How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity

by Jill Burke

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.

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.

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.

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.

Renaissance female beauty ideals were extremely narrow, and they were everywhere.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

Lozana was a maestra – a rather loose term for a woman who specialised in various aspects of maintaining and beautifying women’s bodies.

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.

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.

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

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

The most fashionable artists at the turn of the sixteenth century believed that a mixture of both sexes was the height of beