty much continuously pregnant between 1540 and 1554. There are several extant iron stays from this period, including the seventeenth-century example pictured on the following page, probably made to straighten the back of a teenage girl, perhaps due to a congenital condition or other illnesses such as rickets. Later in the sixteenth century, it became increasingly standard for healthy girls to wear constricting bodices – presumably following advice by authorities such as Marinello to keep the breasts and torso ordered and neat – although other physicians decried the potential harm in constricting young bodies.¹³ How horribly hard they look, all that unruly flesh regulated by iron.

Iron stays (probably French or Italian, c. 1580–99).

Nose Jobs

In summer 1581, the otherwise unknown Milanese writer, Lodovico Gandini, gave a lecture at a salon held in Silvio Calandra’s well-appointed house in Mantua. The subject was the Italian fourteenth-century poet Petrarch. Gandini had a niggling question: why, in all his extensive writings praising Laura’s face, does Petrarch discuss her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, even her breasts – ‘each of the parts of the body that one can honestly discuss’ – but never mention her nose?

What follows is a love song for the nose, the most noble, most important, but most maligned part of the face. Gandini talks about how Vitruvius measured the rest of the face from the length of the nose, how Aristotle likened a well-disposed nose to a well-disposed government, and how if noses are mutilated the entire face is ruined. Petrarch must have missed it out, he argues, in the same way that the ancient Greek painter Apelles left his portrait of Venus unfinished – ‘through this unfinished part it makes the rest more worthy of wonder’.¹⁴ In other words, noses are so beautiful that the perfect nose is beyond human ability to depict or describe, and better left to the reader’s imagination.

In contrast to the eyes, which Marinello rashly insisted could be changed in colour or size if only the correct dietary regimes were followed, he uncharacteristically holds up his hands in defeat when considering the nose. He gives recipes to fix runny noses, bad breath and sneezing (which he argues terribly deforms the face), but he suggests that changing the appearance of the nose is beyond the ability of his lady readers. Nose jobs were best left to the professionals.

In 1590 a young Swiss woman, known only as Susanna N., was attacked by a group of soldiers. She fought against their attempts to rape her and they cut off her nose in retribution. Two years later, the French surgeon Jean Griffon successfully reconstructed her nose, by employing new techniques that were first developed in southern Italy, using skin from her upper arm. Reports from 1611 and 1613 say that her new nose, beyond going slightly blue in very cold weather, was still looking good.¹⁵

There are many reasons why nose surgery and prosthetics became important in the Renaissance. It was common for noses to be the target of mob retribution and honour-based duels. Gandini explains, ‘Enemies sometimes bite off the nose with their teeth as part of a vendetta in order to cause dishonour. This happens not only in our times but also in antiquity.’¹⁶ Facial disfigurement was also used as revenge, especially for women who were adulterous or otherwise had somehow slighted a man. In 1583, for example, the courtesan Fulvia Bellestra was attacked by an unknown young man who cut her nose and face with a dagger. He was most likely a hit man sent by another courtesan or a spurned lover.¹⁷ Similar cases are recorded from early-sixteenth-century Nuremberg, where a woman and her husband together tried to cut off the nose of their former maid, in retribution for that very same husband getting her pregnant.¹⁸

Cutting off the nose was also sometimes used as a ‘shaming punishment’ by magistrates. When noses were cut off or otherwise damaged by judicial authorities, this tended to relate to sexual crime, and particularly crime related to women or ‘feminised’ young men incriminated for homosexual activity. Thus, a Greek woman called Gratiosa was banished from Venice due to her ‘bewitching’ an upper-class man to be her lover. She was paraded through the city with a crown of shame on her head, fined and branded on each cheek and on the upper lip, then banished from the city. If she ever returned to Venice her nose would be cut off.¹⁹

NOSE RECONSTRUCTION surgery originates in fifteenth-century Sicily, when the Branca family of surgeons became famous for their work in reconstructing not just noses but also ears and lips. The technique wasn’t recorded and shared until a century later, in 1597, when the Bolognese surgeon Gaspare Tagliacozzi (1545–1599) published his groundbreaking book Surgery for Mutilations. There he describes how a flap of skin would be cut from the back of the upper arm and, while still attached to the arm, could be ‘grafted’ to the face, in place of the missing nose. He designed special equipment, pictured in his treatise (overleaf), in order to keep the patient’s head and arm in the correct position for the requisite three weeks. This reconstruction was heralded as one of the peaks of ‘modern’ Renaissance medicine. Not everyone was suitable for this type of surgery, though. Due to the pain and physical exertion it involved (Tagliacozzi recommends ‘two strong men’ to hold the patient down), the procedure was recommended only for young, strong people. They were almost always men. A later English commentator notes that it is ‘so difficult and painful… that it is seldom or never attempted’.²⁰

Nose reconstruction surgery. From Gaspare Tagliacozzi, Surgery for Mutilations (1597).

Artificial nose made of plated metal (c. 1601–1800).

Others would have to make do with a prosthetic nose. These could be made of wax, ivory or even metals such as silver, which were tied onto the face with ribbon.²¹ Some early modern false noses still exist, such as the one pictured, made of plated metal and now in the Science Museum in London. They are disconcerting, strangely intimate objects, sitting in museum cases isolated from a face – as if Petrarch had unthinkingly cast them aside.

Renaissance Labiaplasty

The Welsh bard Gwerful Mechain (writing from 1462–1500) wrote an ode to the vulva. She starts off by laughing at the male poets who obsessively describe the beauties of the female body, but leave out the best bit:

Every drunken fool of a poet is quick

In his pompous vanity…

To sing of the girl of the land all day long…

But he leaves the middle without praise,

That place where children are conceived,

The snug vagina, clear hope

Tender and lovely, open circle strong and bright

The place I love, delicate and healthy

The quim beneath the cloth…

A circle of lips with broad edges

A cunt there by a lavish arse

Table of song with its double in red.²²

Mechain had a point. Petrarch, as well as missing out Laura’s nose, ended his consideration of her beauty at the waist. Women’s ‘shameful parts’, as they were commonly called, were ignored by male lyric poets until the later fifteenth century, and then described with ridiculously cloying pastoral metaphors. Caio Baldassarre Olimpo degli Alessandri’s book of poems called Glory of Love (1522) is one of the first Italian texts that peers beneath the skirts. The poet praises his lady love from the head to the feet, including

those secret parts whence comes an ample source of sweetness; the secret part where love grazes, where one stays, rests and lodges; the hidden part that I, bound up, loved for its supernal majesty; the sweet part, that pleasant valley, which thinking of it appears to me almost alive.²³

The Pastoral Ecologue of Philebbo and Dinarcho the Shepherds, a pamphlet of around the same period, similarly compares the female genitals to

that channel between each shore that one descends towards from a mountain to that spring that abounds in milk. At the foot of the hill along the bank is extended a little meadow with some grass, so the sight of the spring doesn’t offend. This [grass, i.e. the pubic hair] I would like to be delightful and black like the eyes and the eyebrows, and sparse and short and a little curly’.²⁴

The most extensive sixteenth-century Italian discussion, though, about the power of women’s genitalia to entrance men is Federico Luigini’s Book of Beautiful Women of 1554. After describing a beautiful woman in detail one of the interlocutors, the character Signor Giacomo, ‘started to smile to himself ’ about ‘the parts of women not discussed’. Its beauty is like a ‘little garden’ which presents to our eyes ‘the sweet white and red flowers of spring’, and where we hear ‘the nightingale sing its plaintive song of misfortune’. This is the power of gazing at female genitals, Luigini explains, and ‘we so enjoy it that our spirits take great recreation’.²⁵ This poetic attitudes towards the female genitals even seemed to extend to the naming of the genitalia – the labia minora (and sometimes, confusingly, the clitoris) were in Italian called ‘ninfe’ (nymphs). In Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Anatomy of 1586 he explains, ‘These are the nymphs so celebrated by Poets, who they pretend wander around fleeing satyrs in woods.’²⁶

Although the evidence can be conflicting, it’s likely that many women felt too much shame to allow anyone of the opposite sex, including husbands and other sexual partners, to see them naked from the waist down. There were many taboos around seeing women’s genitalia, which were thought to be naturally hidden. Lodovico Domenichi’s comments in his Nobility of Women of 1549 are typical. He explains that women never touch ‘those parts of the body’, which he calls their ‘natural woods’; as their ‘genital members are kept inside in a safer and more secret place’; nature has hidden their ‘generative parts because they are dirty things and they really should always stay hidden; unlike in men whose genitals can appear in public for others to see, women’s are beautiful and comely’. Many women, he goes on, would rather die than have their genitalia examined by a doctor. Indeed, apparently they were even modest in death – when women drowned, unlike men, they floated with their face down so as to protect the modesty of their genitals.²⁷

Culturally, therefore, it was hard for male medics and anatomists to look closely at the external female genitalia, probably explaining why the clitoris wasn’t ‘discovered’ officially in Renaissance anatomy textbooks until the 1560s. In trials that involved questions relating to female genitals – for example whether a marriage had been consummated, or whether it was possible for women to have sex due to vaginal tightness – it was female midwives, rather than male physicians, who were generally asked to testify, as they had (literally) hands-on knowledge of many female bodies. Rather than examining their female patients directly, many physicians would ask them to bring a menstrual rag with them so they could consider the humoral composition of their period blood.²⁸ The lack of opportunity to look closely at female genitalia presumably explains Leonardo da Vinci’s rather terrifying drawing now in the Royal Collection (pictured opposite) that shows the lips of the vulva opened to reveal a gaping hole and little else.

Before we castigate Renaissance anatomists for their lack of knowledge of the female genitals, it is worth noting that the anatomy of the clitoris was not accurately mapped until 1998.²⁹ The attempt to convey the ‘normal’ proportions of female genitalia in the light of providing accurate information for patients considering cosmetic labiaplasty is ongoing.

Despite many physicians giving female genitalia a wide berth, there was nevertheless a parallel tradition in the Middle Ages and early modern period that sought to ‘correct’ genitals via surgery. In the case of hermaphroditism, genitals were surgically altered to better resemble male or female genitalia. An enlarged clitoris or labia minora could also be understood as a sign of lesbianism and hypersexuality (hence our word ‘nymphomania’) and some doctors recommended that they be removed. Lastly, the labia minora could be cut simply for aesthetic reasons, because they were deemed ‘ugly’. ³⁰

The vulva and anus. From Leonardo da Vinci, Anatomical Manuscript B (c. 1508).

Cosmetic labiaplasty was discussed in many classical and medieval texts that were reprinted and avidly consulted in the Renaissance. The seventh-century Byzantine physician Paul of Aegina’s Medical Compendium, for example, was repeatedly published in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century.³¹ Aegina and his followers argued that the female organ could grow ‘above the order of nature, so its appearance is shamefully ugly’, and could even become erect like a penis.³² Aegina warned against cutting off the labia too low down and thus causing excessive bleeding, what he termed ‘rhyadica’. This was a sufficiently current term to be included in Otto Brunfels’ medical dictionary, the Onomastikon medicinae (first edition 1528), where it is defined as being caused by cutting off the ‘nymphs’ due to them being ‘immodestly prominent’.³³

Advice to cut off the ‘excessive’ labia minora was also adopted wholesale by some influential Latin texts. Lanfranco da Milano in his Great Surgery, originally written in 1296 and published in Venice in 1498, argues that women with what he deemed ‘outsized’ parts of the female genitals, that ‘hang down from the body’, will be ‘much less loved by men’, so this superfluity should be amputated, then cauterised until it is reduced to its ‘natural form’.³⁴ This emphasis on aesthetics can also be seen later in the sixteenth century in the vernacular, in Scipione Mercurio’s manual of midwifery of 1596. In women with an excess of phlegmatic humours, ‘skin like a cock’s crest hangs below, which generally hang below the genitals and… make a horrible spectacle’. This could impede the woman in her essential tasks of reproduction and had to be cut off – by a midwife if the patient was too embarrassed to employ a surgeon.³⁵ This intriguing sentence perhaps suggests that it was female midwives who were effectively policing the appearance of other women’s genitalia, and the ones who made the final decision about the cutting of the labia minora and clitoris.

European practices of female genital cutting were bound up in mutually reinforcing networks of beliefs about aesthetics, sexuality and ‘proper’ femininity, demonstrating how beauty culture and technology can combine to form a troubling and sometimes coercive mix. On the one hand, demand for body modification was pushing science towards creative and boundary-breaking solutions. On the other, individuals could then be pushed into sometimes painful or harmful procedures to meet a perceived norm.

9 WITCH HUNTS AND BODY HAIR

THE NORTHERN ITALIAN city of Como is a popular holiday destination, spectacularly nestled between the foothills of the Alps and the large lake of the same name. It is also the location of a historic massacre. In 1485 there was a witch trial there, where ‘forty-one sorceresses were burned to ashes after the hair was shaven off over their entire bodies’. This event is recorded approvingly in the important witchfinders’ handbook, The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum), which was published two years later, written by the Dominican friars Heinrich Kramer and (most probably) Jacob Sprenger.

The persecution and burning of witches is sometimes assumed to be a ‘medieval’ practice, but the witch craze was a Renaissance phenomenon. It has been estimated that 40–60,000 people, mainly women, were killed during the European massacres of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and many thousands more were tortured in the name of hunting down malevolent sorcery. As with other Renaissance trends, the Italian witch craze happened earlier than elsewhere in Europe, with many executions in the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. Villages dotted round the mountain regions of the north of Italy, where populations were thought to be out of reach of both the Church and secular authorities, were believed to be particularly susceptible to the occult, and came under the intense scrutiny of witch-hunting friars.¹

There are intriguing connections between the cultures of cosmetics and witchcraft. As much of the population could not afford a visit to a university-trained physician or learned apothecary, they turned to ‘wise women’ who might diagnose illnesses and sell healing potions, sometimes alongside magic charms and cosmetic waters. An archetypal example might be a woman known only as Maddalena the Weaver, who was put on trial in Rome in 1613 for manufacturing poison. As well as her alleged poison business, Maddalena offered love magic to clients, rented out rooms to sex workers and, she explained: ‘I make waters for washing women’s faces, and I also make oils from herbs of all kinds.’² Camilla Orsetta, a Venetian healer working in the 1580s who was tried for witchcraft by Venice’s own Holy Office, was locally renowned for her effective cures for a broad range of illnesses from headaches to broken bones, skin diseases and melancholy. Her contemporary, Elena Crusichi, alias ‘La Draga’ (‘the Dragon’, after the name of the most active of the spirits under her control) could diagnose a child’s illness just from touching their clothing, and prescribed herbal baths as a cure, after which the water was ritually thrown into a canal.³

LOVE MAGIC WAS, according to the Malleus, ‘the best known and most common form of witchcraft’. Sex workers were often assumed to use this type of magic to enchant their clients, and lower-class women who were loved by upper-class men were sometimes accused of bewitching them. In 1567 a well-to-do Venetian woman, Franceshina Orio, accused a poor mother and her daughter of ganging up to bewitch her son Silvestro to coerce him to marry the daughter ‘with damage to our household and ruin of his honour’. The pair were hauled up before the Inquisition.⁴ There is evidence that women, especially poorer women, did sometimes use charms to secure a marriage proposal – there was a rash of trials for love magic in Modena in the 1590s, for example, where women used charmed nutmeg, candles and religious apparatus to secure a good match. Women in Venice applied holy oil stolen from church to their lips to kiss their chosen target.⁵

High-status women might also resort to similar methods in matters of love. A gossipy letter of 1578 about Queen Margaret de Valois’s attempts to conquer the heart of her husband, King Henry IV of France, revealed that she had been locked in her bathroom with her maids for three days ‘always in the water, white as a lily, smelling like balsam, rubbing and re-rubbing herself, using incense in a way so that you might think that she is like a witch with her spells’.⁶ A poorer, less noble woman might well have been accused of witchcraft for much less than this.

Many of the types of potions and lotions women used to beautify themselves were supposedly also used in magic. A Milanese witchcraft manual of 1608 argues that witches may poison a victim ‘by anointing him with their lotions, waters, oils and unguents… They anoint the thighs, or belly, or head, throat, breast, ribs or some other part of the body’. It goes on to give many examples of magic lotions, including a flying ointment.⁷ Recipes, even by physicians like Marinello, often contain animal ingredients that to a modern eye seem decidedly ‘witchy’ – newts, doves, bats, frogs, chickens that have eaten snakes. For skin conditions he even recommends ‘the blood of a child’, or ‘three litres of blood of healthy redheaded men no older than 25 or 30’.⁸ It’s no wonder cosmetic treatments were sometimes associated with witchcraft.

Special ointments, oils, salves and potions are often described in trials, generally from confessions extracted under torture. Bellezze Ursini, for example, killed herself in 1528 after having been imprisoned and tortured for witchcraft by the Roman Inquisition. A long line of neighbours queued up to testify to her ‘evil’. Before she died she wrote a plea for forgiveness in her own hand, and these pages, filled with her childlike, halting script, still survive.⁹ Under torture, she admitted to all sorts of sorcery – having sex with the devil, killing and eating infants at his behest, teaching other women sorcery, and bewitching people in various ways. She also insisted that she had helped many people, medicating and curing disease of all kinds. Like Countess Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), Countess of Forlì, who we will meet properly in Chapter 14, Bellezze claimed to have written a book of ‘secrets’ that included recipes, incantations and ointments. The aristocratic Caterina was heralded for her knowledge, whereas Bellezze killed herself in prison. The margins of society could be a fertile place for invention through necessity – but invention was in many cases misconstrued by hostile authorities: ‘an inexorable and unyielding judge, the icy torture room and stretches on the rope transformed ancient beliefs and knowledge into ritual murders and demonic practices’, to quote Dinora Corsi.¹⁰

Shameful Hair

It was thought that women’s bodies harboured mysterious secrets that a good witch hunter had to investigate. The Malleus Maleficarum recommends complete removal of suspects’ body hair, as in the case in Como:

For the sorcery of silence, [witches] sometimes keep superstitious amulets consisting of certain objects in their clothing or in the hair of the body or sometimes in the most secret places, which cannot be named.¹¹

Although complete removal of body hair was practised in witch trials in Italy, in another publication Kramer notes that ‘In the regions of Germany, this sort of shaving, especially around the secret places, is considered very degrading and for this reason we inquisitors… make no use of it’ – though they did shave the victims’ heads.¹²

Cultural attitudes towards body hair and its removal differed markedly in northern and southern Europe – and particularly those parts of southern Europe influenced by Islamic bathing practices.

CULTURAL AND religious conventions that encourage depilation have long existed in Islamic cultures, where removal of hair in public baths was standard practice, probably from ancient times. This was well known in Christian Europe and was often a point of interest to travellers. Perhaps the earliest first-person account is by Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian Arab (1095–1188), who tells the story of a bathhouse attendant who had his loincloth torn off by a Frankish knight. Upon seeing his shaved pubic area, the knight demanded that he should have his own body hair shaved off, and asked that the attendant do the same for his wife.¹³ In his account of a visit to baths in Turkey, published in 1545, Luigi Bassano (a traveller from Zadar, a former Venetian city now in Croatia) describes how men and women had their body hair removed with a type of paste: ‘The Turks use this paste a lot, because they think having hairs on the hidden parts is shameful… women are more superstitious about this than men.’ Later he claims that some women also dyed their depilated pubic areas with henna.¹⁴ Johannes Wild (d. 1619), a soldier from Nuremberg who was captured then enslaved in Cairo, reported that these women used ointments made from ‘chalk’ and Indian earth. In Hans Weigel’s 1577 Clothes of the Principal Peoples, a Turkish woman is shown in her sheer bathrobe, through which readers can glimpse her depilated genital area.¹⁵

Turkish woman at the bath. From Hans Weigel, Habitus Praecipuorum Populorum (1577).

The paste Bassano mentions is known as ‘rhusma’ and had been used to remove hair in many parts of the Mediterranean and Arab world for several centuries. It was a highly alkaline combination of orpiment (arsenic sulphide) and quicklime (calcium oxide) that melted the hair away on a similar principle to depilatories today. It was also used to strip the hair from animal hides. Recipes with these basic ingredients appear, for example, in a Cairo manual for pharmacists written in the mid-thirteenth century (where orpiment, lime, vinegar and sesame oil are used).¹⁶ Despite the surprise that these European travellers evinced about depilation, a similar recipe was also used by women on the European side of the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and early modern period.

Variations on the rhusma recipe be found in the much-circulated manuscript of healthcare and cosmetic recipes for medieval women, The Trotula, so-named after a twelfth-century nun called Trota from the city of Salerno in southern Italy, an important centre of medical knowledge in this period. The medical school in Salerno benefited from the translation of Arabic medical texts into Latin at the nearby monastery of Montecassino in the eleventh century. The third section of The Trotula, is dedicated to cosmetic recipes. Research by Monica Green has shown that the section on cosmetics was not compiled by Trota but by a male physician, who claimed his information was gained from ‘women whom I found to be practical in practicing the art of cosmetics’. The Trotula’s version of rhusma paste is as follows:

In order that a woman might become very soft and smooth and without hairs from her head down… she should have a steam bath and anoint herself with a depilatory made of orpiment and quicklime… but she should not rub herself because her limbs will be excoriated. But when she has stayed there a little while, try to pull out the hairs from the pubic area. If they do not fall out easily, let her have hot water poured over her and wash herself all over, drawing her palm [over her skin] gently… Having done this, let her enter lukewarm water and let her be washed well.

She then exfoliates with bran, washes with warm water, dries her skin and anoints herself with henna. Another rinse, a white linen cloth, and she can go to bed.¹⁷

This text on cosmetics remained popular and circulated in manuscript form throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but there’s scant evidence that it was directly influential on cosmetic culture in the Renaissance. The much-reprinted Venustà pamphlet, for example, contains only one recipe to ‘make hair fall out so that it never regrows’, containing soap, vine gum and orpiment – but no quicklime.

However, recipes for hair removal do start to proliferate as the sixteenth century goes on, first starting in manuscript texts and later disseminated in print from around the 1550s – perhaps suggesting that elite women were initially more concerned with removing their body hair than their lower-status peers. Thus, in an anonymous manuscript of around 1500, known as the Ricettario Galante, there is a whole section described as ‘A treatise on removing hair from the body in diverse ways so it never returns’. Like in The Trotula, women are advised to go to the baths to remove hair ‘that looks bad in various places on a woman’s body’. There are no fewer than sixteen recipes for hair removal given in this text, ranging from variations on the traditional quicklime/arsenic combination to more esoteric recipes made up of ingredients including ivy, ant eggs and hedgehogs.¹⁸

There is a similarly eclectic and inventive range of body hair removal techniques in Caterina Sforza’s Experiments, perhaps based on correspondence with the Jewish community in Rome.¹⁹ The influence of non-Christian cultures on hair removal practices in Italy is also shown in many editions of the bestselling household tips book, Alessio Piemontese’s Secrets (first edition 1557) where the writer admiringly reveals an ‘extremely rare recipe used by Great Moorish Ladies to prevent their children from having hair under their arms or elsewhere, because they don’t like body hair’. He purports to have learnt this recipe in Syria. This, to modern eyes, is a brutal recipe where the skin of recently born baby girls is burned using heated gold, and the resultant scarring prevents hair growth.²⁰

The Arabic, Jewish and Christian women who lived under the same regime in the Iberian peninsula, Provence and southern Italy shared a culture of medical and cosmetic recipes from around the thirteenth century.²¹ After the expulsion of the Jews from Iberian lands in 1492, many men and women were forced to emigrate. And we see this in fiction too, as Andalucian Lozana has clients who are responding to the demands of their husbands:

… teach me and my cousin here how to shave off female hair, since that’s the way our husbands like it. They don’t want us to look like those Roman women who never shave it.

That husbands may have been asking for wives to remove their pubic hair in the 1520s is intriguing. Over the next thirty or so years, what seems to have been a relatively niche desire for hairless women became mainstream, at least in Italy. Lodovico Domenichi, in his Nobility of Women of 1549, explains that while men’s bodies are hairy, women’s only have hair ‘in those parts that are always hidden and in the hidden parts, and much less than we have’. Another contemporary explains that body hair is not appropriate or fitting for a woman by comparison with a balding horse: ‘if a woman were hairy, she would be ugly; if a horse were without hair it would be a deformity.²² By the 1560s, printed books of secrets were including a growing range of recipes for body hair removal – presumably both reflecting and shaping norms. Marinello explains:

Body hair, if you are not affected by scabies or another ailment, has to be removed after or whilst bathing yourself (because they are superfluities from our nutrition, no less than sweat is). When hair is superfluous over the entire body, as with many ladies who become so hairy that they look like a wild beast, one has to remove it, which one can do excellently in the bath.²³

There are many recipes for removing hair ‘from all over the body’ in printed recipe books from around the 1540s. Although books tend to be slightly coy about exactly which parts of the body are referred to here, occasionally you find recipes that specify that they are for ‘removing the hair around a woman’s nature’, a frequently used metaphor for the genitals.²⁴

Many of these texts also emphasised the danger of removing hair incorrectly. In one book from 1557, women were urged to only practise hair removal ‘when the moon is waning’ and to avoid tweezers, as they are too violent for the skin and will lead to enlarged pores. After removing hair, the skin should be immediately soothed with cold rose or violet oils.²⁵ It was well known that rhusma paste could be harmful, and cautions abound in the instructions for use. Several sources recommend testing the mixture on a hen or duck feather – if the barbs peeled off, it was ready to apply. Too strong a mixture left on for too long would burn the flesh as well as the skin. Several strategies were given for timing the mixture correctly. While Marinello just suggests repeatedly testing it by pulling, and removing as soon as the hair falls out, others recommend removing the mixture as soon as the skin feels hot – ‘very quickly, so the flesh doesn’t peel off ’.²⁶ Sforza gives more concrete guidance: it should be left on for the time it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer twice.²⁷

The evidence from Italian sources suggests that hair removal – coincidentally or otherwise – became fashionable for two reasons. The first was the arrival of refugees from Spain who brought new techniques for hair removal to Italian women. The other, perhaps, is the proliferation of hairless female nudes in a variety of visual media, an artistic fashion that suggested ideally beautiful women had no body hair at all.

This Italian fad for body hair removal wasn’t Europe-wide. The first English translation of The Secrets of Alessio Piemontese, in 1560, omits the hair removal recipes that feature in the Italian original. The one recipe given for hair removal here is adapted to men – ‘To make heare [hair] slacke in cumming… or growing in young men… on their beard, as in other partes.’²⁸ It contains the same ingredients, more or less, as the women’s body hair-removal recipes given in the Italian and French versions, but repurposed. Conversely, in seventeenth-century Holland it seems that both men and women were expected to remove hair from under their arms, their chests and their pubic area to avoid any possibility of sweatiness and smells.²⁹

Those living in the German-speaking lands of Europe, in particular, seem to have been both appalled and fascinated by body hair and its removal. Some depilatory recipes existed there. The physician Johannes Hartlieb’s 1460s version of The Trotula ‘tells of all infirmities of women which cause displeasure to men,’ he explains, ‘be they infirmities of the vagina, of the hands, mouth, teeth or skin. It gives such great remedies that it seems a real miracle that a woman can acquire so much beauty.’ This included body hair removal.³⁰ For many Germans, however, it seems that body hair was deeply taboo – the painter Hans Baldung in particular was quite obsessed with it. A curious copy of one of his paintings of the 1520s (see plate section, image no. 16), originally shown in the ‘nudities room’ at the court of the Margraves of Baden-Durlach in Basel, shows a bath scene with three naked women gathered around a large convex mirror. At the front of the scene one youthful woman leans over to peer at her reflection while dressing the hair on her head. Her standing companion holds a brush to her pubic hair – perhaps applying a depilatory – while an older woman crouches at her feet, holding a large pair of shears in her hand. In another painting from the same period, he shows a naked woman staring down at a convex mirror she holds between her legs.³¹ It is no coincidence that Baldung was also key in creating some of the most influential images of witches; his drawings, paintings and prints of the early 1500s combine sexuality and horror. His witches are always naked, sometimes in overtly sexual poses, and – as in his most well-known print – preparing potions made up of animal and plant ingredients. Scattered on the floor at the witches’ feet is a similar brush to the one used for dusting the pubic hair in the bathhouse painting. There’s also a convex mirror lying discarded – a Renaissance viewer would associate mirrors with both beautification and sorcery.

Hans Baldung, The Witches (1510)

It might seem a strange choice, initially, to link the history of body hair removal with witchcraft, but attitudes to female bodies are often manifested through policing of hair and its removal. In the sixteenth century fashions in the appearance of bodies, like fashions in clothing, swirled around Europe (and beyond), reflected and likely spurred on by the new availability of cheap printed books. The craze for hairless female bodies in the visual arts came together with new techniques in body care and cosmetics, influenced and informed by forced migration and the close contact between Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities.

The history of Renaissance body hair removal is a reminder of how the decisions and choices we make about the most seemingly intimate parts of our lives are bound to much bigger social and political forces. As in Baldung’s images, they can betray the heady and sometimes dangerous mixture of desire and revulsion, pleasure and fear inherent in a patriarchal society’s understanding of the female body. What starts in the bathhouse can end in the torture chamber.

Part Four POWER (UN)DRESSING

10 BEAUTY’S DANGEROUS PATHS

A MUCH-REPRINTED sixteenth-century tale told the ‘miserable end’ of Signora Anzola, a fictionalised courtesan from Ferrara. After her astonishing rise from poverty to riches and fame in her youth, she was brought low while still relatively young. Disfigured by the French pox (syphilis), she was wheeled through the city on a cart for all to see her lesions. She is depicted in a few editions of the story showing her diseased body off to viewers, lying on a couch like a terribly afflicted Venus. Text and image both delight in seeing this formerly successful and desirable woman degraded, afflicted by the visible signs of her own sin. The writer dwells on her new-found poverty, the pain in her limbs and the stench of her syphilitic sores.¹

Anzola showing her syphilitic lesions. From The Miserable End of Signora Anzola (c. 1590s).

The hatred of courtesans in Renaissance Italy wasn’t just a matter of misogyny, but also related to social status. These women were generally born poor but became socially feted, wealthy and courted by elite men. This was a new role for women in the Renaissance – the Italian term ‘cortegiana’ was only coined in the 1490s – and for many the emergence of courtesan culture constituted something of a moral crisis. Their exterior attractiveness – putting them on a par with noblewomen – put a spanner in the works of the idea that exterior beauty reflected inner virtue, disturbing the social order. A 1535 satirical dialogue called The Price List of the Whores of Venice declares that ‘Whores are full of all kinds of malice and falsehoods, and exactly like statues, they have mud inside, but are decorated on the outside.’²

While courtesans were the most obvious example of women who made a living at least partly based on their physical attractiveness, many women used their appearance to raise their social status through marriage – as we have seen. However, there were also those who used their beauty to help them escape the limitations of their birth and sex, and make their way in male-dominated professions. This is perhaps typified in the following stories of four successful creative women – a painter, an actor, a composer and a courtesan poet: Sofonisba Anguissola, Vincenza Armani, Barbara Strozzi and Veronica Franco. But, as we shall, see this could be an extremely risky path to follow in an age that delighted in seeing transgressive women – particularly those from humble backgrounds – receiving a very public comeuppance.

The Painter

Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1535–1625) must have spent much of her twenties staring at herself in a mirror. She painted more self-portraits than almost any other Renaissance artist – around ten survive, all made between 1554 and 1564. The one shown in image no. 17 of the plate section is (probably) the last self-portrait she painted, when she was in her late twenties. How fashionable and self-assured she looks, staring steadily at the viewer as she must have stared at her own face. Her dark-gold hair, intricately curled at the front, is adorned by a yellow-gold hairpiece, strung with pearls and topped by a ruby brooch. Her peaches-and-cream face emerges immaculate from the spiky froth of a lace ruff. By the time this portrait was painted, Anguissola had been living at the Spanish court for around four years. The Spaniards had snapped her up to be a lady-in-waiting, portraitist and painting teacher for Queen Isabel de Valois, King Philip II’s teenage third wife.³

Sofonisba first made her name in Italy painting intimate family scenes that were not just artistically innovative, but psychologically acute. You should not be misled by the impassive face in this image; this is a woman with a marked capacity for mischief. Her most famous painting is a portrait of two of her sisters playing chess, while an older maid looks on. The youngest sister, Europa, also peeking at the game, grins with joyful Schadenfreude as the middle sister is checkmated.⁴ This is one of the few Renaissance images that would squarely pass the Bechdel test: it doesn’t contain a single man and has no reference to romantic attachment. Sofonisba was brilliant at expressing the kind of sibling love that manifests as gleeful spite. One of her most celebrated drawings – ‘not only beautiful but inventive’ according to a 1562 letter written by Michelangelo’s beloved, Tommaso Cavalieri – shows Sofonisba’s little brother, Asdrubale, as a toddler, crying because he’s been bitten by a crayfish that was hidden in a basket. His older sister Europa stands by his side, clearly savouring her trick.⁵

Sofonisba’s father, Amilcare, was something of a loose cannon whose get-rich-quick schemes (from paper-selling, to apothecary-owning, to cheese-making) had failed to support his seven children, until he had the novel idea of sending two of his daughters, Sofonisba and Elena, to train with the local painter, Bernardino Campi. This was quite a risk in a period where a woman’s virtue and family honour were tied up in female virginity. The writer Lodovico Domenichi’s tongue was only half in his cheek when he wrote in 1549 that ‘if I had a beautiful and graceful woman in my house, I would do anything else than let her be prey to a saucy and foolhardy artist, most likely young and lusty; God knows if she would return intact and inviolate!’⁶ It seems, however, that Campi treated his pupils well, and taught them to paint with considerable skill. By her early twenties, Sofonisba had become something of an international sensation.

Sofonisba was far from the only Renaissance woman artist to repeatedly paint self-portraits, and it’s sometimes assumed that women painted themselves because they weren’t allowed to paint other subjects. There’s something to this – guild rules meant that normally women could not run the type of workshops needed for large-scale altarpieces or frescoes, for example.⁷ Certainly Sofonisba stuck with portraits rather than large-scale narrative paintings. I sometimes feel there’s something a bit dismissive about this argument, however. No one ever says it of male artists like Dürer or Rembrandt who are also famed for their self-portraiture. While it’s true that portraiture was thought to be a more suitable genre for women, there’s clearly self-fashioning – that particularly Renaissance desire to construct a finely tuned public persona – in Sofonisba’s repeated return to her face, and an even larger element of self-promotion.

Amilcare made his daughter famous by sending her portrait round to local dignitaries and writers. They marvelled not only at the skill of the painting but also at the attractiveness of the painter. One recipient, the poet Annibale Caro (1507–1566), wrote to Amilcare in 1558 that ‘There is nothing I desire more than the image of the artist herself, so that in a single work I can exhibit two marvels, one the work, the other the artist.’ Sofonisba was renowned for being particularly beautiful; she was called ‘the beautiful Cremonese painter’ in a letter of 1554, and, reputedly, drove at least one man wild with desire to marry her.⁸ In fact, in her youth her single status was much vaunted. She signed her early portraits with the epithet ‘virgo’, or ‘virgin’. Other young sixteenth-century female painters – Catharina van Hemessen and Lavinia Fontana – did the same thing, insisting on their ‘pure’ status, a socially necessary precaution in the sixteenth century when women’s honour and family standing could be threatened even by stories of sexual impropriety – but also perhaps a tantalising suggestion of availability for the right suitor.

Sofonisba was one of the few women in the sixteenth century who had significant control over her own image. Not surprisingly, perhaps, her appearance in her self-portraits closely aligns with the beauty ideals articulated at the time. Sofonisba presents herself with hair that is golden, long, ample and curled. Her forehead is a dewy glowing white with a height that is half its width (and she would surely have measured it). Her eyebrows are black, fine with soft short hairs. Her eyes are round with dark, almost black, irises – according to Marinello the best eyes resemble those of an ox. Her nose is fine and straight, and pinkens at the tip, and her ears are what Marinello describes as ‘middle sized’ and ‘of a lively colour’. Her cheeks are white but, again, using Marinello’s words – ‘with the swelling of the cheeks become redder, like a little hill, which at sunset reddens at the peak’. Even her chin is adorned with a ‘graceful little dimple’. In the earlier portraits, where it isn’t hidden by a ruff, you can see what Marinello describes as ‘almost a second chin under the first’, an asset that he says gives the face ‘singular beauty’, a ‘real ornament of fat ladies, and a graceful companion to a beautiful throat.’⁹

There’s no sign of artificial cosmetics here. In her earlier portraits, done before she went to the Spanish court, she presents herself in simple and sober black clothing, with just a pristine white undershirt peeking out at the neck of her plain black bodice. This lack of ostensible ornament rhetorically emphasises her natural beauty – she painted her canvases rather than painting her face. The physician-art critic Giulio Mancini certainly thought her appearance and her painting ability were one and the same thing. In his Considerations on Painting of 1620, he suggested that ‘It is no wonder she painted the things of this world so well and so beautifully since she painted herself, being so lovely.’

Given that youthful beauty was praised so highly at this time, it would have been easy for Sofonisba to either get married and stop working – the fate of other women artists like Catharina van Hemessen (1528–after 1565), the first artist to paint a self-portrait of themselves at the easel – or simply to disappear from the historical record.¹⁰ Remarkably for the time, and despite a large number of suitors, Sofonisba remained unmarried until she was in her late thirties, when the Spanish king presented her with a selection of suitable Italian men to choose from. She chose Fabrizio Moncada, the governor of the small town of Paternò in Sicily, and returned there with him in 1573. Tragically, five years later he drowned, en route to Madrid. The year afterwards, now in her mid-forties, Sofonisba decided to return to Cremona with her brother, that former crayfish-claw victim, Asdrubale. The journey was interrupted, however: Sofonisba fell in love with the captain of the boat she was travelling on, a man around ten years her junior called Orazio Lomellino. Despite objections from her family and from the Duke of Florence (largely because of the potential groom’s inferior social status), she married him anyway. That unruly streak so evident in the early images of her siblings had clearly not left her. Orazio and Sofonisba spent some time living in Genoa, where they hosted parties and received distinguished guests, then moved to Palermo at some point when Sofonisba was in her seventies or eighties.

In 1624, the up-and-coming 25-year-old painter Anthony van Dyck sought out Sofonisba at home in Palermo. He recorded his impressions of the 92-year-old artist while he was drawing her, and his warm admiration shines through:

she still has her memory and a very sharp mind, she is most courteous and even if she is losing her sight due to her age, she nonetheless put the paintings in front of her with great enthusiasm, and with great effort put her nose on them so she could discern them a little, and she took great pleasure in this. When I was making her portrait, she gave me several pieces of advice – not to make the light too high, so that in the shadows her old-age wrinkles would become too big, and many other sound suggestions. She also told me about the part of her life when she was recognised as a great and miraculous painter from nature, and the greatest pain she had was due to her poor eyesight, meaning she could no longer paint. Her hand was still firm without any trembling.¹¹

Even in her early nineties, Sofonisba was still concerned with how she appeared to others. The finished portrait (see plate section, image no. 18) of course shows that she has aged, but her skin seems soft and clear, her hooded eyes piercing and acute, the locks of hair emerging from the veil still honey-blond. Sofonisba was able to successfully combine her beauty with her extraordinary talent as a painter. Her looks were a key that allowed her to open doors that were firmly shut to most women. She had an extraordinary life. She died a couple of years after van Dyck’s visit, and was buried in her local church, San Giorgio dei Genovesi, where you can still see the dedication on her tombstone, written by her husband, that ship’s captain she was never meant to marry. He remembers both her beauty and her talent:

She was numbered amongst the illustrious women of the world because she was endowed with extraordinary gifts of Nature in terms of beauty. In representing the images of men, she was so outstanding that none was estimated during her lifetime as her equal. Affected by vast grief, Orazio Lomellino dedicated this worthy commemoration, which, while much too small for so great a woman, is truly all that any mortal can have.¹²

The Actor

Filled with pleasure,

I kiss her chest, her breasts.

And from her beautiful mouth

I then gorge on the sweet nectar.

I am mute and she is silent,

She in ecstasy and I in bliss.

We share the high sparks of love

With kisses by the thousand thousand.

What happens next

Love only can say,

Because both of us are drunk

In the summit of joy.

In our immense bliss we lose

Our souls, our spirits, our senses.¹³

In this excerpt from her poem ‘Happy and Joyful Nights’, the actor Vincenza Armani (c. 1530–1569) is freed from the normal constraints of propriety by taking on the role of a male lover. Like Isabella Andreini a few decades later, Armani could wrap her own identity into those of the characters she played, both male and female. This allowed actor-writers to compose and perform verses that dwell longingly on the beauties of the female body, in a way that would have thrilled and titillated audiences.

Actresses, singers and courtesans (and sometimes women were all three) used their voice – both for speaking and for singing – to make their way in a world where women’s silence was often equated with chastity, loquaciousness with sexual promiscuity. ‘An eloquent woman is never chaste’ was a popular fifteenth-century saying. Women took great risks to make themselves heard in a culture that praised their muteness: ‘The truly virtuous woman is the woman who is completely silenced and erased from society,’ the poet Torquato Tasso argued in 1582 – despite the support he had received from his patron Isabella Pallavicina.¹⁴

To be truly beautiful a woman should be silent, chaste and contented. Marinello in the Ornaments is at pains to remind women that it is just not becoming to chatter too much. He suggests that women should speak ‘with a quiet voice and with rarity rather than frequency’. He even argues that there are medical reasons for the need to remain silent:

think carefully about using [the lips]… continually speaking or laughing makes cracks in the skin more raw so that medicine no longer works.¹⁵

Despite these dark mutterings about the dangers of women’s speech, Italian women did start to take a leading role in professional theatre troupes in the second half of the sixteenth century, drawing large crowds and international fame – as well as the inevitable criticism. They were frequently accused of prostitution. According to a Jesuit scholar in 1631:

The women [actors] are always, or nearly always, without morality. [Men and women] live freely together, and the women do not have a separate room or a separate bed. So the men watch them dressing and undressing, doing their hair, now in bed, now half naked and always talking among themselves about lascivious things… The women are often extraordinarily beautiful, with elegant mannerisms and clothes, eloquent, witty, fine dancers and singers, talented performers. And all this excites the spectators’ libido.¹⁶

Vincenza Armani was one of the first female professional actors, and the very first we know anything much about. She was extremely famous during her lifetime. ‘She has placed the art of acting on a par with that of oratory,’ proclaimed a male critic, ‘and partly with her marvellous beauty, partly with her indescribable grace, she has built a great monument to herself, with the world as her audience, revealing herself to be the most excellent actress of our age.’ She was praised for her extraordinary ability to evoke emotions: ‘with what fervour, from that sweet mouth / she shot hatred, anger, fury, well feigned’. She evoked joy in her audience, tears; even thirst.¹⁷

Armani was not just famous for using her mouth to voice characters, but also for her expressive face that allowed her to convey emotions silently. According to the contemporary playwright Leone de’ Sommi, if she heard something out of turn, ‘some word lacking in modesty or wisdom’:

she bashfully turns aside, falls silent and sighs;

that turning of eyes and bending of head

simply slays anyone who sees her do it,

so gently does it express, in welcome silence,

the virtuous scorn which she hides within her heart.¹⁸

Even without a voice, at least the face could be a vehicle for communication. The only surviving script that we know for certain Armani delivered is titled ‘Prologue for Madam Vincenza, actress, recited by her in men’s clothing.’ It is a humorous speech on the importance of silence, designed to be given at the beginning of a play to persuade the audience to keep quiet during the performance. This androgynous figure promised a reward for those audience members who did what they were told: ‘those who are silent will find my eyes, my mouth, my tongue and my body more willing to give them pleasure’.¹⁹

Armani’s life was full of intrigue – and she perhaps even deliberately courted it. Rather than interrupt her successful run of plays in Mantua in summer 1567 to go away with her aristocratic lover, Federico da Gazzuolo, she broke up with him on the street:

that mischief-maker, not wanting to leave at a stroke what the gains she’d made over many months with her own sweat, pretending to disdain him, broke it off openly and he, like a street woman, immediately turned back to her bragging and blaming, since he had nothing left but his tongue with which to avenge himself.²⁰

In the end, Armani was silenced all too soon, murdered by poison at the age of thirty-nine. The abrupt end to her sparkling and tempestuous career is reminiscent of Signora Anzola’s. Her killer remains unknown – perhaps a spurned lover, a theatrical rival, or one of the many moralists who objected to women’s voices being quite so loud, quite so eloquent, and quite so public.

The Composer

If a beautiful appearance could charm the body through the eyes, a melodious voice speaking or singing was just as dangerous to the unwary male. Like visual stimuli, it was believed that when sounds entered the body they could affect its emotional (and, subsequently, humoral) balance. The music historian Bonnie Gordon explains that ‘the early modern voice was imagined to be vibrating air that flowed through the throat of the singer into the vulnerable ear of the listener’. The throat, moreover, was frequently likened to the vulva, the tonsils to the penis, the clitoris to a little tongue. The extraordinary control required to deliver the ornate tremolo and agile trills that Baroque composers demanded of their female singers astonished and titillated contemporary audiences. One of these composers was Barbara Strozzi (1619–77).²¹

Strozzi’s ‘Canto di bella bocca’, or ‘Song of the Beautiful Mouth’, which was published in her First Book of Madrigals of 1644, was explicitly intended to evoke desire in the listener. It sets a poem by her (presumed) father, Giulio Strozzi, to music, and was to be performed by two sopranos. It begins:

How sweet it is to hear a lovely mouth

Joyfully sing verses of love.

A lyrical, charming voice

Entices you with fleeting melody

Encircles you, even touches you,

And enters you as if to kiss your heart.²²

The loveliness of the mouth is matched by the complexity of the singing, designed to enchant and transport the listener. The two singers take turns to sing impossibly complex passages that dip and soar.

Strozzi was the illegitimate daughter of a female servant, Isabella Garzoni and (it is thought) her master, the writer Giulio.²³ Her father’s involvement with artistic and literary academies, where women’s participation was encouraged, was decisive for the young Barbara’s career. It seems that Giulio appointed her a music teacher, Francesco Cavelli, who encouraged her onto the public stage. The push-pull of her sexuality so typical of the treatment of young women in Italian Renaissance culture was used from the beginning, and she was described as a ‘chaste siren’ in her first mention in print when she was just sixteen. Strozzi never married, but from at least 1640 she was in a long-term relationship with one of her father’s friends, Giovanni Paolo Widmann. She went on to have four children, possibly his, though all of them were registered as illegitimate.

Strozzi managed to successfully live this unconventional life to the full, publishing more secular vocal music than any other composer of the period, no fewer than eight volumes during her lifetime, while maintaining her success as a performer. The intellectual heft behind her songs is only now being recognised, and there are still few recent studies of her in English. Unlike Armani, Strozzi was canny with her earnings, gaining financial independence partly from her music, and partly from loaning money out at interest, and was able to support her father in his old age. Despite her own success, both her daughters became nuns, rather than following Strozzi into a secular musical career or marriage. This must have been with her blessing and encouragement as head of the family, and that’s perhaps an indication of the burden that being a successful creative woman could create.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the only likely portrait of Strozzi (see plate section, image no. 19) is deeply eroticising.²⁴ As she stands holding a viola da gamba (an instrument that was played between the legs like a cello), Strozzi’s full breasts are almost completely bare, a nipple peeking out among the lace trimming of her undershirt. A flower emerges from her loose hair – which, notably, is dark brown and curly (the unruly hair commonly associated with creative types). The musical score displayed here is a duet between male and female voices, Tantalisingly, there’s another viola da gamba lying on the table, inviting the viewer of the portrait to join its alluring subject to make beautiful music together.

The Courtesan Poet

The Venetian courtesan Veronica Franco (1546–91) was a sex worker – her name first appears along those of many other teenage girls in a 1565 Catalogue of all the principle and most honoured courtesans of Venice. She was hired out to men by her mother, also a prostitute, for two scudi (silver coins).²⁵ This seems to have been a familiar story for many poor women in Renaissance Venice, but Franco is remarkable because – at least for a while – she managed to break free of her rather depressing beginnings.

School of Tintoretto, Portrait of a Lady, said to be Veronica Franco (c. 1575)

As an adult, Franco became renowned for her charm and eloquence in Venetian salon culture. There are several portraits alleged to be of her; the one shown here is a painting in the school of Jacopo Tintoretto, likely made in the 1580s. You can just glimpse her left nipple peaking above the ruffled hem of her undershirt. Franco bares her breasts in most of her portraits, both an indication of her ‘natural beauty’ (no breast bags needed here!) and a symbol of open-hearted sincerity.²⁶ Franco wrote several poems and in 1580 published a letter collection that included missives to many key political figures, including King Henry III of France, who was her client when he visited Venice in 1574. Franco was unusual in being explicit about her erotic talent:

So sweet and delicious do I become

When I am in bed with a man

Who, I sense, loves and enjoys me

That the pleasure I bring excels all delight

So the knot of love, however tight

It seemed before is tied tighter still.²⁷

Much erotic poetry by Italian women involves them taking on the role of a man – like Vincenza Armani or Isabella Andreini (whose erotic description of breasts can be found in the next chapter). Franco’s unusual daring in expressing her own sexual desire led to her being incredibly successful in her heyday; she became a tourist attraction in her own right for visitors to the city.

Although she was wealthy and widely admired, being publicly recognised as a courtesan also brought risks. The popular poet Maffio Venier (1550–86) anonymously wrote three obscene verses about Veronica in the 1570s. The last of the sequence, ‘Veronica, ver unica puttana’ (Veronica, truly unique whore), includes a description satirising the traditional Petrarchan blazon – the poetic listing of beautiful parts of the female face and body that was so common in the Renaissance it became a frequent object of ridicule:

There is an infinite number of poets

Who want to sing all your evils

All your flaws, all your defects

Spectacle of the bridges and hospitals.

Green forehead, yellow eyes

Ruined nose, wrinkled breasts and cheeks

Ears hourly loaded with chilblains

Mouth full of flies

Franco fought back, also in verse. Although she was upset at first, she explains, and thought it unfair that a man should attack any woman, she soon found the strength to change her mind:

And, blade in hand, I learned warrior’s skills,

So that, by handling weapons I learned

That women by nature are no less agile than men…

When we women, too have weapons and training,

We will be able to prove to all men

That we have hands and feet and hearts like yours;

And though we may be tender and delicate,

Some men who are delicate also are strong,

And some, though coarse and rough, are cowards.

Women so far haven’t seen this is true

For if they’d ever resolved to do it,

They’d have been able to fight you to the death

And to prove to you that I speak the truth

Among so many women I will act first

Setting an example for them all to follow…

And though you call me ‘prostitute’

Either you imply that I’m not one of them,

Or that among them some merit praise

Whatever goodness prostitutes may have

Whatever grace and nobility of soul

The sound of your word assigns to me.²⁸

Franco’s is an extraordinary, transgressive voice in a period where the pressures for women to conform to modes of sexual probity were very strong, and penalties severe. Most published women writers came from relatively privileged backgrounds. Franco upended criticism by effectively unmasking herself – acknowledging her own powers of seduction in her highly eroticised poems, acknowledging her status as a sex worker, as well as enjoining other women to defy the social straitjacket in which they were raised.

However, the relentless pressure of maintaining a beautifully polished surface started to tell on Franco. In a letter to an acquaintance who is thinking of raising her daughter as a courtesan, Franco is equally candid in acknowledging the terrible burden of always having to appear enticing, seductive, beautiful – always hiding one’s inner feelings:

It is a most wretched thing, contrary to human reason, to subject one’s body and labour to a slavery terrifying even to think of. To make oneself prey to so many men, at the risk of being stripped, robbed, even killed, so that one man, one day, may snatch away from you everything you’ve acquired from many over such a long time, along with so many other dangers of injury and dreadful contagious diseases; to eat with another’s mouth, sleep with another’s eyes, move according to another’s will, obviously rushing toward the shipwreck of your mind and your body – what greater misery? What wealth, what luxuries, what delights can outweigh all this? Believe me, among all the world’s calamities, this is the worst.²⁹

Franco’s fortunes were to decline with the death of her chief patron, Domenico Venier, in 1582. She was burgled of her most precious possessions, then accused (though in the end acquitted) of witchcraft; tax records suggest that in her mid-thirties she became near-destitute. She moved from place to place but stayed for a while near the church of San Samuele, a location associated with street prostitution. She died in poverty in 1519, at the age of forty-five.

Although Franco was an extraordinary figure, in many ways her writings – and her sad life story – sum up the impossible contradictions inherent in femininity in the Renaissance period (and others). Young women were urged to be beautiful, but not too alluring, to be desirable yet chaste. Although women like Franco published work advocating for intellectual equality and increased freedoms for women, they were mainly dependent on the goodwill and financial support of male supporters. Creating pathbreaking work as a Renaissance woman meant engaging with your own appearance at one level or another, but this path was a dangerous one. Maintaining a beautiful mask tended to be essential for women’s careers, and it came at a significant psychological and physical cost, especially for women with no family resources. As in the tale of Signora Anzola, there was always an audience of detractors ready to gloat if things went wrong.

11 NAKEDNESS AND THE POWER OF THE GAZE

VULNERABLE, NAKED, barely covered by a sheet, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna (see plate section, image no. 20) wraps her arm around her fleshy naked body, aware of being ogled by the two men behind her. Susanna and the Elders was a popular subject in the early seventeenth century, but Artemisia was better able than most of her male peers to articulate the feelings of victims of unwanted sexual attention – maybe if I don’t do anything, keep still, pretend I haven’t seen them, these unasked-for gawkers will just go away? Susanna stares heaven-ward, gathering her undershirt around her for protection, eyes near overflowing, begging for intervention from a divine hero. Night is drawing in, judging by the ominously darkening sky, and it’s hard to understand why Susannah should be naked in a fountain in a garden, open both to the elements and to the gaze of some old creeps.¹

This painting seems to perfectly articulate a modern cultural idea – one that John Berger describes in his Ways of Seeing of 1972: ‘according to usage and conventions… men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.’ The power dynamic in paintings of the female nude, an art subject that was popularised in Renaissance Italy, is assumed to rest with the artist and viewer, who are assumed to be men – a process of objectification that Laura Mulvey influentially described as the ‘male gaze’.² This chapter will turn these ideas on their heads. Through considering women’s poetry and artworks, we will consider here the Renaissance ‘female gaze’. We’ll find out that in the Renaissance intense looking was imbued with real power. We will explore the steamy rooms of the public bathhouse, the prime location where naked women could be seen, and finally ask how women expressed eroticised viewing through words and images.

Although being looked at may seem harmless in itself, Artemisia knew very well what was at stake; like many young women at this time, she had been the victim of violent rape. The instigator was her father’s colleague, the painter Agostino Tassi. Her testimony from the rape trial of 1612 remains difficult to read:

He shoved me onto the edge of the bed, forcing me with his hand on my chest, he put a knee between my thighs so that I could not close them… he placed his hand with a handkerchief over my throat and mouth that I would not cry out… Having before placed both his knees between my legs, and pointing his penis at my vagina he began to push and he put it in inside so that I felt it burning strongly and giving me great pain, but because of the gag that he held at my mouth I could not cry out’.³

It’s the possibility of what might happen next to Susanna that makes Artemisia’s painting full of dramatic tension, and that makes a discussion of the gaze, too, significant. Male power, in the end, is about violence. A Renaissance audience would know that the Elders would get their just comeuppance and Susanna would be exonerated of all wrongdoing. Artemisia, too, would ultimately bounce back from her violent assault, and find her voice painting female heroines such as Judith, ferociously beheading male oppressors.

The Power of Looking

Veronica Gambara’s most famous poem, perhaps, is the one she wrote about her beloved’s eyes:

Eyes shining and lovely

How can it be that in the same instant

Are born from you such new and countless forms?

Joyful, sad, proud, humble, and changing,

All-at-once you seem, so with hope

And with fear you fill me,

And such sweet, bitter and fierce effects

In my burnt heart unite for you

At any hour you desire.

Now, since you are my life and death,

Eyes blissful, eyes blessed and dear,

Forever be calm, joyful and clear.⁴

Gambara (1485–1550) published about eighty poems during her lifetime, and several were set to music. Her poem about eyes was performed as a madrigal, full of yearning love, and was most likely originally addressed to her husband, Giberto. A quarter of a century older than Veronica, as well as being something of a philanderer, he spent long periods of time away fighting in the Italian wars, and was eventually killed in 1518, when Veronica was in her early thirties.

Gambara was one of several women who became politically important in one of the small cities of northern Italy during the Franco-Italian wars, along with peers like Isabella d’Este and Caterina Sforza. Alongside other female poets – most notably Vittoria Colonna (c. 1490–1547) – Gambara appropriated Petrarchan poetry, with its intent focus on female beauty, and turned her poetic gaze on men. These female poets used Petrarch’s models to articulate their own feelings about love, loss and desire.⁵

Unknown Cremonese painter, Veronica Gambara da Coreggio (c. 1509)

Gambara hailed from the province of Brescia, and came from a family with a long tradition of erudite, powerful women. She benefited from being educated in the same way as her brothers. Veronica had sophisticated parties at her ‘Little House of Delights’, in the countryside near their fiefdom of Correggio, and established a literary academy where poets, historians and painters could meet to discuss and recite poetry. In later life she eschewed the ‘child-like foolishness’, as she saw it, of her youthful poems (‘all the while I was struggling against / My own desires… intensely felt / in tingling flesh’) and her poetry became increasingly political and strategic. She used her verses to win over rulers, notably Emperor Charles V, to her cause, successfully steering her small domain through the choppy waters of the Italian wars that raged during her rule.⁶

Eyes played a special role in Renaissance culture because they were understood to be a particularly porous part of the body, where hazily defined ‘vapours’ could be transferred between people – not metaphorically but actually, corporeally. Eyes were essential in love because they allowed for the exchange of these vapours between lovers, like open windows for the heart and soul of two people to touch each other. Castiglione explains the mechanism:

Eyes often kindle love in the beloved’s heart… those quick spirits that issue from the eyes, being generated near the heart, enter again by the eyes (to which they are aimed like an arrow at the mark), and naturally reach the heart as if it were their abode… Travelling thus to and fro over the road from eyes to heart… little by little these messengers fan with the breath of desire that fire.⁷

The gaze in the Renaissance was understood as having tangible power. Women could be prosecuted in court for casting spells with their eyes to bewitch men – a kind of love magic, as discussed in the last chapter – or even to kill love rivals and children. As late as the early eighteenth century, in Apulia a woman accused of witchcraft, known as Antonia Donatino, was said to have cured a young woman of pain in her eyes and kidneys caused by ‘the eyes of those in love with her’ due to her prettiness.⁸

It was relatively common for older women to be accused of casting evil eyes, especially at young babies. In late-sixteenth-century Latisana, a small town in north-east Italy, a woman named Apollonia, who was well known as a local healer, helped to protect infants from demonic attacks by making holy signs over their swaddling clothes: ‘I sign you against the evils of witchcraft, against the evils of bad encounters, and against the ills of the evil eye.’⁹ Travellers and infants, or others thought vulnerable to the evil eye, were encouraged to carry talismans to distract the gaze. These really could be distracting – in the shape of male and female genitalia, or in the relatively decorous form of a clenched fist, with the tip of the thumb peaking out between the index and middle fingers – the ‘fica’ (vulva) gesture. There are some disconcerting late-fifteenth-century pilgrims’ badges from the Netherlands that show penises and vulvas riding horses, or being carried aloft in penis parades, or simply wandering around in hats, that surely would have worked to divert the evil eye towards them and away from their bearer.¹⁰

Votive pilgrim badge in the shape of a vulva (c. 1400–1500)

The power of eyes to bind bodies together in love was one of the reasons why women were expected to keep their eyes lowered. The scholar Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), in his best-selling book on the education of girls, suggested that while in company a young woman should be ‘retiring and silent, with her eyes cast down so that some, perhaps, may see her, but none will hear her’.¹¹ This kind of thing must have exasperated women like Gambara.

Despite her political, cultural and literary accomplishments, even Gambara was not able to escape the assessing gaze of her peers. Indeed, she was well aware of the importance of appearances in Renaissance court culture – she was an influential patron of art and architecture, commissioning ‘marvels’ from the painter Antonio da Correggio among others, and she also took care of her own appearance.¹² She wrote a letter to her agent, Lodovico Rosso, asking for ‘those things without which I would not be able to appear with the elegance that, as you know, is my usual style’. Her letters are dotted with requests for cosmetic treatments – a ‘beautiful and good Levantine cloth’, a piece of material imbued with rouge to redden the cheeks; a preparation for the complexion and rinses to make hair golden, and several other references to medical-cosmetic ‘waters’ and ‘oils’.¹³

Her description in a biography by her contemporary Rinaldo Corso is queasily damning:

If Veronica’s face corresponded to the rest of her body, she was perfectly beautiful, and full of grace up to old age. But her face, whilst not ugly, was not, however, very delicate, but this defect however was largely recompensed by the eloquence that greatly came from her mouth, and that was issued from her sweet pen… the good quality of her complexion was achieved through exerting her body little.

Her family archives also suggest she was not ‘delicate’ – ‘she had a large body… tall and fat’.¹⁴ Nevertheless, Gambara was able to deflect this type of criticism with her wit. In 1535, she sent her friend Agostino Ercolani a puppy, the offspring of a favourite dog of hers. In the accompanying letter, she admitted that Ercolani might not get a good first impression, as the puppy seemed very ugly, but she thought her friend would be won round.

As often happens to men, who, upon seeing an ugly woman or a very ugly man, you may dislike them at first sight, but then, chatting a little, find beneath that ugly shell a most beautiful soul, and a thousand excellent features within, and so you may praise as beautiful and good that which once seemed ugly and faulty.¹⁵

Gambara’s social position, her education, her eloquence and, above all, her shrewdness as both a poet and a political actor meant that while appearances had to be kept up, her ‘beauty’ was less important than those ‘thousand excellent parts within’.

Seeing Women Naked

‘What you are permitted to touch, you are not permitted to see,’ thundered the Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena in 1427: ‘it is better to die than let yourself be seen naked,’ he impressed upon his female audience. Although there’s likely some distance between what he preached and real-world sexual behaviour, ‘respectable’ women were expected to be modest and seek to hide their nakedness, even in front of their husbands – ‘You, woman, never agree to allow yourself to be seen naked by your husband, because he is sinning, and so are you,’ argued a mid-fifteenth-century guide to married life. Public nakedness was deemed deeply shameful, and sometimes used as a punishment for crimes such as adultery – in Ferrara wives who had been unfaithful were made to run through the streets naked while crowds threw rotten vegetables at them. Legislation was occasionally passed to maintain women’s clothing – in Genoa in 1488, for example, a law was made to prevent women revealing their collarbones.¹⁶

As Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders suggests, the one place where naked (or at least near-naked) bodies were frequently on show was during bathing. Not surprisingly, the bathhouse was a particularly charged location for the erotic imagination. All Italian cities had public bathhouses. ‘There are great numbers of baths in Rome, in Naples, Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Bologna, Lucca, and in other cities in Italy,’ attests Tommaso Garzoni in his encyclopaedic survey of Italian trades, The Universal Piazza, of 1585.¹⁷

Renaissance bathhouses were much more than places to get clean, and operated a bit like a modern health spa, with bath-workers (‘stufaruoli’) offering a wide range of services. In Garzoni’s words, ‘they wash you, make you sweat, place cupping glasses, remove hair and clean everything’. They shared many of the tasks of the barber-surgeons, including treating wounds, whitening teeth and letting blood, and were often in the same guild – or, in the case of Venice, shared a con-fraternity at the church of San Paternian. For the Venetian authorities, in fact, this trespassed into what they perceived as quack medicine, and necessitated intervention. A decree of July 1615 railed against those bath-workers who ‘order decoctions… without having knowledge of the [humoral] complexion of the patient and mainly burn them; others make ointments with quicksilver, perfumes, and other things and cause great damage to their neighbours’ and their own souls; and others, using signs of witchcraft, give medicine orally that is so strong that instead of driving away spirits, it drives away the soul [i.e. kills the patient]’.¹⁸ Public baths were always something of a thorn in the side of those intent on raising public morals.

A lot of rubbing went on in the bathhouse. In this period, cleanliness is less associated with rinsing the body with water than with rubbing it with hands or cloths. In fact, the action of wearing linen cloth against the skin was sometimes deemed sufficient protection against dirt in itself. In one 1602 discussion of bathing in Genoa, we read this in praise of undershirts:

because [the ancients] didn’t use linen clothes… they were covered generally with all kinds of dirt so that they were forced to clean their flesh every day with bath water… but in our times almost universally, both rich and poor, use undershirts, and because they keep the body clean more easily, it’s not so common or so frequent [to use baths] like in ancient times.¹⁹

In Italy, and across Europe in this period, people owned undershirts in surprising quantities. The 1569 inventory of the Venetian courtesan Julia Lombardo shows that she owned more than forty, including a special one ‘for bathing’.²⁰ Although this number is particularly high, it’s common in inventories to come across people of all classes owning ten or more of these shirts; they were likely changed daily and owned by pretty much everyone.²¹

Baths remained popular in Italy, though, and were absolutely essential for ladies to retain their charms. But, as always, moderation was everything. Marinello is particularly concerned that baths shouldn’t be too hot ‘if your beauty is dear to you [… ] because that would burn the skin, whilst bringing out marks and illness’, and advises that they should be taken two hours before eating. With these precautions, it was considered safe for women to take a bath twice a month.²²

Public baths were notorious dens of iniquity. For example, the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci noted in a diary entry of May 1506 how an image of the Virgin Mary facing one of Florence’s public baths had miraculously closed her eyes ‘because she did not want to see the sins that are committed there’.²³ Sin was also very much on the mind of the Venetian authorities when they decreed in 1460 that no ‘keeper of an inn, tavern or bath-house’ should permit a woman ‘to have herself touched on his premises during the day’, at the risk of being fined ten lire – bathhouses frequently doubled up as informal brothels.²⁴

These issues were never to go away. Garzoni is damning about the bath-workers: ‘There are few bath-workers who aren’t pimps, and who don’t keep secret rooms, mixing exterior dirt with interior filth in those baths, that are recipes for a thousand shameful acts and dishonest carnal libidinousness.’²⁵ A carnival poem from Florence called ‘The Song of the Bath-workers’ gives us an idea of the kind of things these guys got up to. Verses written for carnival were traditionally incredibly bawdy and full of unsubtle sexual innuendo, and this poem is no exception:

The clothes that we wear

along with our implements, show you,

ladies, that rubbing is our skill…

The temperate heat

Grows in the baths, and lengthens

Every stiffened member,

With such pleasure, that you cannot estimate it

We also in touching it

Splash your backs, body and chests,

We have you taste other great delights…

When the time comes

For you to use our baths, honourable ladies,

Certain secret rooms

We have for you, set aside from other people.

Come accompanied

By your husbands, or by your lovers and then

Do also let yourself be rubbed by us.

If you see us going about

Just in our undershirts, Ladies, we do it

To show more clearly

The skill which we exercise with pleasure.

Nor do we feel any cold,

However, because all of us, being loving,

Are burning inside from the fire of love.²⁶

Not surprisingly, baths became the focus for the erotic imagination, and there are several prints and paintings of the period that use bathing scenes as a way of showing off female bodies. Sometimes same-sex touching is added to further fire up the viewer’s desire, in images like Dürer’s woodcut The Men’s Bath of around 1496, with its array of muscled men flaunting their bodies in nothing but scanty pairs of tie-on undies, alongside an implausibly phallic tap.²⁷ There is lesbianism, too, in the etching Women’s Bath by Jean Mignon (overleaf), after a drawing by Luca Penni (one of Raphael’s pupils). Here, a linen undershirt lies carelessly discarded at the lower left corner, while naked women wash their hair and feet, look in mirrors, bathe, or erotically embrace – one couple impressively managing to do several of these things at once.

Baths as places for illicit sex were a continent-wide phenomenon, but lesbianism was especially associated in the European mind with Turkish baths.²⁸ Nicolas de Nicolay (1517–83) documented his impression of the baths when he went to Istanbul with a French delegation in 1551. He recorded his travels in an illustrated book, The Navigations and Voyages Made in Turkey, translated into Italian in 1576, nine years after the first French edition. One of his more memorable descriptions is of the tendency of Turkish women to have sex with each other in baths: ‘In every season, Turkish women delight in going to the baths,’ he says, ‘both to maintain their health, as well as to make their life more pleasant.’

Jean Mignon, Women’s Bath (c. 1526–55)

There is a very great friendship between the women of the Levant, proceeding from nothing else but their frequenting and familiarity at the baths. So, sometimes they ardently fall in love with one another as if they were men. So much so, that on seeing some girl or woman of excellent beauty, they will never stop until they have found a way to bathe themselves with her, so they can touch and handle her for their pleasure. The baths are full of lewd, lascivious women, like those Tribades used to be, who included in their number the Lesbian [poet] Sappho who, after she had persecuted hundreds of women and girls, transferred her love to her lover Phaon.²⁹

What’s typical here is the idea that women sexually pleasing each other either happened long ago (ancient Greece!) or far away (Turkey!) – and that, like Sappho, these aberrant women would eventually get over it and find a nice man.³⁰

Attitudes to female same-sex desire greatly shift over the Renaissance period. In the 1580s, writing in the French court, Pierre Brantôme assumed that lesbianism was a new fashion. He discusses the rise in popularity of ‘two ladies that be in love one with the other… sleeping together in one bed’. He argues that these ‘frivolous and empty pleasures’ were brought to France from Italy with Catherine de’ Medici (1518–1589), who had become queen of France in 1547. Catherine and her ladies-in-waiting, known as the ‘flying squadron’ (escadron volant), were accused of all sorts of sexual excess, much of which was fabricated.³¹ The curious idea that lesbianism was invented in sixteenth-century Italy is a salutary reminder that sex and gender identity can exist barely noticed in public discourse – and talking about this more openly is to recognise an existing, previously hidden, situation rather than magicking something new into existence.

Unlike male homosexuality, which was known to be extremely common as it was often condemned in criminal trials and happened in public places such as the tavern or the street, women were in physical proximity to one another in private spaces for much of the time. Domestic servants and ladies-in-waiting often had very close access to the bodies of their mistress and each other. This routine physical closeness is documented at times in Marinello’s Ornaments: ‘I know a gracious widow that when she bathes, anoints all her body with whipped honey, then has her maid rub her with bean flour and a clean cloth.’³²

Zoan Andrea, Two Women (c. 1464–1526)

Evidence for physical relationships between women in these circumstances is limited, and is often only revealed in trials, as in the story of Benedetta Carlini, abbess of a convent near Pescia whose coercive sex with her female servant was revealed during her trial for heresy.³³ It’s no coincidence that one of the first prints showing lesbian sex, by the Venetian printmaker Zoan Andrea, depicts sexual touching between a (disturbingly young) maid and her mistress.³⁴

Sexuality between women, because it tended to happen in private, was generally less frequently penalised (and thus less documented) than male homosexuality – though there are trials for ‘female sodomy’, as it was known in this period, where the perpetrators were executed, exiled or otherwise harshly punished. Generally, however, female homosexuality was thought to be less of a threat to public decency than male.

There is a great deal of evidence that women looked at other women’s bodies with desiring eyes. Female writers would often praise the virtue or beauty of their female dedicatees (as we’ve seen in the case of Maddalena Campiglia’s dedication to Isabella Pallavicina), and this sometimes spilled over into attraction. This likely reflected the broad cultural space opened up by Petrarchan poetry for praising female bodies, but in some case undoubtedly it also reflected individual desire. This is most famously the case for Laudomia Forteguerri (1515–c. 1555), who was well known in Sienese literary circles for the ‘chaste’ love she expressed for her patron Margaret of Austria in a series of longing-filled poems: ‘Ah, cruel fortune, / why do you not allow my body to go / where my heart goes?’³⁵ Female actors and artists both seem to have taken on language associated with their male peers in their appreciations of imagined female bodies. Take, for example, a poem designed to be set to music written by the writer, actor and playwright Isabella Andreini (who we met earlier).³⁶ Here she ‘ventriloquises’ the voice of a man gazing at his beloved’s breasts:

On that fair breast, whence the lily

Filled the whiteness of its snows,

With a thousand eyes the heavens gazed.

I don’t know if on that lovely breast

Those gazes rest still, or if kisses drop –

Thieves rapacious of my own well-being

Pure white snows, these sparks you kindle

By which I’m entirely burned,

You’re the death, the tomb as well

Of my gaze so ravenous,

Of my gaze because the Phoenix

Finds, in dying, happiness…

But, since I may not elsewhere rest,

To me alone will kindly Love

Reveal that pair of snowy hillocks

That make sweet April burst with bloom;

That set alight the golden flames,

For you, glory; for me treasure.³⁷

An equivalent to this ‘ventriloquism’ can alo be seen in images of female nudes by female artists. The expectation might be that, with full access to naked female models, women artists portrayed nudes with more realism than their male counterparts. Artistic fashion trumped realism, however.

Properzia de’ Rossi (c. 1490–c. 1530) was perhaps the first woman to depict a partially clad female body, in her image of Potiphar’s Wife, a marble relief made in 1525 for the door of Bologna Cathedral.³⁸ In this image traditional male/female relationships are reversed, as Potiphar’s wife pursues the youthful, handsome Joseph. When he does not succumb to her seduction she accuses him of rape. Properzia, like many other artists in the 1520s, had been indelibly influenced by Michelangelo, and the bare-breasted woman reaching out to bring the innocent Joseph back to her bed does so with a strongly muscled arm. She has the solid build of the female figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and it’s a wonder that Joseph managed to escape.

Lavinia Fontana was the first female artist to paint completely nude figures in mythological painting.³⁹ Fontana’s 1590s painting of the personification of Prudence (see plate section, image no. 21) at first sight seems to exactly conform to the litany of the Petrarchan descriptions of female beauty. Her breasts, in particular, seem to have a life of their own, standing proud from the chest with their pink pert nipples. However, there seems to be more to this painting, which is all looking and reflections, a play of mirrors. Judging by the discarded jewellery on the red-carpeted table, and the bed in the background, we are in a chamber while a woman is getting ready. But why has she got her foot on a celestial globe? Why is there a snake wrapped around her mirror? Why is she measuring her thigh with a pair of compasses?

Fontana borrowed this iconography from a friend, the artist Denys Calvaert, and it is a learned image, packed with references to other paintings, writings and iconographies.⁴⁰ Prudence is traditionally shown with a mirror – to indicate foresight, wisdom and self-knowledge – and a snake – to show the importance of caution. The face reflected in the hand mirror looks out at the viewer at an unlikely angle, the snake’s forked tongue gently caressing the reflected eye. Appearances, it seems, can be deceptive. Did Fontana use compasses like the ones Prudence uses on her thigh to construct the proportions of her female nude? It is tempting to read this image as a commentary on the constructed reality of ‘natural’ women’s beauty.

Fontana was to consider this highly self-conscious presentation of women’s beauty in another painting, her portrait of the Bolognese high-society belle Isabella Ruini (see plate section, image no. 22), who enjoyed short-lived fame as the most beautiful woman in Bologna.⁴¹ Ruini had herself portrayed as the goddess Venus, holding an arrow in her left hand while cradling Cupid’s head in the other as he whispers in her ear. She looks knowingly at the viewer, her hair immaculately curled, wearing only a gauzy see-through shift trimmed with gold, which shows off her small, gravity-defying breasts. In this radical act of erotic self-fashioning, Ruini’s body may or may not be true to life, but it does suggest that women’s erotic imagination was fuelled by the same cultural forces as men’s and was largely oriented towards female rather than male bodies. What we see here, however, inverts the traditional power dynamic of the ‘male gaze’. This image is not a woman being caught unawares, threatened by male onlookers, but one who invites admiration and finds authority and control in being desired.

Artemisia Gentileschi probably painted more female nudes than any other woman artist of the period. She painted a languid, laid-back Sleeping Venus (now in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) when she was in Rome in the late 1620s.⁴² Like her Susanna, discussed at the beginning of the chapter, her Venus (see plate section, image no. 23) reflects the fashionable body type of the day – pale body, plump thighs, rounded stomach, pert breasts – and, like nudes by her male contemporaries, fetishises the female body as an object for erotic contemplation.

The underlying assumption of the ‘male gaze’ rests on a rather simplistic view that only men look at women’s bodies with desire. Gentileschi’s images suggest a more fluid state of affairs, with desirous looks flashing forth in all directions. The difference in her artworks is her constant interest in subjects that place women at the centre of the story and, particularly in her images of Judith brutally murdering Holofernes, the focus on women’s revenge on their male foes. Her fresh approach to biblical and mythological subjects gained remarkable success, especially with female patrons.

As for her private life, in 1612 she had an arranged marriage to her father’s friend Pierantonio Stiattesi, with whom she was to have five children, four of whom died in infancy. By 1620 her success as a painter allowed her to live largely separately from him, with control over her own money. In her twenties she had a long love affair with another man, the handsome tousle-haired aristocrat Francesco Maria Maringhi. A handful of her letters to him survive, where she demonstrates how much she misses him and worries about whether he will still be attracted to her after her pregnancy in spring 1620. Her physical yearning is evident in these texts. She also, rather coquettishly, chides him for masturbating over her portrait in a letter that shows a heightened awareness of her powers of visual seduction:

I cannot control my feelings in my heart when I receive letters from you. I have held fast so far, but find it hard to take heart for the future, as I know what state I am in. I would urge you with all my heart not to use that portrait of mine, doing that impossible thing that remember you promised not to do, but which perhaps your Lordship does. I would only remind you that it is a great sin, and I want you to remember that I love your soul as much as your body.⁴³

We don’t know which self-portrait Artemisia is referring to here – perhaps something like her image of herself as a lute player, which we discussed in Chapter 8. At any rate, this exchange confirms that Artemisia was well aware of the power of female bodies, including her own body, to evoke desire in the viewer. In Elisabeth Cropper’s words, she came ‘to own the female body, its voluptuous force, self-possession and passion’.⁴⁴ Being looked at is no passive act here. Attracting gazes can also be powerful. These female artists show how women appropriated the words and images of men to look with desire at members of the opposite sex, as well as their own.

12 REBELLIOUS HAIR

GIOVANNA GARZONI (1600–1670) was a small-town girl with big ambitions. Growing up in Ascoli Piceno, near Rome, she dreamed of escape from a young age. When she was around eighteen she depicted herself as Apollo, the god of music and artistic inspiration, leader of the muses. Her tousled, curly dark-brown hair tumbles down her back, she’s crowned with laurel leaves and holding a viola da gamba (see plate section, image no. 24). Apollo is quite a role model for a teenage girl, but Garzoni was an extraordinary figure, whose restless imagination and thirst for adventure burst out in the drawings of seafaring galleons in her early notebooks, and letters that she sent around the courts of Italy, yearning for a patronage that would allow her to see more of the world. Garzoni’s insatiable interest in nature became her stock-in-trade – her best-known paintings are minutely rendered images of flowers and fruit, shells and insects that surge with life. This portrait was probably used as self-promotion, to show off her talents to potential patrons. She was invited to the Florentine court around the time it was painted, and dazzled the Medici and their entourage with her skills as a musician, singer, miniaturist and painter.¹

Marinello explains that ‘both the ancient and the modern poets and painters want the hair belonging to a beautiful woman to be long, soft, thick, curled and of a blond colour like gold,’ and a brief perusal of Venus, the goddess of beauty depicted by artists from Botticelli to Titian, would confirm that the ideal hair colour was strawberry blond.² Garzoni’s decision to depict herself with shaggy, dark hair falling around her face is no accident, and such dark, barely controlled curls are found in many other depictions of adventurous seventeenth-century women. You see it in Bernardo Strozzi’s startlingly erotic portrait of (another) viola da gamba player, breasts almost bared, and hair fizzing out of its confines, most likely modelled on Barbara Strozzi (see plate section, image no. 19). You see it in the strands of black hair escaping from the loosely tied bun of Garzoni’s friend, Artemisia Gentileschi, in her idealised Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting of 1638–9 (see plate section, image no. 25).³ Artemisia in real life likely wore her dark hair loosely tied back, at least in her late twenties and early thirties, judging by other contemporary portraits.⁴ Her appearance in this image – painted at the age of forty-five – reminds us that the chief aim of portraits was not necessarily to be true to life.

We find wild hair on the reverse of Felice Antonio Casoni’s portrait medal of Lavinia Fontana, made in 1611. Presented as a respectable older woman on the front, her hair intricately braided and covered with veils, on the back there is an allegory of painting showing a female personification of the art, seated at an easel, paintbrush in hand. This represents the ‘inner’ Fontana, curled tresses springing from her head like agitated snakes. Cesare Ripa interpreted loosened hair as an attribute of artistic inspiration in his Iconology (1593), an influential compendium of allegories and imagery drawn from ancient, medieval and early modern belief systems. Ripa writes that painting should be represented as a female figure ‘with full black hair, dishevelled, and twisted in various ways’.⁵ Wild hair is an outward sign of interior imagination, a sign of melancholy creativity and a ‘masculine’ temperament. By portraying themselves in this way, these women were engaging – or perhaps even playing – with Renaissance ideas that linked hair to character.

Felice Antonio Casone, Portrait Medal of Lavinia Fontana (1611)

As we know, hair colour and texture were used to ‘diagnose’ humoral balance. One influential physiognomy book explained, for example, that those with very curly hair are timid, unless only the tip of the hair is curly, which suggests animosity. Black hair demonstrates timidity and astuteness with a cunning nature; black and straight hair, lustfulness. Dark-blond hair shows the ability to learn quickly and a subtleness of wit; platinum blond like that of the ‘Scythians or Celts’ shows ignorance and rusticity. Golden hair – the colour that Renaissance commentaries argued that all truly beautiful women should have – was the colour of the goddess Miner-va’s locks and made women pleasant and men strong.⁶ In the Renaissance, then, hair had meaning – and a much more prescribed and specific meaning than today. It was also one of the few areas of their life over which (most) Renaissance women had agency: to express identity, cement allegiances, and to subvert expectations.

Hair and Sexuality

Of all the female writers I’ve read from this period, Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52) is the most bracingly furious. Her book Paternal Tyranny vibrates with rage against a system where women had few choices over their lives. She argues that gender equality is fundamental to true faith, and that Christ treated women as equals of men. Tarabotti was forced by her father to enter a convent as a child of eleven, and took her final vows at sixteen – an experience that around one in eight women went through in Italy in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the number of nuns rocketed due to the spiralling costs of dowries. Novitiate nuns had their hair shaved off to mark the transition to their new life, and covered their heads with a veil. Once they had entered the convent, they were supposed to shave their heads ‘at least once a month during the winter, and every two weeks in the summer’.⁷ For Tarabotti, this ritual process exemplified everything that was wrong with a patriarchal society.

Women’s hair is a sign of both liberty and superiority, and since she is free and not subject, she should not allow her head to be shorn. How can it be right for women to crop their own hair, thereby removing from themselves the greatest attraction and adornment received from nature?⁸

The veil and the head shaving that she was forced to undergo were just external fripperies. In a later book, Convent Paradise, she explains how she retained her interior liberty: ‘I cut my hair but I did not uproot my feelings.’⁹

The ritual of shaving the heads of novice nuns was a sign of eschewing sexuality and any prospect of marriage. Hair carried a significant erotic charge. In her poem starting with the line ‘A che, bella e crudel, tender le reti’, Lucchesia Sbarra (1576–1662), a poet from the Veneto, showed how women used hair as bait to capture men, flipping the standard trope of male huntsmen pursuing female quarry:

Why, lovely and cruel lady, do you spread your nets

And greedily gulp up the feathered birds

And bend with your hands the green bushes,

And with your feet scale beeches and firs?

Now, quieten your mad desire,

And if you still want prey, then your eyes and your hair

Reveal. The first will be the bait, and the other the net

To make your prisoners content and joyful.

In such a rich net, such a sweet

Ambrosial bait, so gorgeous (in tresses so golden

That Cupid spreads out and unfurls them with his own hands),

They fly to battle with souls and hearts;

So every reluctant thought becomes drunk and softened

And men howl to be taken prey.

There’s not much known about Sbarra, beyond what her book of poetry, published in 1610, tells us – that she mourned a son who died in his infancy and was a pious and erudite woman with a love for wordplay, whose ‘graceful rhymes’ were given ‘universal applause’. To properly understand this poem, it is worth knowing that the Italian word for bird was (and is) common slang for penis, an allusion that wouldn’t have been lost on Sbarra’s readers.¹⁰

Her description of the ‘sweet ambrosial bait’ of unfurled golden tresses as being the thing most likely to attract ‘birds’ was well founded. Women’s loose hair was transgressive, dangerous even. In public heads were almost always at least partially covered and hair was tied back from the face, and often both. The sight of women in the process of washing or adorning their hair was thought to be a deeply intimate one. In a letter of 1491, Galeazzo Visconti describes a wondrous moment when he visited Isabella d’Este and her ladies-in-waiting while visiting the Sforza castle in Milan:

I will never forget in my life that evening and her sweet company, and I went to the little chamber of the lady Duchess, thinking to find her – and she was having her hair done, and with her was Teodora and Beatrice in their undershirts, and also Violante and Maria, both half-dressed.¹¹

There’s a letter from a Florentine merchant, Lorenzo Pucci, a couple of years later, where he tells his friend about what he had seen in Rome at the house of Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519), the pope’s daughter and Duchess of Ferrara. The seventeen-year-old Giulia Farnese (the pope’s mistress) had just washed her hair, and was standing drying it by the fire:

Madonna Giulia has fattened up, and has become most beautiful. In my presence she loosened her hair and had it styled; it went down to her feet, I’ve never seen anything like it. She has the most beautiful hair that one can imagine!¹²

It is hard not to see both Isabella and Giulia laying out their traps for these unwary visitors here – catching their birds in those golden nets.

The Perils of Haircare

When Eugenia Spada was pregnant for the first time in 1656, she was away from her family home, stuck in Viterbo with her husband’s family. She wrote to her mother in Rome for advice. Much of her worry swirled around washing her hair. Her mother-in-law had told her to avoid it for at least three or four months. Her mother, Maria – a woman well known for her health expertise – disagreed, and said that Eugenia was fine to wash her hair, though she should be careful about bending over, and that perhaps leaning backwards might be better.¹³

The idea that washing your hair could harm your growing baby might seem strange now, but in the Renaissance, care of the head and hair was central to those health regimens – or ‘diets’ – discussed previously. Hair (or head) care was a regular part of daily routines for both men and women. For example, the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni, based on an original Arabic text, but in the Middle Ages ascribed to Arnaldus de Villanova (c. 1240–1311) was a remarkable popular health manual, with more than 100 printed editions from the 1470s to the early seventeenth century. Based on the idea of the six non-naturals, this treatise opens with advice on six non-negotiable things to do after waking up in the morning to preserve your health. Besides washing your eyes and hands, moving about, stretching and brushing your teeth, he goes on:

The fifth thing you must do is comb your hair. The reason is that it opens the pores on the head, and allows vapours that are left in the brain after sleep to escape and makes the spirit sharper… Therefore it is necessary that [the comb] be used several times every day, because it draws vapours out of the top [of the body] and moves them away from the eyes.¹⁴

Others suggested rubbing the scalp hard with a rough cloth, and brushing your hair and scalp with at least forty strokes of the comb. Judicious hair-washing with scented lye, combing through fragrant powders with warming humoral flowers and herbs, or even dying your hair, were not merely about improving your appearance, but also about conserving your health via the porous skin of the head.

Combing and rubbing the head was thought to be a safer way to clean it than using water, and was to be done daily. Marinello suggests that the ‘usual’ practice was to wash hair with warm water once a week, and to comb it through morning and evening. Hair-washing would likely take place either kneeling on the floor while leaning over special broad copper basins made for the purpose, or bending over one of these basins placed on a table or a custom-made stand (below). These were quite deep, and smooth on the inside, so easily rinsed out.¹⁵ If you were sufficiently well-to-do you would have a maid help you, carrying the water and rinsing as you bent over.

Allesandro Allori, woman washing hair, detail from the Allori Loggetta (1587–9).

People could buy or make soap to clean the head and hair, with various formulations available depending on need. Marinello is typical in suggesting umpteen recipes for what we would now call shampoo, often based on water mixed with vine ashes (which would produce lye or sodium hydroxide – which forms soap when mixed with fats), with different herbs added, depending on the result you wanted. So for thicker hair, for example, you could add mallow or wild pumpkin; for long hair there is a wash with honey and eggs; and for soft hair, camomile and sage. Marinello discusses a very successful shampoo recipe invented by a ‘youthful peasant woman’ that mixed lye with bean and barley flowers. There are also rinses to make the hair ‘straight and sleek’ or to get rid of split ends – what we’d now call conditioner. These often include mucilaginous mallow, or olive oil infused with the scent of lily, rose or violet. I include one of these recipes in the last chapter; it makes a satisfyingly gloopy end product.

There were special towels too, in Italian literally called ‘head-driers’. Amazingly, some of these Renaissance towels still exist; there are several in the Victoria and Albert Museum. They tend to be longer and slimmer than the towels we use today – the one pictured is about 152 × 56 cm. It’s a finely woven linen and cotton affair, white with blue stripes and patterns of castles and animals at either end.¹⁶ It’s easy to see how it would have been wrapped around the head, turban-style, to dry the hair and keep the head warm. Protecting your head from the cold was very important. Washing your hair in winter was deemed a risky affair; there are lots of dark mutterings in the sources about the problem of wetting the head in January, which was explicitly prohibited by some doctors. It was imperative to dry your hair with warm cloths afterwards and to keep a large towel wrapped around the head to protect it from the cold – perhaps something like the ones in the V&A. Going out in public like this was thought so indecent in the Middle Ages that in 1208 the commune of Valdambra in Tuscany introduced a five-soldi fine for transgressors.¹⁷

Towel known as the ‘Perugia Towel’ (Italian, c. 1400s–1500s).

‘I have spent so much time drying my hair that a whole day has passed,’ Isabella d’Este complained to her husband – as it was unacceptable to be seen out and about with wet hair, and even potentially endangering to health, it meant that life had to be put on hold.¹⁸ This meant that the difficulty of drying hair in the winter could be used as a handy excuse for avoiding social events. Lucrezia Borgia, for example, several times used her need to rest after hair-washing as an excuse to dodge parties she didn’t want to go to. In 1502, to avoid going to a dance, ‘she stayed in her room… to wash her hair, and also she is very solitary and remote by nature’. She washed her hair again five days later, which delayed her ceremonial entrance to Faenza. In another five days, she disappeared for a day to wash her hair once more. Apparently, if she didn’t wash her head often enough she got headaches.¹⁹

This link between haircare and bodily ailments reminds us once again of how hygiene was a matter of health – of life and death even. Exactly how often you should wash your hair was a subject hotly debated by doctors, who gave conflicting and confusing advice. Although Marinello suggests a weekly scrub, other sources recommend a wash just once every twenty days. Then again, infrequent washing could cause illness too. In 1599 a Roman woman, Giulia Benzoni, wrote to her husband that she hadn’t washed her hair for twenty-two days because it was painful for her to bend over. The result was a sore throat. No wonder Eugenia Spada was anxious about what hair-washing might do to her growing baby. Tragically, five years later her fears were realised. In 1661 she wrote to her mother about her recent miscarriage, and blamed herself: ‘she had decided to wash her head and got very tired as a result’.²⁰

Colour, Style – and Rebellion

Given the ubiquity of golden-blond hair in descriptions of beautiful women in this period, it is hardly surprising that there is a vast number of recipes for bleaching the hair in early modern sources, certainly more for this than any other colour. Venetian women, in particular, were famous for bleaching their hair. It became such a feature of the city that they were even depicted this way in costume books – large encyclopaedias of clothing from around the world and different historical periods – that were aimed to show the ‘typical’ dress of various peoples.²¹ There is an insight into how Venetian women bleached their hair in Cesare Vecellio’s printed costume book of 1598:

In Venice on the roofs of houses they have square wooden structures, like uncovered loggias, called altane, where, with much skill and care, all (or at least most), women of Venice make their hair blond with various sorts of waters and lotions made for this purpose. And they do this when the sun is high and at its hottest, being able to bear it in this way. They sit down with a little sponge which is fixed to the top of a spindle, and they bathe their hair [with bleaching mixture]. They wear a dress made of silk or light linen called a ‘slave-frock’, and on their head they wear a hat of finely woven straw, called a ‘solana’ that protects them from the sun. They have a mirror in their hands.²²

The illustration shows exactly this, with little pots of hair lightener on the floor and towels hanging on a rail above. To make it still more typically Venetian, on the lower right are discarded on the floor the city’s notorious platform shoes, or zoccoli.

Venetian woman bleaching her hair. From Cesare Vecellio, Ancient and Modern Clothes (1590).

Despite the near-tyrannical fashion for blond hair, repeated endlessly in verbal and visual evocations of female beauty, women persisted – rather wonderfully – in experimenting with other colours. This puzzled Marinello. He recognised that some people with naturally dark hair might want to conceal grey – especially women ‘who have younger husbands’. But he proclaimed himself ‘wary of discussing anything about the ways to make hair red’.²³

The untrustworthy nature of red hair had been a consistent theme for centuries, noted in classical and medieval sources as well as in the Renaissance. For example, Michael Scot, the court astrologer to Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II, repeated Aristotle’s slur against redheads in the early thirteenth century, suggesting that red hair signified a man who was envious, salacious, proud, and who spoke ill of others.²⁴ In his Physiognomy, Bartolomeo della Rocca cites Aristotle’s History of Animals in his averral that true red hair ‘demonstrates ignorance, pride and betrayal’. Whatever scholars’ warnings against red hair, though, Renaissance women seem to have been very fond of the colour and it is common not only in portraits of this period but also in collections of hair dye recipes.

Once adolescence hit, out in public hair was invariably covered. The extent to which it was concealed depended both on changing fashions and on life stages. Head coverings – along with other types of clothing – were frequently subject to legislation. Vecellio also discusses Venetian women’s hair veiling in his Ancient and Modern Clothes. He says that Venetian widows

embrace the death of all vanities and ornaments. Because apart from dressing in black they cover their hair, firmly enclose their bosoms with a heavy veil, gather their mantle up to their forehead and walk in the streets with head inclined… Still, when they wish to remarry, they are permitted without stigma to wear some ornament, though not a conspicuous one, and reveal a little more hair, which serves to signal their intentions to others.²⁵

Venetian unmarried woman with veil. From Cesare Vecellio, Ancient and Modern Clothes (1590).

The more hair on show, it seems, the more sexually available you were deemed to be. Although hair-covering today is often associated with Islamic cultures, injunctions against women showing their hair are common in pre-modern Christian Europe. St Paul in 1 Corinthians says that while men should not cover their heads, ‘if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off… if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but if a woman has long hair it is her glory. For long hair is given to her as a covering.’ This was taken to mean that women’s hair should be both long and covered. This was confirmed periodically by churchmen, both in Protestant northern Europe and in areas subject to Catholic reform. How hair was covered varied widely, but in many places – for example, Venice, Spain and Switzerland in the later sixteenth century – veils often covered much of the face as well as the hair, as in the image (see previous page) by Vecellio of a sixteenth-century Venetian maiden.²⁶

Even if hair wasn’t completely covered, it was never allowed simply to hang loose, but was invariably styled in some way that incorporated accessories, such as brooches, pearls or ribbons. Plaiting was common too, with braids often pinned in a circle near the back of the head with shorter, wavy, centrally parted hair framing the face. Commonly this plait, and some of the rest of the head, was covered by a coif – a small piece of (often white) cloth that sat on and contained the hair. Intricately plaited hair is also on show in many portraits, especially in a few examples by Botticelli, where hair takes on a life of its own, swooping and swirling, curled and tied, false and real – pearls, curls and ribbons all vie for attention.²⁷ Judging by Instagram, the Botticelli hairstyle is now a bridal favourite. It’s perfectly possible to emulate if you have sufficient hair, a lot of patience and a hairdresser, or skilful friend, willing to oblige.²⁸ It was also common in the Renaissance to buy false hair – the Venetian courtesan Julia Lombardo (c. 1495–1542) had ‘a pair of blond tresses of women’s hair’ in the inventory of her house taken at her death.²⁹

Occasionally governments would step in with sumptuary legislation to try to enforce ‘morals’ in women’s hairstyles. In 1480, for example the Venetian Council of Ten outlawed a fashionable haircut called the ‘fungus’ or mushroom, ‘which hides the forehead’. A high, broad and unblemished forehead was a key asset for a beautiful woman, so this adaptation of a fringe was considered to make the bearer seem indecently masculine. The husband, father or brother of these women would be forced to pay 100 ducats; to get an idea of the vastness of this fine, consider that a manual labourer was paid around 3 ducats a month.³⁰ Given the pictorial evidence from this time, such as the stunning portrait of an unrepentantly fringed red-headed woman in an image attributed to the Venetian painter Carpaccio from around 1495–8 (see plate section, image no. 26), this law was remarkably unsuccessful. In 1562 the government clamped down further, suggesting that all accessories, including bonnets, hats, coifs and other items such as gloves and belts, should be plain, without embroidery or perfume: another sumptuary law that was doomed to fail.³¹

Woman also used their hairstyles to signify loyalty and belonging, or political allegiance. Eleonora of Aragon (1450–93) imported the ‘Aragonese look’ to northern Italy when she married Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, in 1473. This consisted of a long hairpiece plait called a coazzone down the back, with a cap on the back of the head, held in place by a band that went round the forehead. Her daughter Beatrice d’Este (1475–97) took this hairstyle with her when she married the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. This hairstyle became so immediately popular that you can see it in practically every portrait of a woman of the Milanese court in the 1490s, including Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of the Duke’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, depicted with an ermine. The style died out as suddenly as it arrived, clearly becoming deeply unfashionable sometime around 1500.³²

Beatrice’s sister, Isabella d’Este, was equally famous for the avant-garde hairstyles that she invented. There’s a gossipy letter in 1505 that suggests her outrage when she heard that Lucrezia Borgia and her female entourage had stolen Isabella’s look. Letters over the next eight years keep mentioning this style, which consisted of something called a capigliera. You can see what it looks like in a portrait by Rubens (after Titian) of Isabella now in Vienna (see plate section, image no. 14), and in many other portrayals of aspiring northern Italian women of this era. Basically, it’s a massive doughnut headdress fabricated from human hair that perches on the back of the head, woven together with existing hair with gold thread and jewels. Tight curls emerge from below it to frame the face.³³

It seems that plaiting, curling and otherwise styling hair was an important part of women’s social lives. The 1505 letter alleges that Lucrezia Borgia and her ladies paid ‘attention to nothing but curling each other’s hair’.³⁴ Certainly Marinello assumed that his female readers would have some expertise in this area:

It seems to me superfluous to talk about wavy and curly hair, whichever you want to call it, because none of you women don’t know how to make it so with some tool or another; even men apparently curl their hair with a hot rag or with their hands. But there are some women who do it by winding their hair around spoons that have been heated in the fire; others bathe the hair in gum arabic dissolved in water, then turning the hair around a spindle; and others in other ways.³⁵

Apart from the spoons – which presumably worked in the same way as heated curlers – I’ve tried all of Marinello’s suggested methods out and they work pretty well. Gum arabic – which is still widely available as it is used as for painting and in food – sets the hair into place and makes for a long-lasting curl, if a slightly crunchy texture. It is fun to try these hairstyles out now, as it must have been for women in the Renaissance. One element that stands out above all else when considering Renaissance women’s attitude to their hair is their willingness to experiment, using a wide variety of styles, colours and ornament. Changing hairstyle was a relatively inexpensive thing to do, and was generally reversible. Even shaved hair, after all, grows back.

The urge to style hair was irresistible for Renaissance women, despite injunctions to make them stop. Official visitations from the church authorities constantly upbraided nuns for showing their hair and styling it in the fashions of day – making it blond and curly, or sporting the forbidden ‘mushroom’ chignon that was so popular at the turn of the sixteenth century, or the ‘horns’ that you can see in early-seventeenth-century Italian portraits, like the one of Moderata Fonte in Chapter 2 (see page 19).³⁶ Fancy hairstyles, however, just kept bouncing back. For women with a limited degree of agency, hair provided a means of shared creative expression. Even for those, like Tarabotti, who were forced to conform to social strictures, the idea of hair could inspire rebellion. ‘I reformed my life’, she says in Convent Paradise, ‘but my thoughts, like my hair, the more they are cut the more they grow, continually multiplying.’³⁷

Part Five COMMUNITIES OF KNOWLEDGE

13 POISON AND THE PATRIARCHY

ON 26 APRIL 1549, the 27-year-old mother of five Prudenza da Trani was publicly executed. She was beheaded on a specially erected platform next to the church of Sant’ Apollinare in Florence, just across from the Bargello, then the civic prison. An entry in the archives of the Confraternity of Santa Maria della Croce al Tempio – the company tasked with assisting those condemned to death – noted her crime: ‘Through devilish instigation, and perhaps urged by some person of ill repute because of her beauty and grace, she gave poison to her husband, and he died.’¹ Prudenza’s story opens the door to a world of beauty and murder, make-up and poison – and the impossible contradictions of femininity in the Italian Renaissance.

The imagined lament of this beautiful young wife who killed her husband became a popular pamphlet, repeatedly printed in many Italian cities over the next century (pictured overleaf). These verses make much of the sharp juxtaposition between beautiful surfaces and frightening depths, stressing not only how worldly beauty means little when your head is chopped from your ‘white torso’, your graceful face covered in blood, but also that the head of justice cannot be turned, as it can see the truth below, the substance under the skin: ‘You would not believe that such beauty lacked help in strength or favour, but the justice of the high lord, showed little favour to my beauty,’ the condemned woman is made to say. ²

Frontispiece from The Lachrymose Lament of Signora Prudentia Anconitana (Venice, 1589).

The relationship between beauty and poison was not just metaphorical. According to the trial documents, Prudenza’s husband, Matteo Cecchi, had died in January that year, seemingly of natural causes. It was only through the chance discovery of a letter that the truth emerged – Prudenza had poisoned her husband with arsenic procured from an old associate from Ancona, a shady figure known only as Pacifico the perfumer. The letter suggested that she intended to use the arsenic to ‘medicate the heads of her children’.³

Arsenic was just one of several toxic ingredients found in Renaissance skincare, commonly used as a topical insecticide for bugs like scabies and lice. It was also occasionally used as an ingredient in skin-whitening creams, such as Caterina Sforza’s complex recipe of around 1500 for a ‘most excellent water that makes the face, throat, neck, chest and hands of women white and otherwise well coloured’.⁴ It was derived from orpiment, which was a standard ingredient in hair removal creams, alongside quicklime.

The use of these clearly harmful ingredients can seem odd to a modern audience, and it’s easy to play a history of Renaissance cosmetics for laughs – to chuckle at these foolish women in the past who died for their vanity! It is often assumed that women used poisonous ingredients without understanding that they were toxic. However, as I’ll show here, this is a misogynistic trope that has circulated since classical times and was repeated in the Renaissance, including by physicians trying to sell their cosmetic recipe collections and in popular books aimed at suppressing women’s freedoms. Renaissance women knew that some of their cosmetic ingredients were poisonous, but used them anyway. And Prudenza da Trani was not the only one to use make-up as a deadly way out of a marriage.

Understanding Poison

The flamboyant Venetian physician and writer Leonardo Fioravanti considered poisonous cosmetics in his Mirror of Universal Knowledge of 1572, listing a series of the most common ones and noting their ill effects. He first condemns the use of ‘sublimate’, a word used in this context to mean a range of substances that contain mercury. He argues that overuse of mercury blackens the teeth, makes the breath smell and ages the face, then suggests that women should not use ceruse (white lead) as a foundation, due to lead’s drying qualities. He suggests that rubbing your cheeks with asbestos to redden them is not a good idea either.⁵ Given our current knowledge, it is easy to agree with Fioravanti here, but women were not the outliers in using these substances in cosmetics. Mercury, lead and asbestos were widely used for the production of various goods, and in many medical treatments up until the twentieth century. Mercury was regularly used as a syphilis remedy until the nineteenth century. White lead was ‘continually made in Venice and in other merchant cities of Italy,’ Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–77) explains in his celebrated book on medical materials, ‘not only for the use of medicine, but also by painters and other masters.’⁶ It had been known since classical times that lead was poisonous if swallowed, but it was nevertheless commonly applied to wounds as it successfully dried them and prevented infection. Why should women be mocked for using materials for cosmetics that were in standard usage elsewhere?

Some of the other ‘poisons’ Fioravanti mentions may require careful use, but are not toxic. He warns sternly against lemon juice and camphor, cream of tartar, rock alum and nitre (potassium nitrate) – all ingredients found in cosmetics and hygiene items today. It becomes apparent that his motivations are not really to protect women, but to sell more of his own books. Fioravanti published with the Valgrisi press, who sold many popular medical textbooks. He recommends that women should consult his Compendium of Rational Secrets, ‘a book that is very useful and delightful for virtuous ladies’, for more information, as well as his friend Marinello’s text: ‘Dr Giovanni of Modena has brought out that lovely book called the Ornaments of Ladies, in which he teaches the way and order to make oneself beautiful.’ Without the advice of kindly, educated men like Marinello and himself, feather-headed ladies could make potentially fatal mistakes:

Often instead of making themselves beautiful [women] make themselves them very ugly. And this happens only because they do not understand the nature and quality of the ingredients, but with these warnings I will share with women and with the good recipes written by Dr Giovanni, everyone will remain satisfied and content.⁷

Given that women had considerable expertise in the invention, formulation and use of cosmetics, this paragraph is less of use to its readers than a consummate example of self-promotion (and proof that mansplaining existed well avant la lettre). In fact, poison was something that was very much on women’s minds when they made and created make-up.

Isabella of Aragon’s Teeth

Isabella of Aragon (1470–1524) was so afflicted by hardships in her twenties that she started to sign off her letters ‘Isabella, unique in misfortune’.⁸ Her bad luck perhaps continued after her death. In the late 1980s, a team of archaeologists exhumed twenty-four bodies from the Aragon crypt, including Isabel-la’s. One of the questions they were interested in investigating was the type of diet this wealthy group of Renaissance people were eating, so the family’s teeth were (literally) put under the microscope. Isabella’s were particularly intriguing; what the archaeologists found led them to suggest that she died from mercury poisoning, rather than a stroke, as was suggested in the historical sources. They attributed this to the use of mercury as a syphilis cure.⁹

Syphilis was a new disease in the 1490s, and rapidly became a danger at all levels of Italian society. Untreated, the disease takes around two to ten years to reach its tertiary stage, where it starts to cause disintegration of the bones. Because of this, archaeologists can diagnose later-stage syphilis from bone lesions.¹⁰ There were no such lesions on Isabella’s bones, so the assumption is that she contracted the disease relatively late in life, no more than ten years before her death at the age of fifty-four. Isabella was widowed in 1494 and remained unmarried for the thirty years before her death – but allegedly had ‘a very active sexual life even during widowhood’.¹¹ While it’s possible that this was the case, and that she did have syphilis, it is far from proven. What we do know, on the other hand, is that Isabella gained fame for developing a mercury-based skin whitener while she was Duchess of Milan.

Isabella grew up in Naples, the daughter of the future king Alfonso II and his Milanese wife, Ippolita Maria Sforza. While still a small child she was betrothed to the future Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Sforza (1469–94), and travelled north for the wedding just as she was turning eighteen. Despite the typical Renaissance grandeur of her reception in Milan, she had a difficult time in her new home. The political scheming of the duke’s uncle meant that her Neapolitan retinue was soon sent home and the couple was starved of money. Moreover, Isabella didn’t make the best first impression. Her blond, pale-skinned husband was reputed to be the more attractive of the pair. The Ferrarese ambassador, Giacomo Trotti, reported that ‘the new duchess has a face that is dark-skinned (‘negretta’) and is not very beautiful, but she has a gracious and lovely body, and the Duke is most beautiful and good’.¹² Trotti may have been slyly referring here to the parentage of her father, whose mother was a Valencian servant. There are no portraits from this period that are definitely of Isabella, but the image opposite is a persuasive candidate (by Ambrogio de Predis from around 1490). It shows a chestnut-haired young woman in Milanese court fashion, depicted here for posterity with flawless pale skin.¹³

Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, Portrait of A Woman (Isabella d’Aragona) (c. 1490)

Perhaps more humiliating for Isabella than the gossip about her husband outshining her in looks, was the common knowledge that that Gian Galeazzo was not willing or able to consummate the marriage. Months after the wedding, her aunt, the Duchess of Ferrara, wrote that Isabella ‘is as chaste and virginal as she was when she left Naples’. It seems that Gian Galeazzo preferred to be with his mistress, Cecilia, much to Isabella’s distress. She wrote a letter to her cousin, Beatrice d’Este, saying that she envied her equanimity in the face of her own husband’s extramarital affairs, a feeling that she felt unable to emulate.¹⁴

The marriage was eventually consummated, and Isabella went on to have her first child in 1491. After 1494, however, things went from bad to worse. Her husband died that year at the age of just twenty-six. The rumours were that he had died from ‘immoderate coitus’, though he was more likely poisoned by his ambitious uncle, Ludovico Sforza, who wanted to take over the duchy. Around the same time her son was taken hostage. In her own words, during these years, ‘I lost my husband and the state of Milan and my father and my brother and my son was seized from me.’¹⁵ Her later life was less tragic; she spent her last twenty-four years as ruler of the southern Italian city of Bari. Unusually for this time, she ruled this city in her own right, and she presided over its cultural revival, founding a literary academy, patronising writers and commissioning building works.

For a 54-year old sixteenth-century woman, Isabella’s teeth were not bad. She had only lost one of them by the time of her death (a molar to the upper right) and had two cavities and some plaque. The decent health of her teeth might have been partly due to the natural fluoride in the water around Naples. Nevertheless, at some point in her lifetime Isabella’s teeth had turned black. We can still see this blackening in photos from the dig. The archaeological team showed that she tried to remedy this during her lifetime through scraping off the blackened surface enamel with some sort of rigid tool – you can see parallel gouges, probably made with a tool made from pumice or cuttlefish bone. The direction of the striations suggests that she did this herself, presumably while sitting at a mirror. There is also evidence of wide grooves in between the front teeth, probably due to the use of metal toothpicks.¹⁶

As we’ve seen, Renaissance women commonly used mercury sublimate to whiten their skins. Now known as mercury(II) chloride, this is an inorganic compound of mercury and chlorine in the form of white crystals. Women would crush them and mix with a variety of other ingredients to make skin treatments. Typically, these were applied to the face like a mask – left for a period of time to work before being washed off to leave the complexion looking ‘naturally’ whiter. Mercury salts are still used (often illegally) today in skin-whitening products in areas where paler skin is socially valued.¹⁷

Given Isabella’s lukewarm reception in Milan, and her inability to attract her lily-skinned husband, it’s perhaps not surprising that she developed a skin-whitening recipe. ‘The most perfect face water used by the most illustrious lady, Isabella Duchess of Milan’ is described in an anonymous cosmetic recipe book of around 1500. It includes twelve lemons and twenty-five eggs, and a mixture of alum, asbestos, borax, camphor and mercury sublimate. After mixing these ingredients together, everything is placed in a pot with donkey milk and mallow, and then distilled in an alembic. The user should prepare her face by washing it with a breadcrumb exfoliator, then apply the resulting ‘water’, which should be covered with a soft cloth and left for an hour.¹⁸ Regular preparation and use of this recipe would certainly have involved repeated exposure to mercury.

Isabella was not the only noblewoman in northern Italy to experiment with toxic heavy metals in cosmetics. Her sister-inlaw, Caterina Sforza, includes many recipes for face treatments containing mercury in her Experiments. The following recipe, for example, is intended generically ‘to make beautiful’:

Take 15 lily bulbs and cover them with a flour paste, and put them in an oven and leave them until they are well cooked. Then remove the paste and cut the bulbs very finely on a stone, and add the same quantity of oil of tartar and some powdered mercury sublimate and mix the whole thing together. When you want to use it dissolve it with rose water and taking it with the hand, rub the face, which is excellent.

Sforza records several other recipes where you mix mercury sublimate with sage and walnuts, or with chewed-up mastic, or with bryony and breadcrumbs. It was a standard ingredient in cosmetic products.¹⁹

As Fioravanti’s warnings show, it was well known that women who used mercury as a cosmetic risked staining their teeth, and Isabella likely understood exactly why her teeth had become black when she was attempting to scrape off her enamel later in life. Even if she did undergo treatment for syphilis in the few years before her death, the evidence suggests that her mercury habit started much earlier, and was connected with skin whitening. Given the degree of public scrutiny she suffered, the humiliation meted out to her by her husband, and the gossip of the court, it’s hardly surprising that she resorted to efficacious means to whiten her skin, the promise of immediate results outweighing the long-term consequences. For Isabella and many other Renaissance women, the social, financial and personal benefits of a whiter complexion were not inconsiderable. Desperate situations called for desperate measures.

Make-Up, Misogyny and Murder

In September 1568, a fifteen-year-old girl from the Accarigi family in Siena confessed to murdering her two younger siblings. As was normal for crime suspects, she had been tortured by the ‘fune’ or rope; her arms were tied behind her back, and then she was hoisted up in the air by her wrists, leading to shoulder dislocation. She was likely held there for twenty minutes to an hour while being questioned.²⁰ She initially said her uncle had provided her with a poisonous powder to kill her family, but when she was taken down from the rope she revealed that she was, in fact, the murderer. Given her torture, it is quite possible the story she told was fabricated. It is revealing nevertheless.

She said that her mother, Ortensia Accarigi, beat her and was threatening to send her to a convent against her will. Both her mother and her sister used mercury sublimate (‘and other nonsense that women use to make themselves up’ according to the governor of Siena, Federigo Barbolani) as a cream for their faces. Knowing that this cream was poisonous, her mother normally locked it up in a strongbox. However, the unnamed girl collected the remnants of paste that her mother discarded as she finished the jar. In addition, she said, when her mother forgot to lock the paste away, the girl saw her chance and stole the poison, then sprinkled some of it on the salad her family was served for dinner. The adults fell ill, but survived, while her two small siblings died. The girl (who is never named in the sources) said she had been influenced by ‘the devil’ and never intended to kill her young siblings, just to hurt her mother.²¹

This girl’s frustration at having no agency over her future – beaten by her mother and about to be forced, against her will, into a convent for the rest of her life – must have been widespread among Renaissance adolescent girls, though normally with less harmful results. Violence against women and girls was endemic and even encouraged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In a Sienese criminal case in 1629, a man accused of breaking his wife’s arm exclaimed in disbelief, ‘Can’t a husband beat his wife?’²² Violence was actually recommended in many contemporary books on marriage – this was a lawful way for husbands to express authority over their spouses. The protection of women’s ‘honour’ – generally code for their virginity or fidelity – could sometimes justify extreme brutality, including murder. One disturbing record recounts how a father beat his daughter to death and stabbed her lover in a village in the countryside near Rome in 1566 after finding them having sex. He was acquitted by the ecclesiastical court because his actions were ‘not punishable by law’.²³

‘Gentle’ wife beating was recommended by some. In his 1592 book on law, Marco Scarsella explains that because the union of marriage makes two bodies one, when a husband beats his wife he is in fact beating his own flesh, which needs to be corrected ‘lightly’.²⁴ The ubiquity of domestic violence is evident in cosmetic recipe books too, which give advice about how to heal bruising. There is a section in Marinello’s Ornaments telling readers how to remove ‘dead blood as a result of a blow on the face or other bruises on the body’. Among other remedies, he recommends applying cabbage, radish or wild mint leaves to cool the area.²⁵

Women were also expected to pay their ‘marital debt’ by having sex with their husbands. Rape was not deemed possible within marriage, where the sexual obedience of wives was required. Venetian criminal records reveal horrifying accounts of girls, sometimes as young as eleven, married against their will and being violently forced to have sex with their new spouse.²⁶

In some cases, wives had recourse to the law if their husbands lost self-control in administering physical punishment. Institutions in Venice and its dominions gave women who were in bad marriages some legal leeway to leave, more so than in other jurisdictions.²⁷ When Isabetta Zibellari sought to divorce her husband, Paolo Fabrilignario, in Verona in 1541, for example, she argued that he ‘beat her… bestially and without reason’, a state of affairs that was confirmed by her neighbour. She left him to live with her mother, and then a lover.²⁸ In 1582 a young Venetian woman, Elena Bottera, also ran away from her husband, a sailor called Alessendro Franchi. With her mother supporting her, Elena said he was violent, had sex ‘unnaturally’ with her, and caused her to lose her unborn child. He said she was so lazy and disobedient she didn’t even prepare dinner for him when he got home from work, and he simply ‘corrected’ her with a few slaps. No fewer than twelve witnesses came forward to support Elena’s case.²⁹

Two years later, Pasquetta Peregrini petitioned the ecclesiastical courts to end her marriage with her deadbeat, violent manuscript illuminator husband, Romano Cavatia. Their marriage had been violent from the start, with Romano objecting to her bleaching her hair a couple of days after their wedding. He dragged her down from the roof, where she was sitting in the sun (see p. 197), ‘with force… and gave me five or six blows’. There was worse to come. Over the course of their marriage, Romano gagged and beat Pasquetta, denied her food, and demanded anal sex against her will (and at this time, against the law), among other issues. Her husband’s brother was similarly horrendous, and Pasquetta and her sister-in-law secretly got the boat to the island of Murano together, were taken in by a kind woman (who they had never met before, but simply wanted to help them), and were then supported by their friends and families. Pasquetta stayed in the convent of Sant’Andrea. When Romano went to find her there, to drag her back home, the abbess refused to let him in. Family, friends and neighbours testified against her ex-husband in court, and Pasquetta was legally able to leave the marriage.³⁰

In early modern Rome, the authorities did not grant divorce so readily. The terrible experience of some women at the hands of their relatives can be glimpsed in one of the most notorious criminal trials of the early modern period – the Aqua Tofana murders. The testimonies of many poor women interrogated in these trials also give us an unparalleled insight into how communities of women at the time supported each other by sharing cosmetic (and other) ‘secrets’.

In 1659, a woman named Marta Buzzi Coli confessed to her local priest that she was thinking about killing her husband. Two friends of hers had managed to get hold of some poison and had successfully murdered their husbands without being detected. The priest went to the authorities, who offered Marta immunity in return for information. Using undercover detectives and a sting operation, the police managed to capture five women. They were all accused of selling poison to a group of female acquaintances over the previous five or so years, a successful business that was convincingly linked to the murder of forty-six husbands. The true number of men killed by this poisoning network is not known, but the Mantuan ambassador speculated as many as ‘five hundred’ men were finished off by their wives, their deaths unnoticed in the wake of the recent plague.³¹

The extraordinary stories of these ordinary women highlight the reality of the daily lives of people who normally don’t make the history books, and considers their friendship networks, their conversations, their troubles. The whole thing started, according to evidence from one of the poison suppliers, Graziosa Farina, because women often got together to chat about their marriages:

As we women normally do, [my companion] started talk to me about what women go through with their husbands, and how their men disgust them. And I told her that I also had a wayward husband and that I had undergone many woes and that he had reduced me to misery.

One of the women accused of murder had talked to her female neighbour about the problems she had with her husband, Andrea. ‘She replied to me “this is the way that men are made,” and similar things as women usually say.’³²

These women were powerless and stuck in marriages with dreadful men. Sometimes their husbands were just drunk and feckless – one of the witnesses comments, ‘I didn’t know how to survive because my husband just lingered about and earned absolutely nothing so that I was reduced to a wretched state.’ Others, however, reveal the amount of violence women had to put up with, not just from their husbands, but from their fathers, brothers, sons-in-law. This was violence on a regular basis that they could do little to avoid. The murderers tended to be in desperate situations, like Anna Maria Conti who, at nineteen, was married off for the second time to a French painter twice her age called Simon Imbert, who repeatedly beat her:

Although I was pregnant with Simon’s child, he threatened to knife me, even with the baby I was carrying. Once he laid hands on my throat so violently to strangle me that he left bruises, and went after me with a naked sword. He would have killed me, too, if certain gentlemen, my neighbours on Via della Croce, hadn’t been around and called the police.³³

She gradually poisoned Simon with the ‘water’ supplied to her by an intermediary and he died in considerable pain. For some murderers, the risk of execution was worth it – one of the poison sellers exclaimed on seeing her friend’s badly bruised face: ‘better to get yourself hanged! Better to suffer that single torment than so many: every day you’ll end up just like you are today!’

The woman at the centre of the poisoning network was Giovanna de Grandis. Her main income was as a cavamacchia, someone who removed stains from clothes. Giovanna was friends with a Sicilian widow called Girolama Spana who had learnt the recipes for the poison from her stepmother. Women of this kind often show up in the criminal archives, either widowed or simply abandoned by their husbands, often with children in tow; they were poor and skirted on the edge of destitution. They worked as laundresses, sellers of ‘secrets’ – cosmetics, love charms, magic – or as procurers for younger women.

Aqua Tofana was made of ground arsenic and lead, boiled together – familiar ingredients and processes for many different types of make-up and skincare remedies. These women were able to attain and share the poisons by pretending they were using them for cosmetic purposes. Giovanna originally bought the arsenic via a friend’s husband, explaining to him that they needed it to make ‘aqua bella’ to beautify their complexions. She told the police that the vial she had sold to another suspect in fact contained ‘liquid tooth polish, sealed with white wax’. When the authorities seized another woman who had bought a bottle of the poison from Giovanna, she feigned ignorance: ‘the liquid is meant to remove blemishes from the complexion – that’s what the woman who gave it to me said’.³⁴

But the game was up and in July 1659 five of the women were hanged on the Campo de’ Fiori – Girolama Spana, Giovanna de Grandis and Maria Spinola for making and selling the poison; Graziosa Farina and Laura Crispolti just for selling it. A sixth woman fled to Naples and was hanged there the following year. Three women who had killed their husbands were granted impunity in return for their detailed witness accounts. Anna Maria Conti was one of them.

RENAISSANCE women have too long been mocked by posterity for their use of poisonous cosmetics, but their relationship to these toxic substances should be understood in the context of their often desperate social circumstances. The use of poisonous make-up may have had more to do with the intolerable lives that many Renaissance women had to suffer, living under a constant threat of violence, public humiliation and destitution if their husbands abandoned them. Cosmetics, however hazardous, could offer the illusion of control to women who needed to attract their husband back into their beds. Although the Aqua Tofana murders are exceptional in the historical records, it’s tempting to speculate that these recorded crimes are just the tip of the iceberg – perhaps there are many other, undetected examples of wives slowly murdering their abusive husbands with make-up.

14 WHAT RENAISSANCE WOMEN KNEW

IN MARCH 1508, Anna Ebrea (Jewish Anna) posted some samples of her wares 200 miles or so north from her business in Rome to Caterina Sforza, the Countess of Forli:

First I have given you a black lotion which is to remove any course marks that are on the face, and soften the skin and make it smooth. You should apply this ointment in the evening and keep it on until morning, then wash with pure river water. After this wash your face with the water which is labelled ‘Cleansing Water’; then you can apply a little of the white lotion; then take just less than a chickpea’s worth of the sublimate and mix with the water which is labelled Gentle Water, and apply it to the face. It is better to apply everything sparely. The black ointment costs 4 silver coins an ounce, the cleansing water 4 for a small phial [foglietta – about 350 ml]; the wax-based ointment, that’s the white one, costs 8 silver coins an ounce; the sublimate, one gold ducat an ounce, and the sweet water one ducat for a small phial. If your illustrious ladyship decides to use them, I will make certain to continue to send them to you.¹

Around 100 years later another Roman woman, known only as ‘Maddalena the Weaver’, came to the attention of the authorities for selling ‘a rare form of poison’.² Like Anna, Maddalena mainly made a living making ‘waters for washing women’s faces and… oils from herbs of various kinds’, as well as renting out beds, and making love magic and other enchantments. These two anecdotes about small-scale female entrepreneurs give us a glimpse into a world where the kind of women who might have normally lived in poverty at the fringes had opportunities to make some cash and even climb the social ladder a little. Anna and Maddalena were far from being the only women of modest means who developed ‘secrets’ of cosmetics and medicine, and who shared them – for friendship, sisterhood, or for profit. Women of higher status, too, experimented with recipes at home, wrote to friends about what they had found and swapped remedies, recipes and ideas. Excluded from formal education in medicine or botany, Renaissance women created informal networks of learning and observation that allowed them to engage with practical science.³

Recent research has revealed an astonishing amount of scientific knowledge inherent in medical and cosmetic remedy texts written by women or based on their recipes – not just knowledge about the properties of ingredients (what plants, minerals, animal products are efficacious), but about chemical processes as well. For many women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this was standard domestic wisdom. These discoveries are revealing lost realms of women’s expertise.

The recipient of Anna’s wares, Caterina Sforza, may be best known today for baring her genitals to frighten invading troops. In 1488, her husband was killed and the rest of the family taken prisoner by a rebellious noble lineage, the Orsi. Persuading her captors that she would tell her loyal caretaker to give up the keys to the city fortress, the Rocca di Ravaldino, she was set free; she left her children behind as hostages to vouch for her compliance. When she got to the Rocca, instead of handing over the keys she ordered them to fire cannons on the besieging troops. According to her contemporary, Niccolò Machiavelli, her enemies held her crying children in front of her and threatened to kill them. Caterina raised her skirts and said, ‘Do it, if you want: even execute them in front of me… I have what’s needed here to make more!’

Lorenzo di Credi, Portrait of a Woman with Jasmine (Caterina Sforza?) (c. 1481–3)

Whether this story is completely accurate or not, Sforza managed to keep hold of the fortress until help came in the form of Milanese troops. She ruled Forlì as a regent for her young son until ousted by a siege in the winter of 1499–1500, when she went out on horseback to fight in person. She spent the rest of her life in Florence, fighting for her children’s inheritance. Machiavelli knew Sforza, and his tale is designed to illustrate aspects of her unyielding personality.⁴

Sforza has also been credited as writing ‘a foundational text in the history of pharmacology’. Pictured in a portrait of the early 1480s, holding jasmine flowers (a common ingredient in Renaissance perfumes), Sforza was renowned for her knowledge of plants, minerals and other medical ingredients. Her recipes have come down to us in two manuscript copies of around 1525, called The Experiments. They contain hundreds of recipes for medicines (for both humans and horses), alchemy, magic and cosmetics.⁵ It is now generally accepted that alchemy – which used to be dismissed as an eccentric activity steeped in a discredited worldview – was crucial for the development of experimental science, especially in chemistry and medical pharmacy.⁶

The fundamental assumption of Renaissance alchemy was that that natural world was full of wondrous secrets that could serve humanity, if only they could be discovered through mechanical and chemical manipulation – via processes such as heating, steeping, distillation and so on. For some practitioners, this incorporated the belief that it was possible to transform base metals into gold, or to discover the ‘philosopher’s stone’, a substance that could confer eternal life. Alchemy also provided a philosophical basis for many practical experiments, including the development of improved medicines and – though this is rarely noted in the historical literature – the creation of more effective cosmetics.

As is typical in Renaissance how-to books, Sforza seems to have written down recipes as she went along, so the diverse remedies in the book are in seemingly no particular order. There is also, however, an annotated index in both volumes that provides some insight into how Renaissance people categorised cosmetics as a branch of experimental knowledge. Caterina’s recipes are labelled either as ‘medicines’, hygiene and cosmetics (lisci), horse medicine, ‘alchemy’ (chimica) or incantations. Alchemy recipes focus on how to harden or soften metals. Medicine recipes are for ailments – sometimes serious, such as the plague, to less deadly wounds and skin issues. Cosmetics include face waters (often washes/toners), hair removal creams, hair dyes and bleaches; various lotions for making the face beautiful – including colour cosmetics, skin whiteners and moisturisers; aftersun; freckle removal; hand cream, perfumes; hair and skin dye. These categories are porous. Wrinkle-removal creams are categorised as medicines, for example, as is advice on slimming – both of which could have cosmetic effects. Many recipes for skin creams and waters entail the manipulation of metallic ingredients, such as silver litharge, lead and mercury, and are sometimes extremely complex.

Sforza’s inclusion of cosmetics as a type of alchemy, alongside medical, chemical and even magic recipes, is far from unique. Giambattista della Porta included a chapter on ‘Ornaments for ladies’ in his popular book on natural magic, The Miraculous and Marvellous Effects Produced By Nature. This appears alongside sections on the properties of plants, how to create fire, how to go to sleep, how to stop dogs barking and how to manipulate metals.⁷ Cosmetics took properties from the natural world and transformed them to exert a further transformation on human appearance. These recipes were often the result of hands-on trial and error, which explains why Sforza refers to them by the term ‘experiments’.

Although Sforza’s recipe books are particularly well known, they are an early example of a trend of domestic recipe books kept by both men and women – but particularly women – in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. While nowadays we might keep collections of favourite food recipes, in the Renaissance it was also common to keep recipes for medicine and hygiene products. This was the norm, particularly for aristocratic women, who often oversaw the health and comfort of extended households, including their own retinue of ladies-in-waiting and other servants.⁸

There’s a section in Moderata Fonte’s The Worth of Women where her characters discuss how nature provides ‘cures’ for human maladies: ‘great powers reside in stones and in words, as well as in plants’. In their attempt to find something that would ‘cure men of their defects’ they exchange knowledge about natural ingredients – from tree saps such as balsam (which ‘keeps the face looking fresh and young’), and myrrh (‘good for chest complaints’); to plants like rhubarb (which ‘acts against choler’), spices like nutmeg (‘an aid to digestion for delicate stomachs’) and fruits like quinces, plums and grapes (‘a little humid and tend to cause wind’). The virtues of different types of wine are also extolled – though ‘if drunk in too great quantities cause headaches and nerve disorders’. Violets and roses are praised for their sweet smell and soothing and hydrating properties, as are other flowers like narcissus, hyacinth, jasmine and carnation.⁹

Although Fonte’s discussion is fictional, it presumably reflects the kinds of conversations that women were having in real life. Early modern science writers often acknowledge the skill of women in alchemical sciences, most notably the healing arts of medicine and cosmetics.¹⁰ In his introduction to the standard sixteenth-century textbook on European medical materials, Pietro Andrea Mattioli notes that ‘there have been some generous women, who to gain fame and immortal glory, have marvellously delighted in knowledge of the virtues of plants’. Included in that is his dedicatee, Giovanna, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, one of the many Medici women who experimented in creating medicines from minerals, animals and herbs.¹¹ One beautiful illustration of Mattioli’s book by his contemporary, Gherardo Cibo (see plate section, image no. 28), shows three women gathering fumitory. One is busy picking the plants, while her two companions sit on the ground, heads companionably touching while they look through the harvest in their basket.

We know from existing correspondence that women often shared healthcare and cosmetic recipes – in 1505, Emilia Pia sent ‘a type of wood that has the property of making fingernails very shiny’ to Marchioness Isabella d’Este. A few months before, Isabella had asked for the Marchioness of Cotrone’s recipe for tooth-powder, as she’d just finished her supply.¹² It was commonplace in books of secrets to credit recipes to women – duchesses and queens as well as humbler folk.¹³ The historian Montserrat Cabré calls these repeated attributions of recipes to women ‘small stories’ – tiny, fragmented insights into a world we know little about. In Marinello’s Ornaments, for example, he says his recipes were invented by ‘some beautiful women’, ‘a pleasant lady’, ‘a damsel of his district’ or ‘one of our young little country girls’ (because ‘under base apparel great virtues are often hidden’). Sometimes his attitude to this kind of knowledge is telling. In one of his toothcare recipes he explains that some women ‘wash the mouth out with the salt water that they steep olives in, and this firms up wobbly teeth and marvellously tightens loosened gums’. If you’ve suffered from tooth problems, you’ll know that rinsing the mouth with salt water is still recommended by dentists, as it suppresses bacteria and promotes healing. Marinello is at pains, however, to point out that this advice is not based on proper humoral theory: the women ‘know this by experience rather than through science’.¹⁴

Over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, university-trained male physicians like Marinello increasingly marginalised the wisdom of women, who generally did not have access to their Latin-dominated world of knowledge. Midwifery too, at least for elites, was a field increasingly taken over by male doctors from the later fourteenth century onwards – often with disastrous results, as the accumulated wisdom of midwives, based on extensive experience, was replaced by theoretical understandings of female physiology based on the humoral system. Physicians were keen to ignore those ‘toothless, wrinkled chattery, superstitious taper-bearing old women’ who challenged their erudition with their practical knowledge.¹⁵

Despite this trend, in study after study historians have demonstrated that women’s practical experience remained central to healthcare in early modern Europe. In most communities, women retained their importance as midwives, healers and nurses. As we have seen, in an era when most ailments were treated with household remedies, it was women who investigated and either made or bought this medicine; it was also women who were largely charged with making sure their household stayed healthy.¹⁶ You can see these efforts in the hundreds (thousands, even) of manuscripts of household recipe books that are kept in libraries and archives around the world – all this knowledge, like buried treasure, is slowly being brought to light once again by historian-readers, some of them making up recipes that have been lying dormant for hundreds of years.¹⁷

Women Apothecaries

Beyond their domestic kitchens and small-scale businesses, some women were able to make a living in more formal settings. Stefano Gherardini’s lively portrait of a pharmacist nun (1723; see plate section, image no. 27) is a late but revealing example of a tradition of convent apothecaries that flourished right through this period. Swathed in her robes, hair carefully covered, this welcoming young woman seems to be enquiring after our health with one hand while the other rests on a ceramic medicine jar. In the background are the tools of her trade: shelves of mysterious labelled jars, a spoon and a spatula hanging from their hooks, ready to dispense their contents. A pewter pestle and mortar rest on two large pharmacopoeias, while a crumpled piece of paper – a prescription perhaps, or her dispensing notes? – is tucked into their pages.¹⁸

Renaissance apothecary shops were a sight to behold, displaying hundreds of custom-made maiolica or stoneware jars, glass flasks, seemingly countless wooden drawers of exotic ingredients and shelves stuffed full of sugar and spices. All that variety, all those ingredients from around the world, and all that possibility, neatly organised in easy-to-find rows. Some of these shops still exist – in Venice the Golden Hercules pharmacy, founded in the mid-seventeenth century, preserves much of its original interior and is still a working shop. In Florence you can visit the Santa Maria Novella apothecary, one of the many pharmacies that were attached to convents. Further south, in the little sun-baked hilltop village of Roccavaldina, near Messina in Sicily, there is a ‘pharmacy museum’. This seventeenth-century apothecary’s shop remains a feast for the eyes, with serried ranks of colourful late-sixteenth-century maiolica jars on dark wooden shelves, and a massive marble pestle and mortar ready to crush whatever ingredient the apothecary recommends.¹⁹

Apothecary shops were much more than mere chemists. They sold a vast number of ingredients and pre-made cures, gave healthcare advice and often had on-site physicians who would diagnose the underlying humoral unbalance that caused the customers’ ailments. As well as being a space for shopping, people visited apothecaries just to hang out and meet people. The proprietors provided chessboards so people could while away their time in the shop, sometimes entertained by musicians. They were places where news was exchanged, and sometimes places of intrigue – of spying and of heterodox religious discussions. No fewer than twenty-four Venetian pharmacists were accused of heresy by the Inquisition in the later sixteenth century. Most visitors to these shops were, undoubtedly, men, but it wasn’t an exclusively male space. In fact, five of the eighty-five apothecaries registered in Venice in 1569 were women, running these businesses in their own right. In Florence at the turn of the seventeenth century, there were twenty-three women enrolled in the Physicians’ and Apothecaries’ Guild.²⁰

As Gherardini’s painting suggests, nuns were particularly important in running apothecaries as businesses to fund their convents. In Rome in 1695, no fewer than thirty-four pharmacies were overseen by nuns. These were organised along the same lines as the traditional shops governed by the guilds. One nun would be the ‘master’ apothecary, and she would be aided by apprentices from the convent. The historian Sharon Strocchia’s research gives us fascinating insights into the lives of these women, and the important role convents and their pharmacies played in the wider community. For example, Giovanna Ginori (1501–c. 1579), a daughter of a prominent Florentine family, entered the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina da Siena when she was twelve. This convent is best known now for its successful sixteenth-century painting workshop, where young nun apprentices were trained by the master-painter Sister Plautilla Nelli (1524–88), whose magisterial and massive fresco in the convent’s refectory, The Last Supper, has recently been restored.²¹ The painters no doubt benefited from the on-site apothecary for the purchase of pigments, as well as pills, purgatives, syrups, and medicinal and cosmetic waters. It was also an important source of revenue for the convent. Giovanna was placed as an apprentice in the convent pharmacy for six years and showed real aptitude for the job. She went on to run the pharmacy for the next thirty-seven years, becoming well known across the city for being ‘extremely knowledgeable about medicals and botanicals’.²²

MANY WOMEN were informal experts in pharmacy, but one sixteenth-century woman stands out, not just for having her thoughts on a range of scientific matters put into print, but also for her prescient words about the human impact on the natural balance of the world. The grocer’s daughter Camilla Erculiani (c. 1540–c. 1590) worked, along with her husband, at the Three Stars pharmacy, near the University of Padua. She published her Letters on Natural Philosophy in 1584; she was one of the few Italian women in this period to publish on scientific subjects. This is particularly impressive given that Erculiani had to juggle her scientific investigations with her duties as a wife and mother. She complains of ‘the toil of raising children, the burden of running a household, the obedience I owe to my husband and my weak humoral constitution’. ²³ Her book – dedicated to the queen of Poland, Anna Jagiellon – consists of essays in the form of letters, where she considers (according to the frontispiece) ‘the natural cause of Noah’s flood, the natural temperament of mankind, and the natural formation of the rainbow’. Her prefaces to the queen and to readers emphasise the importance of women’s learning: ‘I wanted, through my studies,’ she says, ‘to let the world know that we, like men, are capable in all areas of knowledge,’ choosing, she writes later, to ‘affirm the intellectual worth of the women of our times’.²⁴

In her first letter she considers what caused Noah’s flood, arguing that it ‘occurred because men’s presence on earth had increased so much in number size and lifespan’; humans had disturbed the natural humoral balance of the Earth that kept water in check. Erculiani was the first person to suggest that rather than being solely the will of God, the biblical flood could instead be explained by ‘natural’ – what we’d call ‘environmental’ – means. She linked it to the essential sinfulness of humanity. Erculiani’s views were to make her a target of the increasingly suspicious Counter-Reformation Church. She was arrested and interrogated by the Inquisition around 1585. Although she was probably released without charge – the documentation is not clear – this is the last we hear of her.²⁵

Camilla Erculiani, frontispiece from Letters on Natural Philosophy (Cracow, 1584).

The suspicion of heresy or witchcraft often hovered around women of this period who practised pharmacy and healing, yet it did not stop thousands of women providing these services to their families and wider communities. Many, like Anna Ebrea, became known for their expertise well beyond their neighbourhoods. As we’ll see in the next chapter, recreating the recipes they invented can allow us to appreciate their creativity and knowledge more fully.

15 HOW TO BE A RENAISSANCE WOMAN: THE RECIPES

HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION used to be viewed somewhat sniffily by professional historians, but is now all the rage. Large-scale research ventures like Columbia University’s Making and Knowing Project have lured scholars from the library and archive into the lab and kitchen, to investigate the vast wealth of manuscript and printed recipe books that exist from the pre-modern period. As well as being a useful additional tool for historical research, reconstruction also promises to break down the humanities/science divide in creative ways. One of the pioneers of this approach, Lawrence M. Principe, reconstructed alchemical recipes to demonstrate the underlying logic to early modern alchemy and showed that rather than being the pursuit of deluded wizards, it was a precursor to modern-day chemistry and experimental science.¹

Alongside friends and colleagues I have been investigating the reconstruction of Renaissance cosmetic recipes for many years, both in the lab and at home.² As part of the Renaissance Goo project, the soft-matter physicist, Wilson Poon, and I have shown that Renaissance women knew a lot about chemical processes: they were creating emulsions, distilling face waters, making soaps, and inventing all manner of products.³ It is easier to appreciate this culture of experiment if you roll your sleeves up and follow the recipes yourself.

However, following a Renaissance recipe can be tricky. Nowadays, we are used to recipes that follow a familiar formula, starting with a list of ingredients – all of which (ideally) are measured by universally understood weights or volumes. We have kitchen scales that measure grams, or ounces; measuring jugs for litres or pints; or standardised cups, tablespoons and teaspoons. After the list of ingredients, you may have specific instructions relating to the equipment you need. Perhaps you will have to preheat your oven, or prepare a baking tin. Sometimes alternatives are offered – if you don’t have a food processor, you can use a hand whisk or a grater, and so on. When we read a recipe, we tend to know what to expect, we mentally rehearse the actions we need to take to make the dish. The internet makes this easier still, using step-by-step images and videos to show you how to make things. We can measure temperature on our hobs by adjusting the heat with a touch of a dial, or in our ovens by setting them to a universally agreed scale in Fahrenheit or centigrade. None of this accurate, shared, and easily conveyed measurement existed in the Renaissance; using a recipe involved a great deal of interpretation.

Early modern domestic recipes often don’t give amounts at all. When they do, typically they will advise you to ‘take as much as you like’, or ‘a handful,’ ‘as much as would fit in a walnut shell’. Some recipes, particularly in printed pharmacy manuals and books of secrets, do contain precise weights, generally expressed in pounds or drams, but even this can be confusing. A Venetian pound was different to a Florentine pound, which was different to a Roman pound and so on – the same word was used for a diverse range of weights and even measuring systems (so some pounds were divided up into 12 ounces, some into 16). Because the sources I’ve used here were all northern Italian, when I’ve been making up recipes with precise weights in them I’ve used the Venetian pound, which had 12 (rather than 16) ounces in it, and was equal to about 300 g (as opposed to the modern pound, which is 454 g).⁴

There are several improvisations in the small selection of cosmetic recipes I’ve included here, which I haven’t just translated from Italian into English, but from Renaissance into Modern, giving you a list of ingredients and amounts first. This is translation by trial and error, by experiment. It has made me painfully aware of how dependent my knowledge of cooking is on the many hours I spent in our kitchen at home, acting as a (sometimes reluctant) sous-chef to my mum – grating cheese, chopping veg, peeling potatoes; or, less reluctantly, whisking flour, eggs, butter and sugar together into a seemingly unpromising batter that, through some thrilling alchemy, would become birthday cake. None of this hands-on experiential stuff was packaged as learning, or self-improvement, it was just passed on to me, carelessly, the type of no-fanfare knowledge that people of older generations seem to have in a way that I don’t – sewing a button, knitting a jumper, growing veg, putting up a shelf – all properly useful stuff that is best passed on by a real-life person while doing the task, rather than watching a stranger on a computer screen. It’s unassuming teaching that is hand to hand, eye to eye, mind to mind, skills that are remembered in the body through unthinking repetition. ⁵

How has it become the case that we are so reliant on shops for all the basic everyday items that we use to clean ourselves? It’s such a shame, for example, that even those of us who grow roses no longer take the opportunity to collect their petals to make our own scented waters or oils that can furnish us through the year with a bit of summer, bottled – and are a lovely way to spend an hour or so on a weekend morning. Before I stumbled across this research project, I never dreamed that it was possible to make your own hair conditioner, for example.

With the aim of encouraging readers to try some historical reconstruction at home, I’ve erred on the side of ease as opposed to authenticity here – despite the risk of causing consternation among the normally friendly historical-reconstruction community.

‘Your friends will teach you, or some kindly older lady,’ Marinello says at one point in his Ornaments of Ladies – he obviously knew that no manner of reading would be enough to teach the skills needed to make up his recipes. The once commonplace knowledge about the properties of plants that would enable readers to understand the reasons behind some of the ingredients is now a rare commodity. The more I’ve read Renaissance recipes, the more I feel lucky to have a friend like the herbalist Anna Canning, who has helped me try out and write the recipes below (it’s Anna’s kitchen table that you can see on the previous page, complete with our just-made rose lip balm). I hope that our experience will help any interested readers to give these recipes a try. Perhaps the real way to become a Renaissance woman is to appreciate the astounding qualities of the natural world, to experiment with material transformations, and to share your successes and your failures, your triumphs and your struggles, with friends.

Making rose lip balm to a Renaiassance recipe

I’VE ORGANISED the recipes in a similar way to many Renaissance apothecary manuals. These divided recipes up by the viscosity of the substance created, separating what they called ‘waters’ (liquids that were based on free-flowing liquids like water, or wine or other alcoholic beverages), from ‘oils’, and both of these from thicker ingredients such as ointments or pastes. The active ingredients in these recipes were called ‘simples’, and were often used individually. Rose, for example, is a simple that might be used to make oil, water or balm, depending on the recipe. ‘Compound’ recipes are those which include more than one simple.⁶ Research by our team in Edinburgh and also Erin Griffey in Auckland, among others, is showing how efficacious many of the Renaissance ingredients were in, for example, improving skin texture and quality.⁷

1. Waters

Many Renaissance cosmetics were referred to as ‘waters’ – this included both water-based products, made through distillation, steeping (like tea) or boiling (‘decoction’), and alcohol-based products typically (in Italy) using wine. Renaissance beauty ‘waters’ weren’t necessarily based just on water, but they all had the same flowing, light quality. I’ve also included here a body scrub and a gel, as they are made in a similar way.

Caterina Sforza’s distilled broad-bean flower water

Take bean flowers in sufficient quantity, and make into a distilled water. And with this water wash the face.

Although ideally you would distil using specialised equipment, it is quite possible to do it with regular kitchen equipment. I use a heatproof glass bowl, a double steamer and some ice.

Two handfuls of broad bean flowers (or rose petals, etc.)

Water to cover

Ice or a frozen ice pack

Put the bean flowers (or whatever herbs/petals you are using) in the bottom pan of the steamer. Add enough water to half-fill the pan. Put the heatproof bowl in the top part of the steamer, and place the whole lot on top of the bottom saucepan. Put the lid on top upside down, so that the steam that is generated from the flower-water mixture in the base drips off the handle into the bowl.

Put the heat on medium–high so that the bottom mixture starts to boil, then turn the heat down to keep it boiling gently and put your ice or ice packs on the inverted pan lid. Keep replacing them to encourage the steam to condense and drip into the bowl. Do this until either you are bored, or the water in the bottom pan has evaporated.

Leave everything until it is cool enough to handle, then carefully remove the bowl from the steamer, and marvel at the fact that it now contains scented water. Pour your scented water into a very clean bottle (the cleaner it is, the longer it will keep) and use it whenever you feel like being cheered up.

The terseness of this recipe reflects its ubiquitous use in Renaissance cosmetics. Bean flower water is mentioned repeatedly in a wide range of sources. The beans that were normally used were broad (or fava) beans, Vicia faba. Many modern varieties of broad bean are bred to produce large and tasty beans rather than for the scent of their flowers, and I am currently experimenting with different varieties to find the most highly scented flower. If you wish, you can swap out the bean flowers for sweet peas, scented rose petals (dried or fresh) or the leaves of a herb like lemon balm – all of these plants, particularly roses, were also used for distilled waters, so you could enjoy their scent throughout the year.

You can make stronger-smelling concentrations by distilling several times. You can use this water for cooking, splash or spritz it on your face, force your friends to try it as you enthuse about your new home-distilling knowledge – or use it in several of the recipes below.

Caterina Sforza’s Nettle Tonic

To make the hands and face white. Take leaves and roots of nettle and boil them in water and with this water wash your hands and face and they will become white and soft.

2 cupfuls of nettle leaves and roots (approx.)

Wash the nettles wearing rubber gloves, then loosely chop them and put in a pan. Add water to about 2 cm above the level of the nettles. Bring to the boil, then simmer gently with the lid half on (to catch much of the steam without boiling over) for around 15 minutes. Strain through a sieve lined with a muslin square or paper coffee filter. Once cooled, apply the liquid to the skin using cotton wool.

There is some debate among historians about what ‘white’ means in Renaissance cosmetic recipes. Although sometimes it can mean what we understand now as white – i.e. having pale skin – it also seems to confer qualities such as ‘unblemished’ or ‘clear’. Nettles have astringent properties that can calm irritated, inflamed skin, and help to dry greasy skin. They are anti-allergic, anti-inflammatory and calming. You should, of course, pick the nettles with care. If you are foraging your nettles, you need to ask the landowner permission to pull them up by their roots. I should think many gardeners would be grateful, but do check first!

Giovanni Marinello’s Lavender, Rose and Sage Water

Take a large handful of sage leaves and the same amount of lavender and rose flowers, with a pinch of salt. Boil these in plain water or common lye. Then wash the whole body with this, remembering not to bathe after meals; because this will make you extremely ill. But used two hours before eating, it will comfort the nerves, remove stinking sweat from the entire body and from all its parts. It consoles the spirit and puts you in a good mood.

1 tablespoon dried lavender

1 tablespoon dried rose petals

½ tablespoon dried sage

A pinch of salt

Place all the ingredients in a small saucepan and add 500 ml of water. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and simmer for around 15 minutes. A lid loosely perched on top will allow the steam to go back into the pan. Strain into a bowl using a fine sieve. Once cold, pour into a clean jam jar or bottle, and use with a sponge in the shower to scent your body after washing.

This is the very first recipe Marinello includes in his book, and it’s an easy one as it’s made by decoction (boiling then straining) rather than distillation. I haven’t included lye here as Marinello suggests it is optional. Lye is an alkaline solution made from wood ash steeped in water. It is the first step in soap-making and can be caustic when concentrated, so I decided to avoid it. Beyond my first try at his recipe (where I overdid the sage and smelt like stuffing), this makes a pleasant-smelling wash that leaves the skin nicely scented. I can vouch that my spirit did feel quite consoled; I certainly felt compelled to sniff my arms on a regular basis for the rest of the day.

Marinello’s Rose and Bran Scrub

Take some rose water, vinegar and salt and boil them all together in plain water. Take 2 glasses full of this and mix it together with bran, then rub it all over your body. Wash off the remainder. You will not find anything better to wash your body.

1 tablespoon rose water

1 teaspoon salt

A dash of white wine vinegar (optional)

¼ cup of wheat or oat bran

Mix all the ingredients, apart from the bran, together in a jug or bowl, adding an additional tablespoon of water. Just before you are about to shower, add a tablespoon of the mixture to around a quarter-cup of bran, and use it as a body scrub.

Caterina Sforza advises you use a bran scrub to exfoliate the face before using her scented waters. This recipe looked so promising, but the first time I tried it I added too much vinegar and, together with mistakenly having bought nasty rose water (you need to be careful here), filled the kitchen with a sickening, cloying steam. I think boiling was likely only required here to purify the water, as both salt and vinegar readily dissolve in water, so it’s not necessary if you can get clean water from the tap.

The mixture smells much better without the vinegar, but this was frequently used for spotty skin, so it’s likely in the original recipe for that reason – or simply to replicate the slightly acidic pH of skin. If you’re aiming for authenticity, keep it in, but add a very small amount. If you’re aiming for something more fragrant, leave it out. The bran works fairly well as a body scrub and a good rose water makes it smell lovely. Do make sure, however, to use a filter for your plughole and compost the bran after use.

Marinello’s Mallow, Willow and Psyllium Hair Conditioner

Boil in water an entire mallow plant, psyllium, and willow leaves, and with this wash your hair, and it will stop the hair getting split ends. If you already have split ends, you should cut the hair up to where it is healthy and after that condition the hair as discussed. Then you will really understand the value of this recipe.

1 entire mallow plant, roots and all (or 1 heaped dessertspoon dried mallow root)

1 willow frond – just the end of the leaves, nothing woody

1 dessertspoon dried psyllium seeds

Wash the mallow and willow really well. Chop everything up and put in a saucepan. Cover it with water and bring to the boil or, if using dried mallow, add 300 ml of water. Boil for about 10–15 minutes until it turns into marvellously gummy gloop. Cool down, then strain the mixture into a jug – a small square of muslin clipped to a sieve with clothes pegs works well as a strainer. Then you can decant the gloop into a jam jar.

I first made this when I spent a week in August at my in-laws’ house in the Scottish Borders, and thinking of this recipe gives me that pleasant ache of remembering happy times. I pulled up the mallow from their wild-flower patch (I did ask first!). They’d planted marsh mallow, a pale pink, open-hearted, joyful flower, the same colour as the confectionery that used to be made from its roots. It’s quite hard to pull up the entire plant, so I guiltily pulled up a few more plants than I wanted to, hastily sneaking them into the compost bin. If you live near anywhere wooded and wet, willow leaves are easy to find, and you can buy psyllium from health food shops.

This makes the kind of goo that curious toddlers would have a great time with, and that you’d be cleaning off the carpet for months afterwards. It smells slightly of over-boiled vegetables, but not so strongly that it puts you off using it – or think like a Renaissance woman and add a little of a distilled flower water (rose water, for example) to scent it to your liking. Just a little bit on your hair after shampooing, don’t rinse it off and you have a leave-in conditioner that works surprisingly well. My mother-in-law really liked it (or said she did).

2. Oils and Balms

Oils – which usually consisted of scented plant material steeped in a neutral plant oil (normally olive in Italian recipes) – are, alongside waters, the basic building blocks of Renaissance cosmetics. They were used on their own to calm and condition the skin, as well as the basis for balms – which at their simplest are combinations of oil and wax. I include a recipe for sweet violet (Viola odorata) oil here as it was commonly used in the Renaissance and smells wonderful.

Violet Oil from the Common Herbal (1526)⁸

And violet oil you make by cooking violet flowers in olive oil, and drained, this is called oil of violets.

As the brevity of this recipe suggests, it was commonplace to make oils from violets, roses or other scented flowers and herbs, so commonplace in fact that how to do this is rarely explained fully in Renaissance texts. The key thing is to make a bain-marie (water bath) so you don’t fry the plant material, but just heat it in the oil.

10 g dried sweet violet (or rose petals etc.)

100 ml neutral-scented oil (such as sweet almond, sunflower or mild olive oil)

Put the oil and violet or other plant ingredients in a heat-proof jug, bowl or jar. The oil should completely cover the plants, by around a centimetre. Place your jug into a saucepan of water that goes up at least as far as the depth of the oil mixture. Bring to the boil, then lower the heat and leave to simmer for around 15–20 minutes, or around 30 minutes if you are using fresh plant material (e.g. rose petals straight from the garden). Keep an eye on the pan to make sure it doesn’t boil dry, adding more water if necessary. Don’t cover, as this allows water to get into your oil mixture.

After the time has elapsed, turn off the heat and, using oven gloves, remove the jug from the water. Wipe the sides to avoid any water getting into your mixture. Drain the oil through a sieve lined with a muslin square or paper coffee filter. You can get a stronger-smelling oil if you go through the process again, using the same oil but replacing the old sweet violet with a new batch. You can do this several times to build up the strength of the oil. It is also possible to make scented oil by leaving the oil/ plant mixture in a jar in a warm place for a week or so.

Marinello’s Rose Lip Balm

Make an ointment with rose oil, and a little wax, and use it to anoint yourself, because it will remove all burning and heal the lips excellently.

Once you have made a scented oil, the next logical step is lip balm, which is surprisingly straightforward to make.

25 g grated beeswax

100 ml rose oil (or other plant oil, made like the sweet violet oil, above)

As with the oil recipe, you need to make a bain-marie using a heatproof bowl or jug that fits inside your pan. Add oil to the jug, then place in a pan of water and bring it to a simmer on a low heat. When warm, add the bees-wax and stir until melted. Pour into small clean pots and leave to cool. When you wash up, wipe any wax away with kitchen roll and throw in the bin – don’t risk blocking your pipes by rinsing wax down your sink.

This recipe fills approximately ten 15-ml pots, so you will have enough for friends and family! You can make a looser, more spreadable mixture by upping the proportion of oil to wax.

3. Moisturising Lotions

These are creams that sink into the skin, rather than just sitting on top of it like the wax balm. There were various methods and ingredients devised by endlessly inventive Renaissance men and women to make creams that were both spreadable and moisturising. Although it’s not a cream, I’ve also added a recipe to fatten the body and face in this section. All four of these recipes are taken from Marinello’s Ornaments.

Honey and Egg Eye Cream

Boil an egg in its shell in water until it is hard. Take out the yolk and crush it with honey until it has the consistency of an ointment. Rub this into the skin around your eyes. You will never find anything more useful than this: because, as you wash around your eyes with warm water, the dark marks will disappear, and those parts which have some darkness, or uneven colour from the rest of the face will be more beautiful and white. Now what more could you want?

1 hard-boiled egg yolk

1 dessertspoonful honey (approx.)

Possibly the very easiest Renaissance recipe I’ve come across. Just smoosh the honey and the yolk together with a fork or the back of a spoon until it forms a paste. Use it like a face mask – apply, leave on for five minutes, wash off. It doesn’t really remove dark circles (what does?) and it smells a little eggy, but it does make your face feel nice and pleasantly plumps up your skin. Both egg and honey are still used to hydrate and soften skin.

Tallow and Tree Gum Anti-wrinkle Cream

Take a pound of mutton tallow that has been washed nine times in cold water. Mix this with egg white foamed with a pestle in a mortar, and with a little butter. Then add some powdered mastic and incense, and apply it [to the forehead] several times. Not only will it cure the wrinkles on your forehead, but also those of the rest of the face, and those made on the stomach by pregnancies.

100 g mutton tallow (or the same weight of lard or coconut oil)

1 egg white, whisked with a fork

1 teaspoon (approx.) butter (optional)

3 g mastic tears and 3 g frankincense tears, both crushed to a fine powder in a pestle and mortar.

Put the fat into a bowl and cover with water. Work the water through the fat with your hands, squeezing the water through, then drain the water off. It isn’t necessary to do this nine times, once will do it. The fat should become softer and free from lumps. If you are using coconut oil, which has a much lower melting point, you may need to use a wooden spoon rather than your hands.

Then break up your egg white with a fork. Take the drained fat and beat it together with the egg white and butter (if using) in a large bowl. I do this completely inauthentically using an electric hand whisk. The mixture should become paler and lighter in texture. Stir in the powdered tree gums and apply to wherever you have wrinkles.

Because tallow is no longer easily available, and so I can share this recipe with people who might not want to use animal fat, I’ve made this using all three fats, and lard probably worked the best – the tallow, suggested in the original recipe, comes with the distinct whiff of roast dinner. However, this recipe is quite impressive whichever you use. The ‘washing’ of the fat introduces a small amount of water into the mixture, and the egg white acts as an emulsifier, bringing fat and water together to make something that feels surprisingly like a modern face cream. Mastic and frankincense were very frequent ingredients in the Renaissance, and today can easily be bought online. You need very little to create quite a magical scent, evocative at once of pine forests and candle-lit churches. The mastic doesn’t crush completely, so you are likely to have the odd irritating grain of it in the eventual mixture, but this doesn’t affect the end product too much. You’ll need to keep this one in the fridge, where it will keep for up to a month.

Fig and Pine-nut Hand Scrub

It was hard to know where to include this recipe. Is it a hand scrub? A cream? It’s probably best if you try it out and decide for yourself.

How to make hands white, soft, graceful and delicate…

The hands will become white and it will also happen that cold will not cause the skin to wrinkle, and they won’t feel the cold – in fact it will defend them and heal them – if you use this paste taken from our book, which is made in this way: take a pound of fresh well-shelled pine nuts, clean and crushed; an ounce of mustard; three ounces of fat and soft dried figs and a quarter of an ounce of camphor. Once they are well crushed, mix them together and make a paste. Take a walnut size amount of this and rub it on when you wash your hands with fresh water. But remember to use less mustard in the summer.

100 g pine nuts

A pinch of mustard powder or ½ teaspoon mustard seeds (optional)

1 dried fig (ready-to-eat are fine too), chopped into small pieces.

1 drop of camphor essential oil (optional)

Put the pine nuts in a mortar and crush them with a pestle. Add the mustard and figs and crush them together with the pine nuts, mixing as you go. Once everything is combined, add the drop of camphor if you have some – but be careful with the camphor; a little goes a long way.

Once you’ve made this mixture, you can keep the dry mixture until you choose to use it. Over the sink, take a walnut-size amount and rub into your hands like soap. Add some water and it will start to produce a soft cream that will soften and scent your hands. Rinse your hands under water, and discard the used pine-nut mixture (preferably in the compost bin).

Fattening Honey Nut Balls

Peel almonds, pistachios, green wheat, sesame and pine nuts. Minutely crush everything together and make into a paste with honey. Form them into walnut size pieces and eat five or six every morning, then drink a small glass of excellent wine. You will fatten up, become the colour of a red rose, and you, gorgeous woman, will be loved by the boys.

A tablespoon each of:

Chopped almonds

Pistachios

Green wheat (freekeh), optional

Sesame

Pine nuts

1 tablespoon honey

Put all the nuts and seeds in a big pestle and mortar and crush. Add enough honey to form them into balls.

These are easy to make, delicious, and certainly would fatten you up if you ate a lot of them, though being loved by the boys is not guaranteed. An authentic addition would be a drop of rose water (home-made or otherwise), which makes these even more lovely.

4. Colour Cosmetics

I’ve added this section for anyone who might like to try out an authentic Renaissance ‘look’ – dark arched eyebrows, pale face and rosy cheeks. I have used this in teaching for the last five years or so – always a lot of fun.

A Sooty Recipe for Hair and Eyebrow Colour

There are some women, and also some men, who make this recipe because they want to hide their mature age. Place a lantern burning nut oil under something that can gather the smoke… And when you are gathering the smoke, lift the receptacle every quarter of an hour so that the light doesn’t burn it. This smoke on its own, or mixed with oil is extremely effective in making not only hair black, but whatever other thing there may be too. Try it out, you will see!

Walnut oil, about 50 ml

Wax – about a teaspoon.

You’ll also need a small glass jar, cotton (not synthetic) string to make a wick for your oil lamp, some foil to cover the jar, a paperclip and a foil plate or tray to capture the soot.

First make your wick by melting your wax and soaking your string in it until it hardens. Then put the oil in the small jar and cover the jar with a double layer of kitchen foil. Make a small hole in the foil for the string and attach it with a paperclip so that the end of the string is dipped in the oil. You have made a walnut oil lamp! It will smoke, and it’s the smoke you need to capture. I used a foil takeaway carton, holding it above the candle until it got covered with a thick layer of black soot. Obviously, do be careful with this recipe – don’t use synthetic string, and take care not to get burned. Blow out the candle after use.

Once cooled down, apply to your eyebrows with a finger or make-up brush. I found it stuck on quite successfully without any fat at all, but you could always mix with coconut oil or even lard or tallow as a replacement if you wish.

Marinello says that eyebrows should be ‘the colour of ebony, fine, with short hairs and soft, as if they are made of the finest silk’. There are various recipes for eyebrow colour in his book, all of which have slightly different types of soot (‘collected from a walnut oil lamp’, or from ‘burnt hazelnuts’), and different types of animal fat (goat or bear, a favourite in hair-related recipes), but it doesn’t make much difference to the final product. You get a deeply black substance that must have been applied with a fine brush.

Venustà Ceruse (A Non-toxic Version)

To cure redness of the face: Take white lead, rose water and violet oil and mix together and anoint the face.

2 teaspoons titanium dioxide

3 teaspoons violet oil (approx.)

A few drops of rose water

Put the titanium dioxide powder in a small bowl, and slowly add the violet oil until it forms a thin paste. At that point add a drop or two of rose water. You can then use this on the skin as a light foundation.

This ceruse recipe comes from the Venustà, probably the earliest printed cosmetic recipe book. White lead is extremely toxic but can be swapped with titanium dioxide, which is commonly used in cosmetics, especially sunscreen. It can be bought as a powder online (do follow all the precautions on the packet, and be careful not to breathe it in). You won’t get the light-scattering lustre of white lead, but you won’t get lead poisoning either. The mixture of violet oil and rose water smells amazing. You should apply this foundation lightly to avoid the dreaded ‘mask’ look. Once you’ve applied this foundation, add rouge to the apples of the cheeks and lips.

Caterina Sforza’s Very Light and Most Excellent Rouge

Take 1 ounce of red sandalwood, 3 ounces of aqua vita and grind the sandalwood finely and let it soak well in the aqua vita for two hours, then strain it; and seal the strained liquid tightly in a glass ampule with no air. When you want to use it, first cleanse the face, then put on the rouge. And you only need to do this once each day, because this rouge is sufficient like that, and through these means: the more you apply it, the more you will gain a magical vivacity, gracefulness, and beauty, so that it will easily last for this interval. The ‘Spanish Clout’ [a painted cloth used for rouge], was used for this effect, but it happened that every time the face was washed, it spoiled the effect, and it only lasted for a day. But with this one, as I said, you need not avoid water for eight days; in fact it will stay on the face with amazing beauty.

1 teaspoon red sandalwood chips

50 ml vodka or other clear spirit

Grind the sandalwood in a pestle and mortar, place in a small jar or bottle with the vodka, and leave to steep for two hours (or you can leave it overnight if easier). Drain through a tea strainer and use the liquid to lightly colour cheeks pink.

As Caterina Sforza’s recipe indicates, you have to exercise some care with this recipe as it can dye the skin. You can buy dried red sandalwood online. It makes an orangey-red colour and tones down the bright whiteness of the ceruse.

1. Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538)

2. Countrywoman on the way to market. From Mores Italiae (1575)

3. Bronzino, Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo (c. 1545)

4. Parmigianino, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c. 1524)

5. Titian, Woman with a Mirror (c. 1512–15)

6. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Lady (c. 1560)

7. Allessandro Maganza, Portrait of Maddalena Campiglia (c. 1580–90)

8. The judgement of Paris. From Anon. Venetian, Treatise on Cosmetics (c. 1500)

9. Titian, Portrait of Laura Dianti and a Child (c. 1520–25)

10. Christiaen van Couwenbergh, Sexual Assault of a Black Woman by White Men (c. 1632)

11. Paris Bordone, Women at Their Toilet (c. 1545)

12. Crouching Venus (probably German, c. early 1600s)

13. Girolamo Miseroni, Cameo of a Woman (c. 1602)

14. Peter Paul Rubens, Isabella d’Este (c. 1605, after an original by Titian of c. 1530)

15. Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as a Lute Player (c. 1615–17)

16. After Hans Baldung, Women’s Bath with Mirror, (c. 1600)

17. Sofonisba Anguissola (attrib.), Presumed Self Portrait (c. 1560)

18. Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1624)

19. Bernardo Strozzi, Portrait of Barbara Strozzi (c. 1640)

20. Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (c. 1622)

21. Lavinia Fontana, Allegory of Prudence (c. 1595)

22. Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of Isabella Ruini as Venus (c. 1592)

23. Artemisia Gentileschi, Venus and Cupid (c. 1626)

24. Giovanna Garzoni, Self-Portrait As Apollo (c. 1618–20)

25. Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638–9)

26. Vittore Carpaccio (attrib.), Woman with Red Hair and Fringe (c. 1495–1500)

27. Stefano Ghirardini, Portrait of a Pharmacist Nun (1723)

28. Woman gathering fumitory. From Gherardo Cibo’s illustrated copy of Discourses on Dioscorides’ Materia Medica (1564–84)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have so many people to thank. I’ll start with the team at the Wellcome Collection and Profile Books. Anjali Bulley and Helen Conford were instrumental in supporting this publication at the beginning. Editor extraordinaire Francesca Barrie has guided me through the later stages of the process, including several drafts; I’m so grateful for her insights, and I hope the book lives up to her suggestions. I’d also like to thank Jacqui Lewis for her astute and patient copy-editing, in the face of some frankly blush-worthy errors, and Emily Frisella for taking me through the book’s final stages so patiently.

So much research and writing comes down to financial support. Heartfelt thanks to the Leverhulme Trust – a Philip Leverhulme Prize awarded to me more than a decade ago allowed me the time and space to think about how Renaissance people’s understanding of their own bodies interacted with changes in visual culture. They also funded my first foray into reconstructing cosmetic recipes. More recently a Royal Society Apex Award for the Renaissance Goo project has allowed me to focus on the practice and theory of reconstructing early modern cosmetics. This book would have been impossible to complete without the research leave this award gave me. My chapters on recipes and women’s knowledge were completely rewritten as a result of this thinking time, and the opportunity to work with the soft matter scientist Wilson Poon.

I’ve been lucky enough to work at the University of Edinburgh for over two decades now. My colleagues in History of Art have supported my research leave to write this book – my thanks, especially, to Carol Richardson, fellow Renaissance specialist, head of department and friend, and that all round whirlwind of smartness, Halle O’Neal. Lots of the ideas in here come from teaching – I’m grateful for many years of brilliant students who have shared my enthusiasm for trying out Renaissance cosmetics and thinking about beauty in new ways.

One of the very best things about academia is sharing enthusiasms with other similarly obsessed people. The study of Renaissance cosmetics is a burgeoning field, and a supportive one. I’d particularly like to thank Erin Griffey, whose important work on English cosmetic culture has been so influential, but who also shares my obsession with reconstruction as a research tool. Thanks to Montserrat Cabré too, for her intellectual generosity and seemingly boundless knowledge; and to Evelyn Welch for her kindness. Evelyn’s Renaissance Skin project was the essential backdrop to much of the research for this project and allowed me to discuss work with a wide range of scholars. Thanks especially to Hannah Murphy, and to my old friend Sarah Cockram, who read an early draft of the book and was typically inspiring and supportive. Stephen Bowd, another Renaissance Italy specialist, has also commented on the draft and patiently endured a few years of thoughts on Renaissance cosmetics over lunchtime soup.

Outside of academia, my parents-in-law, Keith and Jean Ferguson, have let me dig up their plants to try Renaissance cosmetic recipes, and even been enthusiastic about the results. I couldn’t wish for a kinder and more welcoming extended family than the Fergusons. My mum, Barbara Burke, spurred me on with her enthusiasm over an early draft. Her tireless work as a GP when I was growing up led to a lifelong interest in pioneering women, and she has also taught me countless useful things by example – cooking, gardening and always being right. Juan Huarte would have absolutely hated her. It’s been amazing to see my sons, Joe and Zac, grow into brilliant and creative young adults who have been really supportive of their historian mother – and who will do the dishes without complaining. Gary Ferguson, partner, friend and supporter, always glimpses the sunshine on the garden, even in the darkest Scottish winter. Everyone should have a pocket Gary. But, above all, this book is for the women and men in my life who have caught me when I’ve fallen, dusted me down, and set me back on my way: for my friends.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author photo: Joe Rosenthal © 2023.

Jill Burke is a professor of Renaissance visual and material cultures at the University of Edinburgh, a historian of the body and its visual representation, focusing on Italy and Europe from 1400 to 1700. She is currently the lead investigator of the Royal Society funded project Renaissance Goo, working with soft-matter scientists to remake Renaissance cosmetic and skincare recipes. She talks regularly about Renaissance bodies on television, radio, and podcasts, and she discusses the history of art and beauty on Jill Burke’s Blog. She lives in Edinburgh.

FURTHER RESOURCES

I’ve included detailed endnotes so that readers can follow up references where needed, especially as a lot of the source material I use isn’t well known, and also to prove that I’m not just making it all up. For those without access to a research library, there is a wealth of online resources. These are particular favourites.

Primary Texts

The Universal Short Title Catalogue

www.ustc.ac.uk

Founded by Andrew Pettegree at the University of St Andrews, this website allows you to search for (almost) any book published between 1450 and 1650, and has links to more than 200,000 full digital scans. It’s not completely exhaustive, but it’s massively useful and incredibly impressive, and they continue to add sources, so if you want to look up early modern printed recipe books this is a good place to start.

Edit16

edit16.iccu.sbn.it

This is the census of sixteenth-century Italian books. Not quite superseded by USTC as it also links to scans of individual pages (normally title pages). In Italian.

The Medici Archive Project

www.medici.org

If you fancy working with real archival documents, this extraordinary site contains thousands of English and Italian transcriptions of a massive database of letters and documents relating to the Medici family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The project also posts a lot of interesting information online, and holds events.

John Florio’s 1611 Italian-English Dictionary

www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio

Everyone I know who regularly translates early modern Italian loves this site, created by Greg Lindahl. You can search for Italian words, and (very importantly) don’t need the exact spelling to land on the relevant page. Florio’s English definitions are often also very funny (though occasionally as difficult to understand as the original Italian).

Early Modern Recipe Books on From the Page

fromthepage.com/folger/early-modern-recipe-books

This is a crowd-sourcing site for transcribing early modern recipe manuscripts so they are more broadly available. The Wellcome and Folger Libraries have got together to upload many of their early modern recipes books ready for transcribing – this allows you to see the original texts and to have a go at reading and transcribing them. All transcriptions are reviewed too.

Early Modern Women

Art Herstory

artherstory.net

Founded by Erika Gaffney, this site collects together guest posts by expert scholars on early modern women artists, and lists relevant new books and exhibitions. There is a wealth of information and images here.

Italian Women Writers

www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW

This project, based at the University of Chicago, brings together links to texts and short scholarly biographies (all in English) for Italian women writers from the Middle Ages to 1945.

The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe

www.itergateway.org/iter-press/series/1

Although not a web resource per se, this will allow you to browse through the remarkable series of English translations of texts written by (and sometimes about) women in Europe from around 1400 to 1750. The Other Voice series has been ground-breaking in widening access to the words of some extraordinary women from the past.

Recipes and Reconstructions

Renaissance Goo

blogs.ed.ac.uk/renaissance_goo

This is the blog for the collaborative project based at the University of Edinburgh that I lead along with the soft-matter scientist Wilson Poon. You can find my draft translation of the bulk of Marinello’s Ornamenti via this site, plus links to videos of making Renaissance cosmetics, and some blog posts where we think through the pleasures and pitfalls of radically interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Making and Knowing Project

www.makingandknowing.org

A pioneering (and now massive) project run by Pamela Smith at Columbia University in New York. The Making and Knowing team patiently reconstructed every recipe in a sixteenth-century French artisanal manuscript, and recorded the results on this site. There’s a wealth of information here, including teaching resources and reading lists.

Cooking in the Archives

rarecooking.com

Founded by Marissa Nicosia and Alyssa Connell at the University of Pennsylvania, this website contains images, transcriptions and updated modern versions of food recipes from 1600 to 1800. I love this site and bake ‘almond jumballs’ from a manuscript recipe book at the Folger Library every year for my students.

The Recipes Project

recipes.hypotheses.org

This is run by and for an international group of researchers interested in recipes. It includes a massive range of blog posts by experts in a diverse range of fields.

Odeuropa

odeuropa.eu

The online presence for a research project focusing on the world of early modern smell, including links to articles about reconstruction. They also run offline events, such as a sniffing tour of Amsterdam.

NOTES

Chapter 1

1 In Maxine Leeds Craig’s words, ‘our bodies are the sites of the embodiment of social controls’. See ‘Race, Beauty and the Tangled Knot of a Guilty Pleasure’, Feminist Theory (2006), 160. Given that women of colour have historically been among the most affected by these social controls, it’s probably no surprise that they have been foremost in the analytical study of beauty culture. See Craig’s foundational Ain’t I A Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race (2002), and, outside the US context, Emma Dabiri, Don’t Touch My Hair (2020). For Renaissance studies, see Kim F. Hall’s fundamental discussion in Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1996), esp 62–122, and Farah KarimCooper’s work, notably Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (revised edition 2019).

2 For the context of this image, see my The Italian Renaissance Nude (2018), chapter 5.

3 Giulia Bigolina, Urania: A Romance. Edited and translated by Valeria Finucci (2007), 137.

4 For the cost of cheap print, see Rosa Salzburg, The Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (2015); for the world of country street-sellers, see Cecilia Hewlett, ‘Locating Contadini in the Renaissance City’, I Tatti Studies (2016); and Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance (2005), 85–92.

5 For more on classical beauty texts, see Laurence Totelin, ‘From techne to kakotechnia: Use and Abuse of Ancient Cosmetic Texts’ in Marco Formisano and Philip van der Eijk, eds, Knowledge, Text and Practice in Ancient Technical Writing (2017). For manuscript cosmetic books in Italy, Giuseppe Palmero, ‘Pratica cosmetica e ricerca della bellezza nelle produzioni scritte di ambito privato, tra basso medioevo e primo Cinquecento’ in Elisa Treccani and Michelangelo Zaccarello, eds, Recipe… Pratiche mediche, cosmetiche e culinarie attraverso i testi (secoli XIV–XVI) (2012); and Michelle Laughran, ‘Oltre la pelle. I cosmetici e il loro uso’ in Storia d’Italia Annali: La moda (2003).

6 For more, see Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (2001).

7 See John Christopoulos, Abortion in Early Modern Italy (2021).

8 Most famously the texts said to be authored by a woman named Trota, which have been traced to medieval Salerno. See Monica Green, trans. and ed., The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (2002).

9 Foundational studies on these texts include William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (1994) and Rudolph Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (1999).

10 Eamon, ‘How to Read a Book of Secrets’, in Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, eds, Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (2011).

11 Massimo Rizzardini, ‘Lo strano caso della Signora Isabella Cortese, professoressa di secreti’, Philosophia 2 (2010).

12 For more on Celebrino, see Rosa Salzberg’s summary on Early Modern Forum – warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ecc/archive/emforum/ projects/brieflives/eustachio_celebrino.

13 The only existing copy of this version is in the Biblioteca Ariostea in Ferrara. My thanks to Mirna Bonazza, the head librarian there, who shared this gem with me, So far, I have found eight versions of this text – from 1526 (at least two editions), 1533, 1534, 1535, 1550, 1551 and 1563.

14 This varies depending on the type of evidence used and the definition of literacy. For a consideration of the evidence, see Sarah Gwyneth Ross, Everyday Renaissances (2016), 30–31.

15 There has been a lot of fascinating research recently on the aural history of reading in this period. For women hearing, rather than seeing, texts, see Brian Richardson, Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy (2020), 188–93. For the evidence of female readership of medieval medical works, Monica Green, ‘The Possibilities of Literacy and the Limits of Reading: Women and the Gendering of Medical Literacy’, in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts (2000), 1–76. Some anecdotal sources from the time, for example statements of sex workers to the Holy Office in the later sixteenth century, suggest that literacy may have been more diffuse among the female population than previously thought – see Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (1993), 41–48, 101.

16 Salzberg, The Ephemeral City (my translation slightly differs), 98. See also M. A. Katritzky, ‘Marketing Medicine: The Image of the Early Modern Mountebank’, Renaissance Studies 15 (2001): 122.

17 Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance 35; Katritzky, ‘Marketing Medicine’; David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (2006), 11–90.

18 For the full set, see www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1947-0319-26-173.

19 www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1947-0319-26-173.

20 Welch, Shopping, 40.

21 Suzanne Magnanini with David Lamari, ‘Giuseppe Passi’s Attacks on Women in The Defects of Women’, in Julie D. Campbell and Maria Galli Stampino, eds, In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Literary and Social Contexts for Women’s Writing (2011), 174.

22 Delicado, El retrato de la Loçana Andaluza (1528), translated into English by Bruno M. Damiani with the rather salacious title Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman (1987). For the context, Silvia Monti, ‘Ebrei spagnoli a Roma dopo l’espulsione: Delicado e La Lozana Andaluza’, RiCognizioni. Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture moderne 13 (2020). Women often shared cosmetic and medicinal recipes across religious divides: see for example, Carmen Caballero-Navas, ‘The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian women’, Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008); Montserrat Cabré, ‘Cosmética y Perfumería,’ in Luis García Ballester, ed., Historia de la ciencia y de la técnica en la corona de Castilla (2002).

Chapter 2

1 Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, trans. and ed. Virginia Cox (1997), 223–238. See Cox’s excellent introduction for more on Fonte’s life.

2 For ‘Renaissance Feminism’ see, among others, Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (1990); Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Women as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (2010); Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe (2020).

3 Fonte, Worth of Women,112. For women’s property ownership see James E. Shaw, ‘Women, Credit, and Dowry in Early Modern Italy’, in Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial Europe ed. Elise M. Dermineur (2018).

4 There is a vast amount to read now on sex and gender. Classic treatments include Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (2000), and Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).

5 Unpublished manuscript called ‘Vera narrazione delle operationi delle donne’. Translated from Fabio Boni, ‘La riflessione di Torquato Tasso sulla donna nel Discorso della virtù feminile e donnesca’, Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Crocoviensis, Studia de Cultura 9 (1) 2017, 216.

6 Anon, Il costume delle donne incomenzando de la pueritia per fin al maritar (1525). For more on the education of girls, see Elizabeth Cohen and Margaret Reeves, eds, The Youth of Early Modern Women (2018), 217–276.

7 Samuel Cohn, ‘Women and Work in Renaissance Italy’, in Judith Brown and Robert Davis, eds, Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy (1998).

8 Girolamo Manfredi, Opera nova intitulata il Perche (1523), unpaginated.

9 Nikola Koepke and Joerg Baten, ‘The biological standard of living in Europe during the last two millennia’, European Review of Economic History 9 (2005), 78–9.

10 Stefano Colagrande et al., ‘Teeth of the Renaissance: A Paleopathological and Historic-Medical Study on the Jaws of the Medici Family’, Journal of Forensic Radiology and Imaging (2013).

11 For a summary of the major debates about this topic – including Thomas Laqueur’s influential idea of the ‘one-sex body’ – see Katharine Park, ‘Cadden, Laqueur, and the “One-Sex Body”’, Medieval Feminist Forum 46 (2010).

12 Gianna Pomata, ‘Was there a Querelle des Femmes in Early Modern Medicine?’, Arenal (2013), 335.

13 For a translation of Dovizi’s Calandria, along with four other influential early-sixteenth-century comedies, see Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero, trans. and ed., Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance (2003).

14 See the many examples in Laura Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss: Imagining Gender, Sex and Marriage in Italian Renaissance Comedy (2016), 1–61; for how trans studies can shed new light on these questions, see Simone Chess, Colby Gordon and Will Fisher’s special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (2019).

15 There is now lots of writing on androgyny in sixteenth-century art. For Leonardo, see Maya Corry, Beautiful Bodies: Sexuality, Spirituality and Gender in Leonardo’s Milan (forthcoming); for Michelangelo, see Francesca Falletti and Jonathan Nelson, Venus and Love: Michelangelo and the New Ideal of Beauty (2002). For androgyny, sexuality and Neoplatonism see Katherine Crawford, ‘Marsilio Ficino, Neoplatonism and the Problem of Sex’, Renaissance and Reformation 40 (2004).

16 Burchard, ‘Liber Notarum’, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 32, vol 2, 80.

17 Giannetti, Lelia’s Kiss 30. For cross-dressing sex workers, Tessa Storey, ‘Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals and Experiences’, in Catherine Richardson, ed., Clothing Culture 1350–1650 (2016), 96–9.

18 Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso (2021). Velasco carefully explains her use of female pronouns for Erauso in her introduction, and I follow Velasco’s lead. Erauso’s memoir has been translated into English – see Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (1996).

19 Quoted by Michael Stepto, ‘Introduction’ to Erauso, Lieutenant Nun, xxxiii–xxxiv. Thanks to Stephen Bowd – an expert in early modern women and war – for this fascinating reference. For a discussion of ointments to keep the breasts small, see Chapter 8.

20 For a recent survey, bringing together a mass of evidence for the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, see Leah DeVun, The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (2021); for the early modern period, see the special issue of Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19 (2019), edited by Simone Chess, Colby Gordon and Will Fisher.

21 Moderata Fonte, Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance, trans. and eds Valeria Finucci and Julia Kisacky. My analysis is indebted to Finucci’s introduction.

22 Fonte, The Worth of Women, 61.

Chapter 3

1 Philippe Bernard et al., ‘The Face of Sexualization: Faces Wearing Makeup Are Processed Less Configurally than Faces Without Makeup’, International Review of Social Psychology 32 (2019).

2 Marguerite Johnson, Ovid on Cosmetics: Medicamina Faciei Femineae and Related Texts (2016), 105.

3 Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (2012) for objections to ‘paint’ in England. There were similar fulminations against ‘paint’ in Italy and elsewhere.

4 Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, trans. Anne Dunhill with an introduction by Letizia Panizza (1999), 167.

5 Alessandro Piccolomini, Raffaella or Rather A Dialogue of the Fair Perfectioning of Ladies, trans. John Nevinson. (1968), 33; Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, trans. and ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (1992), 54.

6 Marinello, Ornamenti, 32r. Unless otherwise stated, I use the 1562 version of this text throughout.

7 Isabella Andreini, Mirtilla Pastorale (1588), 48–50. For a full English translation and analysis, see Andreini, Mirtilla, A Pastoral: A Bilingual Edition ed. Valeria Finucci and trans. Julia Kisacky (2018).

8 Andreini, Rime d’Isabella Andreini padouana comica Gelosa (1601). Quoted and discussed in Ferracuti, ‘Reflections of Isabella: Hermaphroditic Mirroring in Mirtilla and Giovan Battista Andreini’s Amor nello specchio’, California Italian Studies 5 (2014), 125.

9 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (1990), 181.

10 Debora Shuger, ‘The “I” of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors and the Reflexive Mind’, in Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt eds, Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (1999).

11 Quoted and translated by Peter Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400–1600 (1991), 236.

12 Thornton, The Italian Renaissance Interior, 238.

13 See Vincenzo Ilardi, Renaissance Vision from Spectacles to Telescopes (2007) 198–9.

14 Bigolina, Urania: A Romance, trans. and ed. Valeria Finucci (2007), 89.

15 Valeria Finucci, ‘Bigolina, Giula (c. 1518–c. 1569)’ on the Italian Women Writers website (www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/BIOS/A0080.html) and also Finucci’s introduction to her translation of Urania.

16 Chiara Matraini, Selected Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition (2009), 102–3.

17 Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry (1997). For a summary of this and other key texts, Letizia Panizza, A History of Women’s Writing in Italy (2000), 65–73.

18 Lodovico Domenichi, La nobiltà delle donne (1549), 9v.

19 For Huarte, see Javier Virués-Ortega et al., ‘A Systematic Archival Inquiry on Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–88)’, History of the Human Sciences 24 (2011).

20 Huarte, Essamina de gli’ingegni de gli huomini (1603), 449–56.

21 Bartolomeo Della Rocca, Physiognomiae et chiromantiae compendium (1536). For a fascinating consideration of the relationship between appearance and identity, see the work of Valentin Groebner, notably Who Are You?: Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (2007), and ‘Complexio/ Complexion: Categorizing Individual Natures 1250–1600’, in Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, eds, The Moral Authority of Nature (2004).

22 This is my translation from the Italian version – Juan Luis Vives, De l’ufficio del marito, come si debba portare uerso la moglie… (1546), 86r–94r. This more or less echoes Vives’ original text.

23 Domenichi, Dialoghi di Lodovico Domenichi… (1562), 119–20.

24 This version from Matteo Palma, Anatomia d’amore profano (1628), 351.

25 For an overview of this advice, see Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (2013).

26 The fullest discussion of this trend in academic medicine is Maria Carla Gadebusch Bondio, Medizinische Ästhetik: Kosmetik und plastische Chirurgie zwischen Antike und früher Neuzeit (2005). Gadebusch Bondio points out that the Galenic relationship between beauty, health and medicine was also important in medieval medicine, with discussions of this topic in the Canon of Medicine of Ibn Sina (Avicenna) of 1025.

27 Gabriele Falloppio, ‘De decoratione’, Opera omnia (1600), 325–344.

28 Marinello, Ornamenti, 111v-112r.

Chapter 4

1 Laura Cereta, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, trans. Diana Robin (2007), 72–80. These letters are full of insights into Cereta’s life as a pioneering scholar.

2 Cereta, Collected Letters, 61.

3 Cereta, Collected Letters, 79.

4 Cereta, Collected Letters, 85.

5 Cereta, Collected Letters, 83.

6 Isotta Nogarola, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, ed. and trans. Margaret King and Diana Robin (2003), 6.

7 For an overview of these changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Monika Pietrzak-Franger’s introduction to her Women, Beauty and Fashion (2014).

8 For a discussion of these issues, Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women (1990); Chidera Eggerue, What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower’s Guide to Why You Are Already Enough (2018); Florence Given, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty (2020). For an introduction to Wollstonecraft’s thought, Martina Reuter, Mary Wollstonecraft (2022).

9 Giuseppe Passi, I donneschi diffetti (1599), 164. For an English translation and fascinating discussion of the context of Passi’s work, see Suzanne Magnanini, ‘Giuseppe Passi’s Attacks on Women in The Defects of Women’, in Julie D. Campbell and Maria Galli Stampino, eds, In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Literary and Social Contexts for Women’s Writing (2011), 143–194.

10 For Christine’s biography, see Rebecca Kingston and Sophie Bourgault, ‘Christine de Pizan: Her Works, Her Times’, in de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies and Other Writings, trans. Ineke Hardy (2018), ix–xliv.

11 De Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 180.

12 Fonte, The Worth of Women, 236.

13 Letizia Panizza, ‘Introduction to the Translation’, in Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, trans. Anne Dunhill (1999), 1.

14 Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, 57–63.

15 Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, 166–67.

16 Fonte, The Worth of Women, 235.

17 All these examples and more are discussed in Catherine Kovesi Killerby, ‘Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind?: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defence of Women and Their Clothes’, Renaissance Studies 13 (1999): 255–58.

18 Killerby, ‘Heralds’, 263–69.

19 Discussed by the wonderful Tiziana Plebani, ‘Scritture di donne nel Rinascimento italiano’, in Umanesimo ed educazione, eds Gino Belloni and Ricardo Drusi, vol 2, Il Rinascimento Italiano e l’Europa (2007), 243. The original is Declamatione delle gentildonne di Cesena intorno alle pompe (1575), unpaginated.

20 Though some scholars argue that Marinella does not mean her words literally, but is using ‘hedged subversion’– see Amy Sinclair, ‘Insinuatio in Lucrezia Marinella’s Esortationi alle donne (1645): Exhorting Marital Harmony And Insinuating Feminist Critique’, Renaissance Studies 34 (2020).

21 Lucrezia Marinella, Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please, trans. Laura Benedetti (2012).

Chapter 5

1 I am indebted to Katherine A. McIver, Women, Art, and Architecture in Northern Italy, 1520–1580: Negotiating Power (2006), 17–55, for this account of Isabella Pallavicina’s upbringing, including a full discussion of the life of her fascinating mother, Camilla. For Camilla’s list of jewels for Isabella, 249. Isabella is perhaps best known today for having one of the ‘marvellous hairy girls’, Antonietta Gonzales, in her court, as depicted by Lavinia Fontana – see Merry Wiesner Hanks, The Marvellous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds (2009).

2 Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS 478, f. 5v. The whole text is digitised – www.thedigitalwalters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/html/W478. My thanks to Montserrat Cabré for first telling me about this fascinating manuscript.

3 The musk boxes would leave their scent on anyone who used them – a kind of ‘marking’ of future brides. As musk was thought to be a ‘heating’ aphrodisiac, this was especially suitable as a marriage gift. For the material culture of courtship and marriage, see Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008), especially Deborah L. Krohn’s essay ‘Rites of Passage: Art Objects to Celebrate Betrothal, Marriage and the Family’ and Jacqueline Musacchio’s Art, Marriage and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace (also 2008).

4 There are several translations of these letters. For English readers, the most complete version is Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Letters to Her Sons, 1447–1470, ed. and trans. Judith Bryce (2016). I used the bilingual edition, which allowed me to make occasional tweaks to the translation – Heather Gregory trans. and ed., Selected Letters of Alessandra Strozzi: Bilingual Edition (1997). For more on Alessandra, see Ann Crabb, The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood and Family Solidarity in the Renaissance (2000).

5 Marco Spallanzani, ‘L’abito di Fiammetta Adimari Strozzi alle nozze del Magnifico’, Archivio storico Italiano (2012). For a more positive view of sixteenth-century brides’ agency in choosing clothing, see Megan Moran, ‘Young Women Negotiating Fashion in Early Modern Florence’ in Elizabeth S. Cohen and Margaret Reeves, eds, The Youth of Early Modern Women (2018).

6 I use the surname ‘Pallavicina’ here because that is what she was called in contemporary texts; women in northern Italy sometimes feminised their family names (Lucrezia Marinella also did this). Historians, however, often refer to her by the masculinised form of her maiden name, Pallavicino, and/or add her married name, Lupi. Whatever name is used, Isabella deserves greater historical attention. I am indebted to the following: Lisa Sampson, ‘Between Court and Academy. Isabella Pallavicino Lupi and Angelo Ingegneri’s Danza di Venere (1584), in Stefano Jozza and Giuliana Pieri, eds, Chivalry, Academy and Cultural Dialogues. The Italian Contribution to European Culture (2016); Brian Richardson, Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy (2020), 36; Virginia Cox, The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (2011), 265.

7 For more of Moroni’s irresistible portraits, Aimee Ng, ed., Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture (2019). Valerio Sampieri has brought together Lucia Albani Avogadro’s poetry, including a useful list of sources: www.academia.edu/39722704/Poesie_di_Lucia_Albani.

8 For Aquinas and his context, see Montserrat Cabré, ‘Beautiful Bodies’, in A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Middle Age, ed. Linda Kalof (2010), esp. 135.

9 Woolley is a fascinating figure – for more on this ‘celebrity author’, see Margaret Ezell, ‘Cooking the Books, or, The Three Faces of Hannah Woolley’ in Michelle Di Meo and Sara Pennel, eds, Reading and Writing Recipe Books 1550–1800 (2013).

10 These warnings are peppered throughout the book – Marinello, Ornamenti, 69v, 82r, 88r, 123r, 152v, 156r, 205v.

11 Marinello, Ornamenti, 2r

12 For Isabella and other women associated with literary academies, see Virginia Cox, ‘Members, Muses, Mascots: Women and Italian Academies’, in Jane E. Everson et al., The Italian Academies 1525–1700: Networks of Culture, Innovation and Dissent (2016); also Richardson, Women and the Circulation of Texts, 36.

13 From Angelo Ingegneri in Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581).

14 The first line is ‘Calisa, chiome d’oro a l’aure estive’. See Torquato Tasso, Rime, ed. Bruno Basile (1994), 872.

15 Mutio Manfredi, Cento donne cantate da Mutio Manfredi (1630), 145.

16 Antonio Querenghi, Poesie volgari (1626), 43.

17 For ‘Calisa’, see Carla Perrone, ‘ “So che donna amo donna…”: La Calisa di Maddelena Campiglia’, in Les femmes écrivains en Itali eau Moyen Age et à la Renaissance (1994).

18 For more on Maddalena Campiglia see the introduction to her Flori, a Pastoral Drama: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Virginia Cox and Lisa Sampson (2004), and Philiep Bossier, ‘Female Writing and the Use of Literary Byways: Pastoral Drama by Maddalena Campiglia (1553–1595)’, in Anke Gilleir et al., eds, Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era (2010). For a discussion of Campiglia’s work in a broader context, Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy 1400–1650 (2008), esp. 157.

19 I’m indebted here to the account in Lisa Sampson, ‘Between Court and Academy. Isabella Pallavicino Lupi and Angelo Ingegneri’s Danza di Venere (1584)’, in Stefano Jozza and Giuliana Pieri, eds, Chivalry, Academy and Cultural Dialogues. The Italian Contribution to European Culture (2016).

Chapter 6

1 For the ‘mammy’ stereotype, see Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory (2008). For the portrayal of black people, including servants and slaves, in Italian Renaissance painting, see Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘Italy, 1490–1700’ in David Bindman et al., eds, The Image of the Black in Western Art III part 1. From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition – and below for more information on this painting in particular.

2 Due to thoroughgoing archival-based research over the last few decades, we now have a much more accurate picture of the longstanding diversity of the population in Europe. People hailing from Africa (both northern and sub-Saharan) lived in Europe as both slaves and freed people. For an overview in English, Olivette Otele, Black Europeans: An Untold History (2020), chapters 2 and 3. The classic broad discussion of slavery in early modern Italy is Charles Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe Médiévale, vol 2. Italie, colonies italiennes du Levant, Levan Latin, Empire byzantin (1977). For Muslim slaves, typically captured in raids around the Mediterranean, see especially the work of Salvatore Bono, such as Schiavi: una storia mediterranea (XVI–XIX secolo) (2016), 141–150 for female slaves; Christian Europeans were also captured as slaves and held in North Africa – slavery was often used by both sides as a pretext for ransom. For household slaves (generally women), Sally McKee, ‘Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy’, Slavery and Abolition, 29 (2008) and Stefania Salvi, ‘Donne, schiave e concubine in età moderna. Riflessioni storico-giuridiche’, in Alessandra Bassani and Beatrice del Bo, eds, Schiave e schiavi. Riflessioni storiche e giuridiche (2020); for the early slave trade with sub-Saharan Africa, Sergio Tognetti, ‘The Trade in Black African Slaves in Fifteenth-Century Florence’, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2005).

3 Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1995). More recently Farah Karim-Cooper, ‘The Materials of Race: Staging the Black and White Binary in the Early Modern Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson (2021); and Kimberly Poitevin, ‘Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race and Women in Early Modern England, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11 (2011). Erin Griffey has considered the political importance of complexion in ‘ “The Rose and Lily Queen”: Henrietta Maria’s Fair Face and the Power of Beauty at the Stuart Court’, Renaissance Studies (2021).

4 For an overview of this fascinating, and fast-growing, literature, Peter Erickson and Kim Hall, ‘ “A New Scholarly Song”: Rereading Early Modern Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly 67 (2016). The term ‘geohumoralism’ was coined by Mary Floyd-Wilson in ‘English Epicures and Scottish Witches’, Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (2006).

5 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008). For the Couwenbergh painting, now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Strasbourg, see Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The Heroic Tradition and Its Alternatives (1989), 187–193.

6 Thanks to Patricia Allerston, who first mentioned these fascinating tattoos to me around fifteen years ago, leading to my former student at the University of Edinburgh, Sarah Mitchell, completing a wonderful undergraduate dissertation on this figure in 2009 – (although this is all making me feel quite old!). The woman’s story is also taken up in the forthcoming book by Evelyn Welch, Renaissance Skin, which I had the fortune to read in draft.

7 Cynthia Becker, Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity (2006), 56–58.

8 For a consideration of this topic, see Diane Wolfthal, Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300–1700 (2022).

9 Bono, ‘Schiavi europei e musulmani (Sec. XVI–XIX)’, Oriente Moderno 91 (2011); Bono, Schiavi. Una storia mediterranea. Sec. XVI–XIX (2016). Stefania Salvi, ‘Donne, schiave e concubine in età moderna. Riflessioni storico-giuridiche.’ Schiave e schiavi. Riflessioni storiche e giuridiche (2020): 189; Stefan Hanß, ‘Hair, Emotions and Slavery in the Early Modern Habsburg Mediterranean.’ History Workshop Journal 87 (2019).

10 For slave naming practices, see Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (2018), 24–33.

11 Noel Malcolm, Rebels, Believers, Survivors: Studies in the History of the Albanians (2020), 90–91.

12 E. Natalie Rothman, ‘Becoming Venetian: Conversion and Transformation in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean’, Mediterranean Historical Review 21 (2006).

13 All examples from G. Lorenzi, ed., Leggi e memorie Venete sulla prostituzione fino alla caduta della republica (1870).

14 Jonathan Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice (2011), 13–14, 78–79.

15 This is not the only black Venus at the Metropolitan Museum – there’s also a Netherlandish bronze sculpture of around 1600 of a naked woman looking in a mirror (see www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/195447). These figures are discussed in Joaneath Spicer, ‘European Perceptions of Blackness’ in Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, 51–2.

16 See Spicer, ‘European Perceptions of Blackness’, 47–54. See also essays in Thomas Earle and Kate Lowe, eds, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2010).

17 For a full account of her life, see Linda M. Heywood, Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (2018). An account of her conversion was published in Naples in 1669 by Francesco Maria Gioia, La maravigliosa conversione alla santa fede di Cristo della Regina Singa e del suo Regno di Matamba nell’Africa meriodionale; for an image of her negotiation with the Portuguese see Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Istorica descrizione de tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola (1687), 605.

18 My translation. For the original, see Patrizia Bettella, The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (2005), 146–47. Bettella gives a prose translation that differs slightly from mine. She also discusses several other poems from this period that praise black beauty (144–51).

19 Spicer, ‘European Perceptions of Blackness’.

20 Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri, La corte di Lodovico il Moro, la vita privata e l’arte a Milano nella seconda metà del quattrocento (1913), 134.

21 Sally McKee, ‘Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy’, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 29 (2008): 305.

22 For these documents, see Paul Kaplan, ‘Isabella d’Este and Black African Women’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds Earle and Lowe (2005), 125–54.

23 For this thoughtful recent interpretation of this portrait, plus links to further reading, see Sabine Engel, ‘Titian’s Portrait of Laura Dianti: Appropriation and Transformation between Orient and Occident’, Studi Tizianeschi (2019).

24 Kaplan ‘Italy, 1490–1700’, 109–10.

Chapter 7

1 Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, Corrispondenza, Copialettere Originali, Minute, Busta 2993, copialettere 10, f. 7v, 13 March 1499 (reproduced online at www.isabelladestearchive.org). Discussed with a slightly different translation by Beverly Brown, ‘Portraiture at the Courts of Italy’, in Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, eds, The Renaissance Portrait: From Donatello to Bellini (2011), 46.

2 Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, Mantova e Urbino: Isabella d’Este ed Elisabetta Gonzaga nelle relazioni famigliari… (1893), 57–58, n. 3.

3 Alessandro Luzio, La galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra nel 1627– 28 (1913), 236–7.

4 My thanks to my friend Sarah Cockram for this reference – see her Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga: Power Sharing at the Italian Renaissance Court (2013), 162.

5 For this story, in the context of an emphasis on male shapeliness, see Timothy McCall, Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy (2022), 5.

6 For the WHO figures, see ‘Obesity and overweight’ factsheet, 2018 – www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-andoverweight. For the US figures, see Cheryl D. Fryar et al., ‘Prevalence of Overweight, Obesity and Severe Obesity among Adults aged 20 and over: United States 1960–1962 through 2015–2016’, Health E-Stats (2018).

7 There’s been a great deal of interest recently in the history of fatness. For general accounts, see Georges Vigarello, The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity (2013), and Christopher Forth, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life (2019). For fatness specifically in the early modern period, Michael Stolberg, ‘Abhorreas pinguedinem: Fat and Obesity in Early Modern Medicine (c. 1500–1750), Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (2012), and the forthcoming volume I am editing with Holly Fletcher and Christine Ott, Fat Bodies in Early Modern Europe.

8 Ugo Benzi, Trattato circa la conservazione de la sanitade (1481), 7r

9 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo del Principato 5, f. 330; transcribed for the Medici Archive Project by Bruce Edelstein (bia.medici.org).

10 McCall, Brilliant Bodies, esp. 81–116, discusses the appeal of a shapely male leg to Renaissance onlookers, both male and female.

11 Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (2007), 14–19.

12 Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516. Trans. Alice de Rosen Jervis (1927), 272.

13 Santorio Santorio, De statica medicina, first published in 1614. A German research team have recently reconstructed Santorio’s weighing machine to understand more precisely how it was used – see Teresa Hollerbach, ‘The Weighing Chair of Sanctorius Sanctorius: A Replica’, NTM Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 26 (2018).

14 Benzi, Trattato circa la conservazione, G1v

15 Marinello, Ornamenti, 29v.

16 There was a new interest in treating obesity as a medical issue in lectures at the University of Padua in the mid to late sixteenth century – physicians’ approaches to obesity are usefully brought together by Maria Carla Gadebusch Bondio, Medizinische Ästhetik: Kosmetik und plastische Chirurgie zwischen Antike und früher Neuzeit (2005), 120–125.

17 Falloppio, ‘De decoratione’, in Opera omnia vol 2 (1600), 328.

18 Mercuriale, De decoratione liber (1587), 21.

19 For an overview of this genre before print see Donatella Lippi, Díaita. Le regole della salute nei manoscritti della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (2010). Cornaro arguably holds an overly important position in the history of dieting – see, for example, Louise Foxcroft, Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years (2012), 34–6; Sander Gilman, Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia (2008), 63–5.

20 For a discussion of ‘healthy living’ in this period, see the wonderful Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy.

21 Falloppio, ‘De decoratione’, 328.

22 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo del Principato 2010, f. 358; transcribed for the Medici Archive Project by Fabrizio Nevola (bia.medici.org).

23 Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey, ‘Healthy “Decorous” and Pleasant Exercise: Competing Models and the Practices of the Italian Nobility (Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries)’ in Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture: New Perspectives on the History of Sports and Motion, eds Rebekka von Mallinckrodt and Angela Schattner (2016), 175–7.

24 Alessandro Arcangeli, ‘Exercise for Women’, in Sports and Physical Exercise in Early Modern Culture, 150.

25 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (2004), 179. This evidence is discussed in Arcangeli, ‘Exercise for Women’, 147.

26 Quoted and discussed in Nancy Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (2007), 52.

27 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 145–78. Landscape paintings in themselves were thought to enhance health – for the relationship between painting, long galleries and health in this period, see Frances Gage, Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art (2016), esp. chapter 3.

28 Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica (1569) – this book is available online via the Wellcome Collection, and is full of fascinating illustrations, also used by Pirro Ligorio to decorate a hall in the Ducal Palace in Ferrara. Nancy Siraisi discusses this book in a broader context in her History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (2007), 42–52.

29 I discuss ideas of perfect proportion in ‘The Body in Artistic Theory and Practice’ in Thomas Kren et al., eds, The Renaissance Nude (2018).

30 Niccolò Franco, Dialogo… doue si ragiona delle bellezze (1542), 23.

31 Agnolo Firenzuola, Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (2nd ed., 1552), 18v–19v. Interestingly, the first edition is illustrated with a man in the circle and square.

32 Jeamson, Artificiall Embellishments, or Arts Best Directions How to Preserve Beauty or Procure It (1665), 63–69. My thanks to Katherine Walker-Meikle for kindly giving me this reference.

33 Marinello, Ornamenti, 30v–31r.

Chapter 8

1 R. Case, M. McNealy and B. Nutz, ‘The Lengberg Finds: Remnants of a Lost 15th-century Tailoring Revolution’, in Milena Bravermanová, Helena Brezinová and Jane Malcolm-Davies, eds, Archaeological Textiles – Links between Past and Present. NESAT XIII (2017).

2 Translated and discussed in this context by Isis Sturtewagen on www.medievalsilkwork.com/2012/08/bra-shirts-in-written-sources.html.

3 Thessy Schoenholzer Nichols, ‘It does not need to be hard to hold’, Frank Matthias Kammel and Johannes Pietsch, eds, Structuring Fashion: Foundation Garments through History (2019) 29–37. Thanks to Sarah Bendall for this reference and her advice on Renaissance underwear more generally.

4 Marinello, Ornamenti, 253r–254r. Recipes for keeping breasts small were very common in late medieval and early modern texts – for the earlier period, see Kim M. Philips, ‘The Breasts of Virgins: Sexual Reputation and Young Women’s Bodies in Medieval Culture and Society’, Cultural and Social History 15 (2018). Interestingly, the transvestite soldier Catalina de Erauso (discussed in Chapter 2) said she used ‘a poultice given her by an Italian’ to reduce her breast size: ‘it hurt a great deal but the effect was very much to her liking’.

5 For more on this painting, which is in the Wadsworth Athenium in Connecticut, see Jesse M. Locker, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting (2015), 137–141.

6 Marinello, Ornamenti, 276v.

7 Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Busks, Bodices, Bodies’, in Bella Mirabella, ed., Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories (2011), 86

8 Sarah Bendall, ‘To Write a Distick Upon It: Busks and the Language of Courtship and Sexual Desire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, Gender and History 26 (2014). For an image of a busk, see for example www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/85399

9 For more on the development of ‘bodies’, busks and other structuring undergarments, see Sarah Bendall, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, The Body and Women in Early Modern England (2022).

10 Fashion historians have significantly increased our understanding of early modern clothing through thoughtful reconstruction. See Hilary Davidson and Anna Hodson, ‘Joining Forces: The Intersection of Two Replica Garments’, in Maria Hayward and Elizabeth Kramer, eds, Textiles and Text: Re-establishing the Links Between Archival and Object-Based Research: Postprints (2007), and Bendall, Fashioning Femininity.

11 Montaigne, Complete Essays, translated by Donald M. Frame (1958), 41. Discussed in Georges Vigarello, ‘The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility’, in Michel Feher, ed., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol 2 (1990), 168–76.

12 Quoted and discussed in relationship to nuns’ transgressive underwear choices in Campagnol, Forbidden Fashions, 63–4. For a discussion of ‘cassi longhi’, Annalisa Zanni et al., Velluti e moda: tra XV e XVII secolo (1989), 170.

13 See the discussion in Bendall, Shaping Femininity, 154–161.

14 Ludovico Gandini, Lettione… sopra un dubbio, come il Petrarca non lodasse Laura espressamente dal naso (1581), 18v. For more on Silvio Calandra, see Guido Rebecchini, Private Collectors in Mantua (2002), 168–9. Five hundred years later, Amadeo Quondam wondered the same thing in Il naso di Laura: Lingua e posie lirica nella tradizione del Classicismo (1991).

15 Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, ‘On the Function, Utility, and Fragility of the Nose: Early Modern Patients and Their Surgeons’, Nuncius 32 (2017): 50–51.

16 Gandini, Lettione, 5r.

17 This rather complex, involved and sometimes shocking story is delved into in detail in Paolo Savoia, Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain (2019).

18 Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (2004), 72–73.

19 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (1985), 33–35.

20 William Salmon in his Ars chirurgica, of 1698. Translated and discussed in Emily Cock, Rhinoplasty and the Nose in Early Modern British Medicine and Culture (2019).

21 Probably the most famous prosthetic nose wearer in this period was the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) who had lost his own nose in a duel. For a general discussion of early modern prosthetic noses, see Cock, Rhinoplasty and the Nose (2019).

22 The Works of Gwerful Mechain, trans. and ed. Katie Gramich (2018), 43.

23 Baldassare Olimpo degli Alessandri, Gloria d’amore (1522), 2

24 Eglogha pastora de Philebbo e Dinarcho pastori: De le bellezze che debbe haver le donne (1507).

25 Federico Luigini, Il libro della bella donna (1554), 55.

26 Juan Valverde, La anatomia del corpo umano (Giunti, 1586), 90v.

27 Lodovico Domenichi, La nobiltà delle donne (1549), 25v.

28 Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (2004), 158–160; Monica Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine (2008), 43.

29 See Helen E. O’Connell et al., ‘Anatomical Relationship between Urethra and Clitoris’, Journal of Urology 159 (1998).

30 Early modern changing attitudes to the clitoris, and the relationship with new ideas about lesbianism, have been discussed by Valerie Traub, ‘The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2 (1995): 81–113, and Katharine Park, ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade 1570– 1620’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporality in Early Modern Europe, eds Carla Mazzio and David Hillman (1997). Leah DeVun has done equally brilliant research on ideas of sex and gender in genital surgery conducted on people with hermaphroditism in the Middle Ages. See ‘Erecting Sex: Hermaphrodites and the Medieval Science of Surgery’, Osiris 30 (2015): 17–37. See also now The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance (2021).

31 Latin editions were printed in Paris (1510), Venice (1528, 1532 and 1553), Basel (1538); and French in 1540 and 1542.

32 Paulus Aegineta, Libri septem (1538), 400.

33 Otto Brunfels, Onomastikon medicinae. (1534), n.p.

34 Quoted, translated and discussed in DeVun, ‘Erecting Sex’, 24.

35 Scipione Mercurio, La comare o ricoglitrice (1596), 46–47.

Chapter 9

1 Carlo Ginzburg wrote a well-known account of the ‘benandanti’, a group of men and women who went on nocturnal spirit journeys to fight witches in the mountainous Friuli in northern Italy, but then morphed into witches themselves – The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Anne Tedeschi and John A. Tedeschi (2011). For an overview of these early and murderous witch trials in Italy, see Dinora Corsi, Diaboliche, maledette e disperate. Le donne nei processi per stregoneria (secoli XIV–XVI) (2013).

2 Tessa Storey, ‘Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic and Poison: Making and Selling Secrets in Early Modern Rome’, in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science 1500–1800, eds Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (2011), 143–66.

3 These examples are from Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 143–150.

4 Seitz, Witchcraft and the Inquisition (2011), 73.

5 Mary O’Neil, ‘Magical Healing, Love Magic and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-Century Modena’, in Brian P. Levack, ed., New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology vol 5: Witchcraft, Healing and Popular Diseases (2001).

6 Discussed in Jacqueline Boucher, Deux épouses et reines à la fin du XVIe siècle: Louise de Lorraine et Marguerite de France (1995), 91.

7 Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum trans. E. A. Ashwin (1988) for uses of ointment of various kinds – 90, 99, 104, 184, 200, 202. This ointment is ‘either given to them by the demon or brewed by themselves with devilish skill’ (186).

8 Marinello (1562) 18v and 19v. Elsewhere he recommends applying the hot blood of a black hen to the face to remove black marks (191r). An anti-baldness cure recommends burning green lizards, moles and hedgehogs (complete with their spines), then adding wasps, bees and flies, ‘as many as you can’, grinding them together and mixing with snakeroot juice to provoke hair growth (40v). There are many more recipes that seem horribly gruesome to a modern reader.

9 Even if you can’t make out her Italian, it is heartbreaking to see her hesitant writing, which gets increasingly scrappy towards the end of the document – Pietro Trifone, who has carefully transcribed and analysed her notes, has uploaded images of the original documents from the state archives in Rome to academia.edu. See also his ‘La confessione di Bellezze Ursini “strega” nella campagna Romana del Cinquecento’ in Contributi di Filologia dell’Italian Mediana (1988), vol 2. There is a thoughtful summary of this case in Corsi, Diaboliche, maledette e disperate, 135–144.

10 Diaboliche, maledette e disperate, 88.

11 Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Hammer of Witches, trans. Christoper S. Mackay (2006), 552–4.

12 Discussed and contextualised in Gary K. White, ‘Religion and Ritualized Belief ’ in Edith Snook, ed., A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance (2021), 37. For other contributions to the history of body hair and its removal, see the pioneering essay by Penny Howell Jolly, ‘Publics and Privates: Body Hair in Late Medieval Art’, in Sherry Lindquist, ed., The Meanings of Nudity in Medieval Art (2012); Jana Matthews, ‘Class and Social Status’, in Edith Snook, ed., A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance, esp. 139–142; Montserrat Cabré (with Fernando Salmón) ‘Health and Hygiene: Hair in the Medical Traditions in Roberta Milliken, ed., A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages (2022), 83.

13 Francesco Gabrieli trans. and ed., Arab Historians of the Crusades (1984), 78.

14 Quoted in Susan Aykut, ‘Hairy Politics: Hair rituals in Ottoman and Turkish Society.’ 24th Annual Conference of the Australian Association for the Study of Religions (1999).

15 Stefan Hanß, ‘Hair, Emotions and Slavery in the Early Modern Habsburg Mediterranean’, History Workshop Journal 87 (2019), 162 and 178; for the image, see Weigel, Habitus praecipuorum populorum (1577), no. 209. Available on Google Books.

16 Leigh Chipman, The World of Pharmacy and Pharmacists in Mamlūk Cairo (2010), 251.

17 Monica Green, trans. and ed., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (2001), 113–4. See p. 46 for her discussion of Muslim women as a source for cosmetic recipes.

18 Olindo Guerrini, ed., Ricettario galante, del principio del secolo XVI (1883), 51–60.

19 One of Sforza’s two recipe books is published in Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Caterina Sforza (1893), see 653 for the hair removal recipes.

20 Girolamo Rustici writing as Alessio Piemontese, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (1564), 100–1.

21 Montserrat Cabré and Carmen Cabellero have both done crucial work in this area. See particularly Carmen Caballero Navas, trans. and ed., El libro de amor de mujeres: Una compilación hebrea de saberes sobre el cuidado de la salud y la belleza del cuerpo femenino (2003), 44–5; and ‘The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared by Medieval Jewish and Christian Women.’ Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008); Montserrat Cabré (with Fernando Salmón), ‘Health and Hygiene’; I also benefited from Montserrat’s splendid paper on this subject at the Renaissance Society of America conference in 2021.

22 Lodovico Domenichi, La nobiltà delle donne (1549), 27; Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, 14.

23 Marinello, Ornamenti (2nd ed., 1574), 2r.

24 See, for example, London, Wellcome Library, MS. 772 Medical receipts and cosmetics. Giacomo Todeschino, c. 1575, 81v.

25 Piemontese, Secreti (1557), 122.

26 See, for example, Opera nuova intitolata dificio de ricette (1535), 5v. Interestingly, the 1520s editions of the pamphlet of the same name do not include the rhusma recipes, again suggesting that there was an increasing fashion for hair removal.

27 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, 659.

28 Girolamo Ruscelli, The Seconde Part of the Secretes of Master Alexis of Piemont. Trans. William Warde (1560), 9.

29 Benjamin B. Roberts, Sex and Drugs before Rock ’n’ Roll: Youth Culture and Masculinity during Holland’s Golden Age (2012), 62.

30 Monica Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (2008), 178–180.

31 Copy after Hans Baldung, Women’s Bath with Mirror, c. 1600. Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle. For a discussion of these paintings and the cultural obsession with female genitalia, see Bodo Brinkmann, ‘Baldung’s Art Witches’ in Brinkmann et al. ed., Witches, Lust and the Fall of Man (2007).

Chapter 10

1 Sharon Strocchia and Ryan Kelly, ‘Picturing the Pox in Italian Popular Prints, 1550–1650’, Renaissance Studies 2022.

2 There has been a lot of wonderful work on Renaissance courtesans. For a general introduction see Margaret Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice (1992) – quotation on 39–40. There’s a great selection of essays in Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, eds, The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (2006) and for courtesans and the literary imagination see Duncan Salkeld, Shakespeare Among the Courtesans: Prostitution, Literature, and Drama 1500–1650 (2012). For a recent scholarly overview, Susanna Mantioni, Cortigiane e prostitute nella Roma del XVI secolo (2016).

3 My account of Sofonisba’s early career is indebted to Michael Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson: A Renaissance Artist and Her Work (2020), 122. See also Leticia Ruiz Gómez, ed., A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavina Fontana, trans. Jenny Dodman (2019). The classic article on her self-portraits is Mary D. Garrard, ‘Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist’, Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994). For her time in the Spanish court (including a delightful account of her dancing in torchlight) Cecilia Gamberini, ‘Sofonisba Anguissola at the Court of Philip II’ in Sheila Barker, ed., Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame and Collectors (2016) and Almudena Pérez de Tudela, ‘Sofonisba Anguissola at the Court of Philip II’ in Gómez, A Tale of Two Women Painters (2019).

4 Now in the National Museum of Poznan in Poland.

5 Drawn around 1577–8, now in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

6 Lodovico Domenichi, La nobiltà delle donne (1549), 29v.

7 Other female painters of the era – Lavina Fontana and Plautilla Nelli, for example – did paint at a larger scale. Nelli also ran a workshop from her convent in Florence. For up-to-date research and links to further literature on early modern female artists, see Erika Gaffney’s Art Herstory website: artherstory.net.

8 Cole, Sofonisba’s Lesson, 65 and 24.

9 All these quotations are taken from the prefaces from each chapter of Marinello, Ornamenti, where he describes ideal body parts.

10 For van Hemessen, see Céline Talon, ‘Catharina van Hemessen’s Self-Portrait: The Woman Who Took Saint Luke’s Palette’, in Elizabeth Sutton, ed., Women Artists and Patrons in the Netherlands (1500–1700) (2019).

11 For this sketch, see www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1957-1214-207-110. This visit is discussed by Barbara Tremelli, ‘Sofonisba Anguissola, “Pittora de Natura”: A Page from Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook’, in Sheila Barker, ed., Women Artists in Early Modern Italy: Careers, Fame and Collectors (2016).

12 Catherine King, ‘Looking a Sight: Sixteenth-Century Portraits of Woman Artists’, Zeitschrift Für Kunstgeschichte 58 (1995): 399.

13 In Italian ‘Notte felice e lieta’. This poem was probably performed by Armani, but published posthumously. Translation and context from Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (2013), 166.

14 Lori J. Ultsch, ‘Torquato Tasso: Discourse on Feminine and Womanly Virtue’ in Julie D. Campbell and Maria Galli Stampino, eds, In Dialogue with the Other Voice in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Literary and Social Contexts for Women’s Writing (2011), 118; for eloquence being incompatible with chastity, see Lisa Jardine, ‘Isotta Nogarola: Women Humanists – Education For What?’, History of Education 12 (1983).

15 Marinello, Ornamenti, 259r. He says the hands should remain still for the same reason.

16 Margaret Rose, ‘The First Italian Actresses, Isabella Andreini and the Commedia dell’Arte’, in The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, eds Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (2019), 108–9. For the original Latin and an Italian translation, see Ferdinando Taviani, La commedia dell’arte e la società barocca I: La fascinazione del teatro (1969), 86–9.

17 This account of Armani is indebted to Eloisa Pierucci, ‘Vincenza Armani (Venezia, 1530 ca. Cremona, 11 settembre 1569)’, Drammaturgia XV (2018). This quotation is 283–4. See also now, Serena Laiena, ‘Incarnating the Ideal: Vincenza Armani the First Diva’, in Elena Brizio and Marco Piana, eds, Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance (2022).

18 Translated and discussed in Richard Andrews, ‘Isabella Andreini and Others: Women on Stage in the Late Cinquecento’ in Letizia Panizza, ed., Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society (2000), 321, n. 23.

19 Pierucci, ‘Vincenza Armani’, 281

20 Pierucci, ‘Vincenza Armani’, 272.

21 I found Bonnie Gordon’s book absolutely revelatory: Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (2004), chapter 1 for the discussion of anatomy and sexuality in song.

22 Translation by Richard Kolb at barbarastrozzi.com/piece/canto-di-bella-bocca. It’s easy to find performances of Barbara Strozzi’s work online – one of my favourite interpretations is by the music ensemble Constantinople of her Amor dormiglione (where the singer attempts to wake up the sleeping Cupid).

23 For Strozzi’s life, see Ellen Rosand, ‘Barbara Strozzi, “virtuosissima cantatrice”: The Composer’s Voice’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 31 (1978) and Beth L. Glixon, ‘New Light on the Life and Career of Barbara Strozzi’, The Musical Quarterly 81 (1997).

24 This portrait is probably the one documented as being painted by Bernardo Strozzi for Giovanni Battista Franceschi in August 1639. See Glixon, ‘New Light’, 312.

25 For this catalogue, Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 66.

26 This includes her portrait in the Mores Italiae (Yale University), where she is complete naked, and the one in Worcester Art Museum, where she is in a state of undress. For Franco in the context of the material culture of Venetian courtesans, see Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives: Art, Architecture and the Family in Renaissance Venice (2004), 159–188.

27 Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan, 46. For her writings in English, Veronica Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, trans. and ed. Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal (2007).

28 Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, 161–71.

29 Franco, Poems and Selected Letters, 39.

Chapter 11

1 For a discussion of this painting in the context of Artemisia’s career, see Letizia Treves’s account in her edited exhibition catalogue, Artemisia (2020), 174–177. This painting was most likely made for a cardinal, Ludovico Ludovisi. For more on her Susanna images, and other themes in Artemisia’s painting, Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe (2020).

2 The idea of the ‘male gaze’ reflecting gender relationships has been massively influential across many fields since Mulvey first described the phrase in relationship to 20th-century cinema in her ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16 (1975).

3 For the context of the rape in Artemisia’s early artistic career, see Sheila Barker, Artemisia Gentileschi (2021), 23–38.

4 For the original, and an alternative translation, see Veronica Gambara, Complete Poems: A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. by Molly M. Martin and Paola Ugolini (2014), 68.

5 Cox, Women’s Writing, 60–75 for Gambara and her peers.

6 For Gambara’s life, Molly M. Martin ‘Critical Introduction’, to Veronica Gambara, Complete Poems. This verse translation is by Ellen Moody – see mars.gmu.edu/bitstream/handle/1920/769/vgpoem49.html. For her cultural context, see Katherine McIver, ‘The “Ladies of Correggio”: Veronica Gambara and her Matriarchal Heritage’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 26.1 (2000).

7 Quoted and contextualised in the excellent Thijs Weststeijn, ‘Seeing and the Transfer of Spirits in Early Modern Art Theory’ in John Shannon Hendrix and Charles H. Carman, eds, Renaissance Theories of Vision (2010).

8 David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra D’Otranto (1992) 147–8.

9 Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power at the End of the Renaissance (1993), 153–54.

10 Ann Marie Rasmussen, Wandering Genitalia: Sexuality & the Body in German Culture between the Late Middle Ages & Early Modernity (2009).

11 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, trans. Charles Fantazzi (2000), 72.

12 Katherine McIver, ‘The “Ladies of Correggio”’, 31–39 for her art patronage.

13 Veronica Gambara, Rime e lettere, ed. Felice Rizzardi (1759), 147, 152–3; Irma B. Jaffe, Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets (2002), 2–3. This book is a great read, but prone to the fits of romanticism suggested by the title.

14 Jaffe, Shining Eyes, 3 n.9 seems to have the wrong translation of this passage, which can be found in Gambara, Rime, lxxxi.

15 Gambara, Rime, 231–2.

16 I discuss Renaissance ideas about public nakedness, including the quotations here, in chapter 1 of my Italian Renaissance Nude (2018).

17 Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1589), 826.

18 Samuele Romanin, Storia documentata di Venezia (1853), vols 7–8, 246–7.

19 Bartolomeo Paschetti, Del conservare la sanità et del vivere de’ Genovesi (1602), 202. The classic discussion of linen undershirts replacing bathing is Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (1988). For hygiene in Italy more generally, Douglas Biow’s The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (2006). Baths remained popular in Italy throughout the period.

20 In a fascinating article by Cathy Santore that considers Julia’s well-appointed house: ‘Julia Lombardo, “Sontuosa Meretrize”: A Portrait by Property’, Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988).

21 For example, a shoemaker from Siena recorded ten ‘used’ shirts in his household inventory of 1547 – see Paula Hohti Erichsen, Artisans, Objects and Everyday Life in Renaissance Italy (2020), 305.

22 Marinello, Ornamenti, 3r. For bathing and linen-shirt wearing in Italy, see Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 250–258.

23 Luca Landucci, A Florentine Diary from 1450 to 1516. Trans Alice de Rosen Jervis (1969), 222–3.

24 David Chambers and Brian Pullan eds, Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630 (2001), 122.

25 Garzoni, La piazza universale, 825.

26 ‘Canto degli Stufaiuoli’ in Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascherate o canti carnascialeschi andati per Firenze (1559), 460–1.

27 This image is discussed in Thomas Kren, Jill Burke and Stephen Campbell, eds, The Renaissance Nude (2018).

28 Patricia Simons, ‘Images of Bathing Women in Early Modern Europe and Turkey’, In Jaynie Anderson, ed., Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence (2009).

29 Nicolay, Le navigationi et viaggi nella Turchia (1576), 124.

30 For lesbianism in the Renaissance see, for example, Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002); Sherry Velasco, Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (2011); Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer and Diane Watt, The Lesbian Premodern (2011).

31 Una McIlvenna, Scandal and Reputation at the Court of Catherine de’ Medici (2016). For Brantome, Memoires contenans les vies des dames galantes de son temps, vol 1, 248–9 and 264–7, also for lesbianism as a new fashion, Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun (2021), 15.

32 Marinello, Ornamenti, 24r–v.

33 For Carlini, see Judith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (1986).

34 Discussed in Patricia Simons, ‘Lesbian (in)visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of donna con donna’, Journal of Homosexuality 27 (1994), though she describes both figures as ‘willing’ and ‘active’ participants. Sexual abuse of children, both boys and girls, was common in the Renaissance. Michael Rocke discusses this in his brilliant overview, ‘Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy’, in Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, eds, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (1998), 163–4. In Florence between 1495 and 1515 – around the same time as this print was created – girls between six and twelve constituted a third of rape victims (in cases with a conviction). Sex with girls was licit from the age of menstruation, said normally to be the age of fourteen.

35 See Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, The Presses and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy (2007) 124–159.

36 For the context of this poem (‘Movea dolce un zefiretto’) and Andreini’s other ‘scherzi’, see Anne MacNeil, ‘The Divine Madness of Isabella Andreini’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 120 (1995): esp. 209.

37 Isabella Andreini, Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini, ed. Anne MacNeil, trans. James Wyatt Cook (2005), 126–27.

38 Vera Fortunati Pietrantonio and Irene Graziani, Properzia de’ Rossi, una scultrice a Bologna nell’età di Carlo V (2008).

39 The best introduction to Fontana in English remains Caroline Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna (2003), but see also the useful articles in Gómez, A Tale of Two Women Painters (2019).

40 Liana De Girolami Cheney, Lavinia Fontana’s Mythological Paintings: Art, Beauty and Wisdom (2020), 133–54. For other nudes by Fontana, see Gómez, A Tale of Two Women Painters (2019), 213–229.

41 For Ruini and other ‘beautiful’ Bolognese noblewomen, see Caroline Murphy, ‘In Praise of the Ladies of Bologna’, Renaissance Studies 13 (1999). Vera Fortunati considers this image, suggesting it was made at the behest of Ruini’s husband and enjoyed ‘privately’ in Gómez, A Tale of Two Women Painters (2019), 218–9.

42 This painting can be seen in its full glory on Google Arts and Culture.

43 These letters were discovered in 2011 by Francesco Solinas, and are published as Lettere di Artemisia (2021). This translation was taken from the National Gallery pamphlet accompanying their wonderful exhibition of the artist in 2020 – www.nationalgallery.org.uk/media/35472/letters-transcription-booklet_final_online-version-1.pdf. A likely portrait of Maringhi by Simon Vouet is in the Louvre, inv. 78 (collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010061288).

44 Elizabeth Cropper, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi: La Pittora’, in Treves, ed., Artemisia (2020).

Chapter 12

1 Garzoni’s works have recently been highlighted in an exhibition at the Uffizi. See Sheila Barker, ed., ‘The Immensity of the Universe’ in the Art of Giovanna Garzoni. (2020) – my thanks to Sheila for sharing this with me before publication.

2 Marinello, Ornamenti, 32r. For ideal hair, see Edith Snook, ‘Beautiful Hair, Health, and Privilege in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 15 (2015) as well as her edited volume, A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance (2021).

3 This painting has been much discussed in the art historical literature. For a recent summary see Treves, Artemisia (2020), 217–8.

4 See the portrait medal of 1625 and Jérome David’s engraving of 1627–8 in Treves, Artemisia (2020), 162–65.

5 Discussed in Irene Graziani’s catalogue entry on this medal in Gómez, A Tale of Two Women Painters (2019), 132–3.

6 Giambattista della Porta, Della fisionomia dell’huomo (1598), 14, 33–5, 39–41.

7 Isabella Campagnol, Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents (2014), 87–88. For convent culture more generally, Giancarla Periti, In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents (2016).

8 Quoted and discussed in Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (2014), 188. For the full work in English, see Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny (2007), and for an analysis of Tarabotti’s views on female ornament, see Daniela de Bellis, ‘Attacking sumptuary laws in Seicento Venice: Arcangela Tarabotti’, 227–242.

9 See Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, 186. The whole text has recently been translated into English as Arcangela Tarabotti, Convent Paradise, trans. Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater (2020).

10 My translation adapted from Virginia Cox, Lyric Poetry by Women of the Italian Renaissance (2013), 186. The original was published in Luchesia Sbarra Coderta, Rime (1610), unpaginated. For more on Sbarra, who also wrote poignant verses about the death of her son, see Cox, Prodigious Muse, 78–9 and 267. Emanuele Lugli talks about the dangerous eroticism of hair in the Renaissance mind in ‘The Hair is Full of Snare: Botticelli’s and Boccaccio’s Wayward Erotic Gaze’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 61 (2019), and also see his evocatively titled forthcoming book, Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence (2023).

11 Thanks to Sarah Cockram for this, and other, references to Isabella d’Este and hair. The original document is published in Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, Delle relazioni di Isabella d’ Este Gonzaga con Ludovico e Beatrice Sforza (1890), 40–41.

12 Ferdinand Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia secondo documenti e carteggi del tempo (1874), 67.

13 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 248–49. For more on Eugenia’s pregnancy, see Marina d’Amelia, ‘Becoming a Mother in the: Seventeenth Century: The Experience of a Roman Noblewoman’, in Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, eds Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (2001), 223–44.

14 For the popularity of this text, and its companion the Secreta Secretorum, that was derived from the same original manuscript, see Christopher Bonfield, ‘Medicine for the Body and Soul: Healthy Living in the Age of Bishop Grosseteste c. 1100–1400’, in Robert Grosseteste and the Pursuit of Religious and Scientific Learning in the Middle Ages, eds Jack P. Cunningham and Mark Hocknull (2016). 90–95.

15 E. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier Français de l’époque carlovingienne à la Renaissance vol 2 (1872), 32; Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 248. Marinello, Ornamenti, 55r–v.

16 For towels, see Elizabeth Currie, ‘Textiles and Clothing’ in Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, eds, At Home in Renaissance Italy: Art and Life in the Italian House (2006), 342–4 – an absolutely brilliant exhibition catalogue that I’d love to see available online. See also the excellent V&A collections database – collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O130282/towel-unknown.

17 Giulio Rezasco, ‘Segno delle meretrici’, Giornale Ligustico di Archeologia, Storia e Letteratura, XVII (1890), 174–5, n. 4.

18 Welch, ‘Art on the Edge: Hair and Hands in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Studies (2009), 244.

19 Gregorovius, Lucrezia Borgia, 224–5.

20 Cavallo and Storey, Healthy Living, 247–9, discuss all these dilemmas over hair-washing.

21 For costume books, see among many other studies Giorgio Riello, ‘The World in a Book: The Creation of the Global in Sixteenth-Century European Costume Books’, Past & Present 242 (2019): 281–317.

22 Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo. Venice 1598, 113.

23 Marinello, Ornamenti, 74v–75r.

24 Michael Scot, Physionomia (1533), chapter 62.

25 Discussed in reference to Leandro Bassano’s Portrait of a Widow at Her Devotions in Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008), 286.

26 Susanna Burghartz, ‘Covered Women? Veiling in Early Modern Europe’, History Workshop Journal 80 (2015).

27 Lugli, ‘The Hair Is Full of Snares’.

28 As my former student, Anna Coburn, investigated in her wonderful undergraduate dissertation of 2014.

29 Cathy Santore, ‘Julia Lombardo, “Sontuosa Meretrize”: A Portrait by Property’, Renaissance Quarterly 41 (1988), 61.

30 David Chambers, Jennifer Fletcher and Brian S. Pullan, eds, Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630 (2001), 123–24.

31 Luca Molà and Giorgio Riello, ‘Against the Law: Sumptuary Prosecutions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Padova’, in The Right to Dress, eds Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (2019), 216–17.

32 This analysis is indebted to Evelyn Welch’s pioneering article ‘Art on the Edge’, 247–8. Many of the primary sources are in Alessandro Luzio and Rodolfo Renier, ‘Il lusso di Isabella d’Este Marchesa di Mantova’, Nuova Antologia (1896).

33 For more on hair and political and social identity, see Jana Matthews, ‘Class and Social Status’, in Edith Snook, ed., A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance (2021). For Isabella d’Este’s inventive hairstyles, see Welch, ‘Art on the Edge’, 249–50.

34 Welch, ‘Art on the Edge’, 244.

35 Marinello, Ornamenti, 61r.

36 Campagnol, Forbidden Fashions, 21–22; Jutta Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (1999), 121–23.

37 Quoted and discussed in Paulicelli, Writing Fashion, 186.

Chapter 13

1 Francesco di Andrea Buonsignori, Memorie: 1530–1565, eds Sandro Bertelli and Gustavo Bertoli (2000), 38. There is more on Prudenza’s sad story in Giuseppe Conti, ‘Madonna Prudenza da Trani’, La rassegna nazionale XXIV, anno VII (1885), and the poems are considered in detail in Giancarlo Baronti, Storie funeste. Prudenza Anconitana e Marzia Basile. Francesco Novati e Benedetto Croce (2013).

2 Il lachrimoso lamento che fece la Signora Prudentia Anconitana (first edn 1589)

3 Conti, ‘Madonna Prudenza’, 459–462.

4 Sforza, ‘Experimenti’, in Pietro Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, 778–9.

5 Leonardo Fioravanti, Dello specchio di scientia universale (1572), 338–343. For Fioravanti’s spectacular career, see William Eamon, The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (2010).

6 Pietro Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi… nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia medicinale (1568). Syphilis was a new disease in the Renaissance, and associated in Italy with troops led by the French king, who had invaded the peninsula in 1494, hence called ‘the French pox’. See Eugenia Tognotti, ‘The Rise and Fall of Syphilis in Renaissance Europe’, Journal of Medical Humanities 30 (2009).

7 Fioravanti, Dello specchio, 305r–v. The fourth section of his Del compendio di secreti rationali (1564). 118r–145v is dedicated to cosmetic materials that ironically also include ingredients he warns against here, though two ‘recipes’ inform women that they would be more beautiful if they’d only be happier – 141r–142r.

8 Patrick Zutshi, ‘An Unpublished Letter of Isabella of Aragon, Duchess of Milan’, Renaissance Studies 2006, 495–7.

9 Francesco d’Errico, G. Viia and G. Fornaciari, ‘Dental esthetics of an Italian Renaissance noble-woman, Isabella D’Aragona. A case of chronic mercury intoxication’. Ossa 13 (1988), 207–33.

10 For the archaeology of mercury, see the discussion in Molly K. Zuckerman, ‘More Harm than Healing? Investigating the Iatrogenic Effects of Mercury Treatment on Acquired Syphilis in Post-medieval London’, Open Archaeology 16 (2016), 48–9; for syphilis’s effect on bones, Antonio Fornaciari et al., ‘Syphilis in Maria Salviati (1499–1543), Wife of Giovanni de’ Medici of the Black Bands’, Emerging Infectious Diseases 26 (2020).

11 Antonio Fornaciari et al., ‘Renaissance Mercurial Therapy in the Mummies of Saint Domenico Maggiore in Naples: A Palaeopathological and Palaeotoxicological Approach’, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 14 (2022), 47. Isabella would surely be turning in her grave at that description, if she were still in it.

12 Achielle Dina, ‘Isabella d’Aragona. Duchessa di Milano e di Bari’, Archivio storico Lombardo (1921), 292. The aristocratic lords of northern European courts were traditionally very proud of their fair hair – see McCall, Brilliant Bodies, chapter 4.

13 Portrait identification is always vexed, but Carla Glori has linked this image to Isabella through an analysis of this figure’s jewellery. See her unpublished ‘Proposta di identificazione della dama con la reticella di perle di Ambrogio de Predis’ – Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milano’ via academia.edu.

14 Dina, ‘Isabella d’Aragona’, 304.

15 Zutshi, ‘An Unpublished Letter’, 495–7.

16 Stefano Colagrande et al., ‘Teeth of the Renaissance: A Paleopathological and Historic-Medical Study on the Jaws of the Medici Family’, Journal of Forensic Radiology and Imaging 1 (2013), 196.

17 World Health Organization Report, ‘Mercury in Skin Lightening Products’. apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1262414/retrieve.

18 Olindo Guerrini, Ricettario Galante del principio del secolo xvi (1883), 23–4.

19 Caterina Sforza, ‘Experimenti’, 628.

20 John K. Brackett, Criminal Justice and Crime in late Renaissance Florence, 1537–1609, 62 for this common form of torture.

21 There are three letters about this case of 17, 26 and 28 September, all in Florence, Archivio di Stato, Mediceo del Principato, 538a, fols. 572, 661 and 670. They were transcribed for the Medici Archive Project by Susan Kubersky in 2002 (bia.medici.org).

22 Quoted in Trevor Dean, ‘Domestic Violence in Late-Medieval Bologna’, Renaissance Studies 18 (2004): 527.

23 Thomas V. Cohen, ‘A Daughter-Killing Digested, and Accepted, in a Village of Rome, 1563–1566’, in Murder in Renaissance Italy, eds Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe (2017), 62–80.

24 Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (2001), 120–25.

25 Marinello, Ornamenti, 166r.

26 Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (2004), esp. 114–8.

27 Joanne M. Ferraro, ‘The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995); Ferraro, Marriage Wars, 120–24.

28 Emlyn Eisenach, Husbands, Wives, and Concubines: Marriage, Family, and Social Order in Sixteenth-Century Verona (2021), 204.

29 Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage, Introduction.

30 Ferraro, Marriage Wars, 120–21. Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage, 127–9.

31 My account is indebted to the recent studies of two historians: Craig Monson’s The Black Widows of the Eternal City: The True Story of Rome’s Most Infamous Poisoners (2020), which gives a racy account of the accused women and usefully translates the major sources. For a more sober analysis, linking the murders to the texture of working women’s lives and marital violence, see Simona Feci – ‘Trame di donne all’indomani della peste romana del 1656: La vicenda dell “acqua tofana”’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines 132 (2020); and ‘Violenze e venefici. Narrazioni dell’acqua Tofana (Roma, sec. XVII)’, in F. Ferrando et al., Storie di violenza. Genere, pratiche ed emozioni tra Medioevo ed Età Contemporanea (2020).

32 Both quotations translated from Feci, ‘Violenze e venefici’, 32–3.

33 Monson, Black Widows, 114–8 tells Anna Maria’s story (115 for quotation).

34 Quotations from Monson, Black Widows, 38, 45, 95.

Chapter 14

1 Pasolini, Caterina Sforza, 608. For a discussion of this document and Caterina Sforza’s alchemical practice in a broader context of Italian women’s experiments, see Meredith Ray, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (2015), chapter 1.

2 Tessa Storey, ‘Face Waters, Oils, Love Magic and Poison: Making and Selling Secrets in Early Modern Rome’, in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science 1500–1800, eds Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (2011).

3 The widespread involvement of women in domestic experimentation has been one of the most lively areas of the history of science in recent years. See for an excellent overview the work of Elaine Leong, especially her book Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine Science and the Household in Early Modern England (2019), and her article with Alisha Rankin, ‘Testing Drugs and Trying Cures: Experiment and Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2017). Rankin’s work on German noblewomen’s experimentation is also crucial in this field – see for example Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany (2013). For Italy, see work by Sharon Strocchia, Sheila Barker and Meredith Ray, cited below.

4 Julia L. Hairston, ‘Skirting the Issue: Machiavelli’s Caterina Sforza’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000). For an accurate short biography, Giampiero Brunelli in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, via www.treccani.it.

5 There are two manuscripts of the Experiments now surviving, one in a private archive that has been known since the nineteenth century (published in Pasolini, Caterina Sforza 599–807), and the other recently found and discussed in Sheila Barker and Sharon Strocchia, ‘Household Medicine for a Renaissance Court: Caterina Sforza’s Ricettario Reconsidered’, in Sharon Strocchia and Sara Ritchey, eds, Gender Health and Healing, 1250–1550 (2020).

6 For an accessible overview, see Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (2013).

7 I consulted the Italian translation of the Latin original: Giambattista della Porta, Dei miracoli et maravigliosi effetti della natura prodotti (1562), chapter 23, 66v–69v – interestingly, his last recipe is to reveal whether a woman is using cosmetics or not, involving chewing saffron and breathing on her face.

8 See Sheila Barker, ‘The Contributions of Medici Women to Medicine in Grand Ducal Tuscany and Beyond’ in Alessio Assonitis and Brian Sandberg, eds, The Grand Ducal Medici and Their Archives (2016), and ‘Christine de Lorraine and Medicine at the Medici Court’, in Giovanna Benadusi and Judith C. Brown, eds, Medici Women: The Making of a Dynasty in Grand Ducal Tuscany (2015). For Germany, see Alisha Rankin, Panaceia’s Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Germany, (2013).

9 Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, trans. Virginia Cox (2007), 169–85. Discussed in Meredith Ray, ‘Prescriptions for Women: Alchemy, Medicine and the Renaissance Querelle des Femmes’, in Anke Gilleir et al., eds, Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era (2010).

10 Penny Bayer, ‘From Kitchen Hearth to Learned Paracelsianism: Women and Alchemy in the Renaissance’, in Stanton J. Linden, ed., Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (2007); essays by Meredith Ray, Penny Bayer and Jayne Archer and Dorothea Heitsch in Kathleen P. Long, ed., Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Culture (2010).

11 See the unpaginated dedicatory letter to Giovanna d’Austria that opens Mattioli, I discorsi… nelli sei libri di Pedacio Doscoride Anazarbeo della materia medicinale (1568), in the context of Barker, ‘The Contributions of Medici Women.

12 These examples are given in Luzio and Renier, ‘Il lusso di Isabella d’Este’, 90.

13 Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, 16.

14 Marinello, Ornamenti, 145r.

15 See, for example, Monica Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (2008); Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (2006). Meredith K. Ray, ‘Prescriptions for Women: Alchemy, Medicine and the Renaissance Querelle Des Femmes’, in Women Writing Back/Writing Women Back: Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era, eds Anke Gilleir, Alicia Montoya and Suzan van Dijk (2010), 135–61.

16 For an overview of this trend in recent historiography, which has completely shifted the older view of the university and academy-led ‘scientific revolution’, see Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies 28, no. 4 (2014): 496–514.

17 Some of these books are digitised. The Wellcome Library in London (wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/recipe-books) and the Folger Library in Washington (folgerpedia.folger.edu/List_of_receipt_books) have particularly rich collections that are being (slowly) transcribed by volunteers via the ‘From the Page’ website – fromthepage.com/folger/early-modern-recipe-books.

18 This image is on the front cover of Sharon Strocchia’s groundbreaking book Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (2019).

19 There has been much brilliant work over the last ten years on Renaissance apothecaries. See, for example, Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, 151–8, where she discusses extant pharmacies. See also James Shaw and Evelyn Welch, Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence (2011); Filippo de Vivo, ‘Pharmacies as Centres of Communication in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 505–21; David Gentilcore, ‘Introduction to The World of the Italian Apothecary: Apothecaries, “Charlatans” and the Medical Marketplace in Italy, 1400–1750’, Pharmacy in History 45 (2003): 91–94, and other essays in the same issue.

20 Strocchia, Forgotten Healers, 86; de Vivo, ‘Pharmacies as Centres of Communication’.

21 Jonathan Nelson, ed., Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523–1588): The First Woman Painter of Florence (2000).

22 Strocchia, Forgotten Healers, 136–38.

23 Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (2019), 42.

24 Camilla Erculiani, Letters on Natural Philosophy: The Scientific Correspondence of a Sixteenth-Century Pharmacist, with Related Texts. Edited by Eleonora Carinci, translated by Hannah Marcus (2020), with a preface by Paula Findlen (‘Foreward: Aristotle in the Pharmacy: The Ambitions of Camilla Erculiani in Sixteenth-Century Padua’), 110–12. Her dedicatory letter is discussed in Sandra Plastina, ‘Letters on Natural Philosophy and New Science: Camilla Erculiani (Padua 1584) and Margherita Sarrocchi (Rome 1612)’, in Women, Philosophy and Science, ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer and Gianni Paganini (2020).

25 An account of Erculiani’s beliefs about the flood and how they intersect with ideas about gender and knowledge can be found in Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (2019), 32–43. Also important on Erculiani is Ray, Daughters of Alchemy, 114–131, and Eleonora Carinci, ‘Una “speziala” padovana: Lettere di philosophia naturale di Camilla Erculiani (1584)’ Italian Studies 68.2 (2013).

Chapter 15

1 Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (2013). For the Making and Knowing Project, led by Pamela Smith, see www.makingandknowing.org. Wilson Poon and I collaborate as part of the Royal Society-funded Renaissance Goo project at the University of Edinburgh. See blogs.ed.ac.uk/renaissance_goo.

2 My heartfelt thanks to Jackie Spicer and Anna Canning, both of whom started me along this road in 2011. See our jointly authored ‘Making Up the Renaissance’ website, where we reconstruct some of Caterina Sforza’s cosmetic recipes – blogs.ed.ac.uk/ renaissancecosmetics.

3 We discuss this in more detail in Jill Burke and Wilson Poon, ‘ “Your Friends Will Teach You”: Beautifying Physic and Makers’ Knowledge’, in Sarah Bendall and Serena Dyer, eds., Making and Embodiment in Early Modern Europe, forthcoming.

4 To get an insight into the dizzying array of Italian weights and measures, see the indispensable Ronald Zupko, Italian Weights and Measures from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (1981), 134 for the Venetian pound.

5 For a brilliant discussion of the often overlooked knowledge involved in cooking, see Rebecca May Johnson, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen (2022).

6 Wilson and I have written about this in our forthcoming essay: ‘The “Shock of Recognition”: Hylocentrism in Apothecary Taxonomies and Soft Matter Science’.

7 For more information and resources, see the Renaissance Goo project’s blog and social media feeds (blogs.ed.ac.uk/renaissance_goo), and Erin Griffey’s forthcoming essays and book – Facing Decay: Beauty, Wrinkles and Anti-Aging Cosmetics in Early Modern Europe.

8 Herbario volgare, nel quale virtu delle herbe, et moltri altri simplici se dechiarano (Venice, 1526), chapter 146.

INDEX

A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition. For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function.

NB page numbers in italics indicate illustrations

‘Academy of the Enlightened’ 77

Accarigi, Ortensia 217

Accomplisht Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and Cookery, The (Woolley) 76, 76

actresses 155–7

Adam and Eve 23–4, 30

Andreini, Isabella 38–40, 39

Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 111

Albani Avogadro, Lucia 75

Alberti, Leon Battista 110

alchemy 227–8

Alfonso II, King of Naples 212

Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara 94

Allori, Allesandro 193

Amazigh community 87, 90

Ambrogio de Predis 212, 212

Anatomy (Valverde de Amusco), 127

anatomy, 27–8

Ancient and Modern Clothes (Vecellio) 196–9, 197, 199

Ancient Egypt, 7

Andrea, Zoan 180, 180

Andreini, Isabella 155, 162, 181

androgyny 29–30

Anguissola, Amilcare 150–51

Anguissola, Sofonisba 148–54

Anna Jagiellon, Queen of Poland 234

Apelles 122

apothecaries 231–4

Aqua Tofana murders, 219–23

Aquinas, Thomas 75

Aretino, Pietro 12

Aristotle 23, 27, 121, 198

Armani, Vincenza 148, 154–8, 162

Arnaldus de Villanova 192

arsenic 208–9, 222

Art of Love (Ovid) 36

Art of Static Medicine (Santorio) 102, 103

Artificiall Embellishments (Jeamson) 112

artists, female 117, 150–52, 166–7, 182–5

As You Like It (Shakespeare), 40

asbestos 210

Baldung, Hans 141–3, 142

‘Barbara the Spaniard’ 31

Barbolani, Federigo 217

Bari 214

Bassano, Luigi 135–6

bathhouses 174–9

beauty books 6–7

Bellestra, Fulvia 123

Bellini, Giovanni 43

Benalio, Bernardo 11

Benzi, Ugo 101, 103

Benzoni, Giulia 196

Berger, John 166

Bernardino of Siena 173

da Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi 29

Bigolina, Giulia 5, 44–5

‘black Venus’ 90–91

bodily proportion 110–13

body hair removal 134–43

Bono, Salvatore 84, 88

Book of Beautiful Women (Luigini) 127

Book of the City of Ladies, The (Christine de Pizan) 61

Book of the Courtier, The (Castiglione) 23, 36, 101, 108

‘books of secrets’ 10

Bordone, Paris 86–9

Borgia, Lucrezia 191, 195–6, 201–2

Bottera, Elena 218–19

Botticelli 200

Brambilla, Ambrogio 13, 13

Brantôme, Pierre 179

‘breast bags’ 115–17

breasts 115–17

Brognolo, Giorgio 93–4

Bronzino, Agnolo 26

Brunfels, Otto 129

Burchard, Johannes 31

Burckhardt, Jacob 40–41

busks 119

Buzzi Coli, Marta 220

Cabré, Montserrat 230

Calandra, Silvio 121

‘Calisa’ (Campiglia) 79

Calvaert, Denys 183

Campi, Bernardino 150

Campiglia, Maddalena 79–80

Canning, Anna 240

‘Canto di bella bocca’ (Strozzi) 158–9

capigliera 201

Carlini, Benedetta 180

Caro, Annibale 151

Carpaccio, Vittore 201

Casola, Pietro 13

Casoni, Felice Antonio 187–8, 187

Castiglione, Baldassare 23, 36, 40

da Castiglione, Sabba 42

Catalogue of all the principle and most honoured courtesans of Venice 160

Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forlì 134

Cavalieri, Tommaso 150

Cavatia, Romano 219

Cavelli, Francesco 159

Cecchi, Matteo 208

Celebrino, Eustachio 11

Cennini, Cennino 111

Cereta, Laura 55–60, 56

Cesena, Italy 66

Charles II, King of England 118

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 170

childbirth and pregnancy 9–10, 26–7, 118, 120, 192

midwifery 129–30, 230–31

Christine de Pizan 61

Cibo, Gherardo 229

Clothes of the Principal Peoples (Weigel) 136, 136

clothing 74–5, 101, 115–20

bras 115–17, 116

stays 120–21, 121

underbodices 118–21

underdress (gamurra) 72–3

undershirts 175

Colombo, Realdo 28

Colonna, Vittoria 169

Columbia University Making and Knowing Project 236

Como, Italy 131, 134

Compendium of Physiognomy and Palmistry (Della Rocca) 47–8, 47

Compendium of Rational Secrets (Fioravanti) 210

conception 27–8

Considerations on Painting (Mancini) 152

Conti, Anna Maria 221–2

Convent Paradise (Tarabotti) 189, 203

Copernicus, Nicolaus 114

Cornaro, Alvise 104–5

Corner, Cristina 65

da Correggio, Antonio 172

Corso, Rinaldo 172

Cortese, Isabella 10–11

cosmetics 137–8, 224–35

approbation of 60–67

cosmetic medicine 49–51

criticism of 55–60

oils 248

recipes 236–58

skin whiteners 84, 214–16

toxic ingredients 208–23

waters 241

witches and 132–3

courtesans 147–8, 155, 160–64

van Couwenbergh, Christiaen 85–6

di Credi Lorenzo 226

Crenshaw, Kimberlé 95

Crispolti, Laura 222

Criton of Heraclea 7

Cropper, Elisabeth 185

Crusichi, Elena ‘La Draga’ 132

Customs of Women, The 24–5, 24

Da Vinci see Leonardo da Vinci

Dance of Venus (Ingegneri) 80

De Grandis, Giovanna 221–2

De’ Rossi, Properzia 182

De’ Sommi, Leone 157

Declamation about Ostentation, A 66

Defects of Women, The (Passi) 60

Delicado, Francisco 14–16, 15

Della Porta, Giambattista 228

Della Rocca, Bartolomeo 47, 198

‘Dialogue on Love’ (Domenichi) 48

Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (Tullia d’Aragona) 46

Dianti, Laura 83, 94–5

dieting see weight issues

Diotima of Mantinea 66

divorce 219

Domenichi, Lodovico 46, 48, 127, 139, 150

domestic violence 217–19

Donatino, Antonia 170

Dorothea Sabina, Countess of Neuburg 119

Dürer, Albrecht 177

Ebrea Anna (‘Jewish Anna’) 14, 224–5, 235

education 32–4, 56–8

Education of A Christian Woman, The (Vives) 48

Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence 26–7, 101, 120

Eleonora of Aragon, Duchess of Ferrara 201

Equicola, Mario 30

de Erauso, Catalina 32

Ercolani, Agostino 173

Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, 201

Erculiani, Camilla 2345, 235

d’Este family

Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara 94

Beatrice d’Este, Duchess of Milan 99, 201, 213

Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, 201

Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua 92–4, 99–100, 113, 191, 195, 201–2

Evil and Shrewdness of Women, The 59, 59

Examination of Men’s Wits, The (Huarte) 46–7

exercise 108–10

Exhortations to Women and to Others If They Please (Marinella) 67

Experiments (Caterina Sforza) 138, 140, 215, 227–8

eyes, 50–51, 122, 151, 170–72

Fabrilignario, Paolo 218

facial disfigurement 122–3

Falloppio, Gabriele 28, 49–50, 104, 107

Farina, Graziosa 220, 222

Farnese, Giulia 191

Farnese, Mario 81

fatness see weight issues

female genitalia 125–30, 129

feminism 58–62, 67, 189

Ficino, Marsilio 30

Finucci, Valeria 44

Fioravanti, Leonardo 209–11, 216

Firenzuola, Agnolo 37, 111, 111

Florence 176, 207, 232–3

Flori (Campiglia) 79–80

Floridoro (Fonte) 33–4

Fontana, Lavinia 151, 182–3, 187–8, 187

Fonte, Moderata 18–19, 19, 25, 28, 33–4, 61, 64, 203, 228

Forteguerri, Laudomia 181–2

France 43, 179

Franchi, Alessendro 218–19

Franco, Niccolò 111

Franco, Veronica 148, 160–65, 161

Fredrick II, Holy Roman Emperor 198

Galen 27

Gallerani, Cecilia 201

Gallicina, Laura 32

Gambara, Giberto 168

Gambara, Veronica 168–70, 169, 172–3

Gandini, Lodovico 121–2

Garzoni, Giovanna 186–7

Garzoni, Isabella 159

Garzoni, Tommaso 174, 176

da Gazzuolo, Federico 157

gender identity 20–22, 28–32

Genoa 83, 153, 174–5

Gentileschi, Artemisia 117, 166–8, 174, 184–5, 187

Germany 135, 141

Gherardini, Stefano 231, 233

Ginori, Giovanna 233–4

Giovanna, Grand Duchess of Tuscany 229

Glory of Love (Olimpo degli Alessandri) 126

Gonzaga, Elisabetta, 99

Gonzaga, Francesco 99

Gordon, Bonnie 158

Gratiosa 123

Great Surgery (Lanfranco da Milano) 129–30

Green, Monica 137

Griffey, Erin, 240

Griffon, Jean 122

hair 75, 186–203

colour 196–8

covering 198–200

haircare 192–6

hairpieces 13

hairstyles 200–203

sexuality and 189–91

Hall, Kim 84

‘Happy and Joyful Nights’ (Armani) 155

Hartlieb, Johannes 141

Hartman, Saidiya 86

health and beauty 49

Henry III, King of France 161

Henry IV, King of France 133

History of Animals (Aristotle) 198

Holland see Netherlands

Holme, Randle 118

homosexuality

female 79, 128, 177–81

male 179–81

Huarte, Juan 46, 85

humours 22–3, 28, 47–8, 50–51, 85, 104, 107

humoral balance, 188

humoral medicine 50–51

Iconology (Ripa) 188

Imbert, Simon 221

Ingegneri, Angelo 80

‘intersectionality’ 95

Isabel de Valois, Queen of Spain 149

Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua 92–4, 99–100, 113, 191, 195, 201–2

Isabella of Aragon 211–15, 213

Isabella Ruini (Fontana) 182–3

Islamic practices 135–6

Jeamson, Thomas 112

Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso) 78

jewellery 57, 65, 69, 74–5

Jews/Judaism 14–15, 138–9

Judgement of Paris 70

Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 100

Kelly, Joan 16

Kramer, Heinrich 131, 135

La Calandria (Bibbiena) 29

labiaplasty 125–30

Lachrymose Lament of Signora Prudentia Anconitana, The 208

Landucci, Luca 102, 176

Lanfranco da Milano 129–30

Last Supper, The (Nelli) 233

lead 210

Lengberg Castle, Austria 114–15, 116

Leo X, Pope 102

Leonardo da Vinci 29, 110, 128, 129, 201

lesbianism see homosexuality

Letters (Cereta) 55–58, 56

Letters on Natural Philosophy (Erculiani) 234, 235

literacy 11–12

Lombardo, Julia 175, 200

Lomellino, Orazio 153

Lotto, Lorenzo 43

love magic 132–3, 170–71

Luigini, Federico 127

Machiavelli, Niccolo 40, 226

Maddalena the Weaver 132, 224–5

magic potions 132–4

make-up 35–8, 48–9

Malcolm, Noel 88

‘male gaze’ 167, 184

Malleus Maleficarum (Kramer and Sprenger) 131–2, 134

Mancini, Giulio 152

Manfredi, Mutio 78

Margaret de Valois, Queen of France 133

Margaret of Austria 181–2

Marinella, Lucrezia 37, 62–4, 63, 67

Marinello, Giovanni ix–x, 37, 50–51, 62, 64, 69–71, 69, 77, 105–7, 210–11, 230–31

see also Ornaments of Ladies, The

Maringhi, Francesco Maria 185

Marino, Giovan Battista 91

da Marradi, Francesco 107

marriage 21, 70–77, 80–81, 148

divorce 219

domestic violence 217–19

dowries 21, 74–8

magic potions and, 132–3

sexual obedience 218

widows 77–8

Matraini, Chiara 45

Mattioli, Pietro Andrea 210, 229–30

Mechain, Gwerful 125–6

Medical Compendium (Paul of Aegina) 129

Medici family 186

Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France 179

Cosimo de’ Medici 71

Isabella de’ Medici 108

Lorenzo de’ Medici 74

medicines 227–31

see also apothecaries

Meli Lupi, Camilla 80–81

Meli Lupi, Giampaolo 74

Men’s Bath, The (Dürer) 177

Mercuriale, Girolamo 28, 104, 108–9

Mercurio, Scipione 130

mercury 209–11, 214–17

Michelangelo 29–30, 30, 182

midwifery 129–30, 230–31

Mignon, Jean 177, 178

Milan 191, 201, 212–15

Miraculous and Marvellous Effects Produced By Nature, The (Della Porta), 228

Mirror of Universal Knowledge (Fioravanti) 209

mirrors 41–3

Mirtilla (Andreini) 38–9

Miserable End of Signora Anzola, The 147–8, 147

Miseroni, Girolamo 91

Moncada, Fabrizio 152–3

de Montaigne, Michel 119

Moroni, Giovanni Battista 75

Moryson, Fynes 13

motherhood 80–81

Mulvey, Laura 167

Murano, Venice 41, 43, 219

nakedness, 173–7, 182–4

Naples 71, 88–9, 214, 222

‘natural look’ 36–51

Navigations and Voyages Made in Turkey, The (de Nicolay) 178

Nelli, Sister Plautilla 233

Netherlands 43, 141, 171

de Nicolay, Nicolas 177

Njinga, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba 91

Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men, The (Marinella) 62–4

Nobility of Women (Domenichi) 127, 139

Nogarola, Isotta 58

‘non-naturals’ 49

noses 121–5

prosthetic noses 124, 125

reconstruction 122–3, 124, 125

nuns 189–90

Nuremberg, Germany 123

Nutz, Beatrix 115

obesity see weight issues

Olimpo degli Alessandri, Baldassarre 126

On the Art of Gymnastics (Mercuriale) 109, 109

On the Beauty of Women (Firenzuola) 37, 111, 111

On the Fabric of the Human Body (Vesalius) 27, 27, 114

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Copernicus) 114

On the Use of Parts (Galen) 27

Onomastikon medicinae (Brunfels) 129

Oration for the Restitution of Vain Ornamentation, An (Sanuti) 64

Orio, Franceshina 132

‘ornament’ xi

Ornaments of Ladies, The (Marinello) ix–x, 50, 69–70, 69, 77, 180, 218, 239

bathing 175

body hair 139–40

body proportion 112–13

breasts 116–17

diet 103, 105–7, 218

eyebrows 256–7

eyes 50–51, 122, 151

faces 151–2

Fattening Honey Nut Balls (recipe) 254–5

Fig and Pine-nut Hand Scrub (recipe) 253–4

hair 186–7, 193–4, 196, 198, 202

Honey and Egg Eye Cream (recipe) 250–51

Lavender, Rose and Sage Water (recipe) 244–5

Mallow, Willow and Psyllium Hair Conditioner (recipe) 246–7

noses 122

Rose and Bran Scrub (recipe) 245

Rose Lip Balm (recipe) 249–50

skin whitening 84

stretchmarks 118

Tallow and Tree Gum Anti-wrinkle Cream (recipe) 251–3

teeth 230

voice 155–6

Orsetta, Camilla 132

Ovid 36

Pallavicina, Camilla 68–9

Pallavicina, Isabella 68–9, 71, 74–5, 77–81, 155

Paré, Ambroise 120

Parenti, Marco 72

Parmigianino 42

Passi, Giuseppe 60

Pastoral Ecologue of Philebbo and Dinarcho the Shepherds 126

Paternal Tyranny (Tarabotti) 189

Paul of Aegina 129

peasant women 5–6, 8

Penni, Luca 177

Peregrini, Pasquetta 219

Petrarch 5, 121–2, 126, 169, 181–2

Philip II, King of Spain 149

Phryne 48–9

physiognomy 46–8

Physiognomy (Della Rocca) 198

Pia, Emilia 230

Piccini, Giacomo 63

Piemontese, Alessio 138

pilgrims’ badges 171, 171

poets, female 163–5, 168–9

poison 207–23

Poon, Wilson 236

Portrait of a Woman with Jasmine (Lorenzo di Credi) 226

Portrait of Andalucian Lozana (Delicado) 14–16, 15

Potiphar’s Wife (Properzia de’ Rossi) 182

pregnancy see childbirth and pregnancy

Price List of the Whores of Venice, The 148

Prince, The (Machiavelli) 40

Principe, Lawrence M. 236

Prudence (Fontana) 182–3

Pucci, Lorenzo 191

racial beauty, 90–95

racial ideology, 84–6, 90–91

racism, 95

rape 218

recipes 236–58

Caterina Sforza’s Distilled Broad-Bean Flower Water 241–3

Caterina Sforza’s Nettle Tonic 243–4

Fattening Honey Nut Balls 254–5

Fig and Pine-nut Hand Scrub 253–4

Giovanni Marinello’s Lavender, Rose and Sage Water 244–5

Honey and Egg Eye Cream 250–51

Marinello’s Mallow, Willow and Psyllium Hair Conditioner 246–7

Marinello’s Rose and Bran Scrub 245

Marinello’s Rose Lip Balm 249–50

Sooty Recipe for Hair and Eyebrow Colour 255–7

Tallow and Tree Gum Anti-wrinkle Cream 251–3

Venustà Ceruse 257–8

Very Light and Most Excellent Rouge 258

Violet Oil from the Common Herbal 248–9

Regimen Sanitatis Salerni 192

Renaissance x, 3–4

ideals of female beauty 4–6, 46, 110–13

femininity 20–22

feminism 58–62, 67, 189

courtship 70

black women’s beauty, 90–95

diet 105–7

women in 21–4

physique of women 23–4, 26

roles in life 24–5

reading 11–12

rhusma paste 136–7, 140

Ricettario Galante 138

Ripa, Cesare 188

Roccavaldina, Sicily 232

role-play 40–41

Rome 13–15, 312, 138, 191, 219, 233

Rosso, Lodovico 172

Rubens, Peter Paul 201

ruffiana 89–90

Ruini, Isabella 183–4

Ruscelli, Girolamo 10

Santa Caterina da Siena convent 233–4

Santorio, Santorio 102, 103

Sanuti, Nicolosa 64–7

Sbarra, Lucchesia 190

Scarsella, Marco 218

Scot, Michael 198

Secrets of Alessio Piemontese, The 10, 138, 141

sedan chairs, 108

Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (Gentileschi) 187

Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (Gentileschi) 117

sex workers 17, 31–2, 90, 94, 132

see also courtesans

Sforza, Caterina, Countess of Forli 138, 140, 209, 215, 224–8, 226, 246

Distilled broad-bean flower water (recipe) 241–3

Nettle Tonic (recipe) 243–4

Very Light and Most Excellent Rouge (recipe) 258

Sforza, Gian Galeazzo, Duke of Milan 212–14

Sforza, Galeazzo Maria, Duke of Milan 100, 101

Sforza, Ippolita Maria 212

Sforza, Ludovico, Duke of Milan 99, 201, 214

Shakespeare, William 28, 40

shampoo 194

Short Compendium for a Sober Life (Cornaro) 104–5

singers 155, 158–9

skincare see cosmetics

slavery 83–9, 92–5

Sleeping Venus (Gentileschi) 184

social media, 35–6

‘Song of the Bath-workers, The’ 176–7

Spada, Eugenia 192, 196

Spana, Girolama 221–2

Spicer, Joaneath 92

Spinola, Maria 222

Sprenger, Jacob 131

sprezzatura 36–7

Stiattesi, Pierantonio 184

Street Sellers of Rome (Brambilla) 13

stretchmarks 118

Strocchia, Sharon 233

Strozzi, Alessandra 71–3

Strozzi, Barbara 148, 158–60, 187

Strozzi, Bernardo 187

Strozzi, Filippo 71–4

Strozzi, Giulio 159

Strozzi, Lorenzo 71

Strozzi, Matteo 71

Study for the Libyan Sibyl (Michelangelo) 29, 30

sugar production 102

sumptuary legislation 64–6

Surgery for Mutilations (Tagliacozzi), 123, 124

Susanna and the Elders (Gentileschi) 166, 174

syphilis 211–12

Tagliacozzi, Gaspare 123, 124, 125

Tanagli, Francesco 72–4

Tarabotti, Arcangela 189, 203

Tassi, Agostino 167

Tasso, Torquato 78, 155

tattoos 87–8

Tedea, Theodora 88–9

teeth 214, 230

Terracina, Laura, xiii

testicles 117

thinness see weight issues

Thornton, Peter 42

Tintoretto, Jacopo 161

Titian 4, 12, 43, 83, 94

towels 194–5, 195

Trani, Prudenza da 207–9, 208

Treasure of the City of Ladies, The (Christine de Pizan) 61

Treatise about the Conservation of Health, with a Book about Keeping the Body Healthy (Benzi) 101, 103

Trotti, Giacomo 212

Trotula, The 137–8, 141

Tullia d’Aragona, 46

Two Women (Andrea) 180

Universal Piazza, The (Garzoni) 174

University of Brussels 35, 37

University of Padua 49

Urania (Bigolina) 5, 44–5

Ursini, Bellezze 134

Usama ibn Munqidh 135

Valdambra, Tuscany 195

Valverde de Amusco, Juan 127

Van Dyck, Anthony 153–4

Van Hemessen, Catharina 151–2

Vecellio, Cesare 196–9, 197, 199

Venice 11, 13, 120, 133, 174, 176, 196–8, 218, 232–3

Venier, Domenico 164

Venier, Maffio 162

Venus of Urbino (Titian) 4

Venustà Pamphlet 138

Venustà Ceruse (recipe) 257–8

Venusta (Celebrino) 6–12, 7

Vesalius, Andreas 27, 114

Victoria and Albert Museum, London 194

Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A (Wollstonecraft) 58

Visconti, Galeazzo 191

Vitruvian Man (Leonardo da Vinci), 110

Vitruvius 121

Vives, Juan Luis 48, 171–2

Ways of Seeing (Berger) 166

Weigel, Hans 136, 136

weight issues 99–105, 112

dieting 99, 104, 107

obesity 100, 103–4

thinness 100, 107

Widmann, Giovanni Paolo 159

Wild, Johannes 135

witch trials 131–5

witchcraft 132–4, 143, 170–71, 235

Witches, The (Baldung) 142

Wollstonecraft, Mary 58

Woman with a Mirror (Titian) 43

Women at Their Toilet (Bordone) 86–8

Women’s Bath (Mignon) 177, 178

Woolley, Hannah 76, 76

Worth of Women, The (Fonte) 18–23, 19, 61–2, 228

Zibellari, Isabetta 218

zoccoli 198

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOUR PLATES

1. Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538) © Alamy

2. ‘Countrywoman on the way to market’ (from Mores Italiae, 1575, General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS 457) Courtesy of Yale University Beinicke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

3. Bronzino, Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo (c. 1545) © Alamy

4. Parmigianino, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (c. 1524) © Alamy

5. Titian, Woman with a Mirror (c. 1512–15; Louvre, Paris) © Alamy

6. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Lady (La Dama in Rosso), (c. 1560) © Alamy

7. Alessandro Maganza, Portrait of Maddalena Campiglia (Vicenza, Museo Civico di Palazzo Chiericati) Courtesy of Museo Civico di Vincenza

8. The Judgement of Paris (from Treatise on Cosmetics, c. 1500; Walters Art Musuem, Baltimore, MS W.478, f. 5v) Courtesy of Walters Art Museum

9. Titian, Portrait of Laura Dianti and a Child (c. 1520–25; Kisters Collection, Kreuzlingen) Courtesy of The Yorck Project/Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH/Wikimedia

10. Christiaen van Couwenbergh, Sexual Assault of a Black Woman by White Men (c. 1632) © Alamy

11. Paris Bordone, Women at Their Toilet (c. 1545; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) Courtesy of National Gallery of Scotland; Purchased by the Royal Institution 1830; transferred to the National Gallery of Scotland 1859

12. Crouching Venus (probably German, c. early 1600s; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917

13. Girolamo Miseroni, Cameo of a Woman (c. 1602; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) © KHM-Museumsverband

14. Peter Paul Rubens, Isabella d’Este (c. 1605, after an original by Titian of c. 1530) © Alamy

15. Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as a Lute Player (c. 1615–17) © Alamy

16. After Hans Baldung, Women’s Bath with Mirror (c. 1600; Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) Courtesy of Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe

17. Sofonisba Anguissola (attrib.), Presumed Self Portrait (c. 1560) © Musée Condé, Chantilly, France, RMN-Grand Palais/Dist. Photo SCALA, Florence

18. Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1624) © Alamy

19. Bernardo Strozzi, Portrait of Barbara Strozzi (c. 1640) © Alamy

20. Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (c. 1622) © Alamy

21. Lavinia Fontana, Allegory of Prudence (c. 1595; Maison d’Art, Monaco) Courtesy of Maison d’Art, Monaco

22. Lavinia Fontana, Portrait of Isabella Ruini as Venus (c. 1592; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen) Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen/Courtesy of Wikimedia

23. Artemisia Gentileschi, Venus and Cupid (c. 1626) © Alamy

24. Giovanna Garzoni, Self-Portrait As Apollo (c. 1618–20; Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome) Courtesy of Segretariato Generale della Presidenza della Repubblica

25. Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (c. 1638–9) © Alamy

26. Vittore Carpaccio (attrib.), Woman with Red Hair and Fringe (c. 1495–1500) © Alamy

27. Stefano Ghirardini, Portrait of a Pharmacist Nun (1723; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest) Szépművészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, 2023

28. ‘Women Gathering Fumitory’ (from Gherardo Cibo’s illustrated copy of Discourses on Dioscorides’ Materia Medica by Pier Andrea Mattioli, 1564–84) British Library, London, UK © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

BLACK-AND-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS

Chapter 1

page 7 ‘Opera nova piacevole la quale insegna di far varie compositioni… [A pleasant new work which teaches how to make various perfumed compositions to make every woman beautiful…]’ (from Intitulata Venustà, 1526; Wellcome Collection, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

13 Ambrogio Brambilla, ‘Specchi and Pomata [Mirror and Pomades]’ (detail from Street Sellers of Rome, 1582; British Museum, London) © The Trustees of the British Museum

15 Francisco Delicado, ‘Lozana plucking eyebrows in her chamber, as Ranpin grinds ingredients for cosmetics’ (from Retrato de la Lozana Andaluza [Portrait of Andalusian Lozana], 1528; National Library of Austria, Rara Josefsplatz, Vienna) Thanks to Österreichische Nationalbibliothek

Chapter 2

19 ‘Portrait of Moderata Fonte’ (from Il Meriot Delle Donne [The Worth of Women], Venice, 1600; Bavarian State Library, Munich) Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 4 P.o.it. 181#Beibd.4, urn: nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10166027-1

24 ‘Women and girls doing “suitable” female work’ (from Il costume delle donne incomenzando de la pueritia per fin al marita [The Customs of Women], 1525; British Library, London) © British Library. All rights reserved 2023 Bridgeman Images

27 ‘Illustration of the uterus, vagina and vulva as an inverted penis’ (from Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543) Courtesy of The Wellcome Collection

30 Michelangelo, Study for the Libyan Sibyl (1511; Metropolitan Museum, New York) Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924

Chapter 3

39 ‘Portrait of Isabella Andreini’ (from her Book of Rhymes, 1601) Courtesy of Archive.org, Getty Research Institute, and Sloan Foundation

47 Bartolomeo della Rocca, Physiognomiae et chiromantiae compendium [Compendium of Physiognomy and Palmistry] (1536; Wellcome Collection, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

Chapter 4

56 ‘Portrait of Laura Cereta’ (frontispiece from her Epistolae [Letters], 1640) © Alamy

59 ‘A woman visiting an apothecary shop’ (from Le malicie e sagacita dele donne [The Evil and Shrewdness of Women], 1530; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich) Courtesy of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen

63 Giacomo Piccini, Portrait of Lucrezia Marinella after a lost painting by Giovanni Battista Papa of 1601 (1652; Biblioteca Correr, Venice) Courtesy of Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

Chapter 5

69 Giovanni Marinello, Ornamenti [Ornaments of Ladies] (frontispiece, 1562; Wellcome Collection, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

76 Hannah Woolley, The Accomplisht Lady’s Delight in Preserving, Physick, Beautifying and Cookery (frontispiece, 1675; Library of Congress) Credit: Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division

Chapter 7

103 ‘Weighing machine’ (from Santorio Santorio, De statica medicina [Art of Static Medicine], 1657; Wellcome Collection, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

109 ‘Women swinging’ (from Girolamo Mercuriale, De arte gymnastica [On the Art of Gymnastics], 1569; Wellcome Collection, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

111 ‘The proportions of ideal female beauty’ (double page from Agnolo Firenzuola, Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne [Dialogue on the Beauty of Women], Venice, 1552 ed., first published 1548) Courtesy of Archive.org and Getty Research Institute

Chapter 8

116 ‘Linen “bra” found at Lengberg Castle in East Tyrol, Germany’ (c. 1400–1500) Thanks to Beatriz Nutz

121 Iron stays (probably French or Italian, c. 1580–99; York Castle Museum) Image courtesy of York Museums Trust :: yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk :: CC BY-SA 4.0

124 (top) ‘Nose reconstruction surgery’ (from Gaspare Tagliacozzi, De curtorum chirurgia [Surgery for Mutilations], 1597; Wellcome Collection, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

124 (bottom) ‘Artificial nose made of plated metal’ (c. 1601–1800; Science Museum, London) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

129 Leonardo da Vinci, ‘The vulva and anus’ (from Anatomical Manuscript B, c. 1508; Royal Collection, Windsor) Courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2023

Chapter 9

141 Hans Weigel, ‘Turkish Woman at the Bath’ (from Habitus Praecipuorum Populorum, 1577; Bavarian State Library, Munich) Courtesy of Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Res/2 H.g.hum. 6 b, urn: nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00072483-7

142 Hans Baldung, The Witches (chiaroscuro woodcut print, 1510; The Metropolitan Museum, New York) Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Felix M. Warburg and his family, 1941

Chapter 10

147 La miserabile fine della signora Anzola [The miserable end of Signora Anzola] (Civic Collection of Achille Bertarelli Prints, Castello Sforzesco, Milan) Courtesy of Civica Raccolta delle Stampe Achille Bertarelli, Castello Sforzesco, Milano

161 School of Tintoretto, Portrait of a Lady, said to be Veronica Franco (c. 1575–94) © Alamy

Chapter 11

169 Veronica Gambara da Coreggio (c. 1509; Ministry of Culture, Italy) Courtesy of Ministero della Cultura, Italy

171 ‘Votive Pilgrim Badge in the shape of a vulva’ (c. 1400–1500; British Museum, London) Courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum

178 Jean Mignon, Women’s Bath (c. 1526–55; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1989

180 Zoan Andrea, Due Donne [Two Women] (c. 1464–1526) © Alamy

Chapter 12

187 Felice Antonio Casone, Portrait Medal of Lavinia Fontana (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection

193 Allesandro Allori, ‘Woman washing hair’ (detail from Loggetta, 1587–9; Pitti Palace, Florence) Courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Photographer: Paolo Bacherini

195 Towel known as the ‘Perugia Towel’ (Italian, c. 1400s–1500s; V&A Museum, London) Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Given by Dudley Myers

197 Cesare Vecellio, ‘Venetian Woman Bleaching Her Hair’ (from De gli habiti antichi et moderni [Of ancient and modern habits], c. 1590) Courtesy of Archive.org and Getty Research Institute

199 Cesare Vecellio, ‘Venetian unmarried woman with veil’ (from De gli habiti antichi et moderni [Of ancient and modern habits], c. 1590) Courtesy of Archive.org and Getty Research Institute

Chapter 13

208 Il lachrimoso lamento, che fece la Signora Prudentia Aconitana [The lachrymose lament of Signora Prudentia Aconitana] (frontispiece, Venice, 1589), Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Réserve des livres rares, RES-YD-1285

213 Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, Portrait of A Woman (Isabella d’Aragona) (c. 1490) © Alamy

Chapter 14

226 Lorenzo di Credi, Portrait of a Woman with Jasmine (Caterina Sforza) (c. 1481–3) Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Courtesy Web Gallery of Art/ Wikimedia

235 Camilla Erculiani, Letters on Natural Philosophy (frontispiece, Cracow, 1584) Courtesy of Biblioteka Kórnicka

Chapter 15

238 Photograph of table of ingredients © Jill Burke

242, 245, 251, 253 Details of botanical illustrations (from Pietro Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi… nelli sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia medicinale, 1501–77) Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of copyright material, the author and publishers would be grateful for information where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

HOW TO BE A RENAISSANCE WOMAN

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

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Copyright © 2024 by Jill Burke

First Pegasus Books cloth edition January 2024

Design: Peter Dyer; hand lettering: Holly Ovenden

Cover image: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd. / Alamy Stock

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ISBN: 978-1-63936-590-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63936-591-3

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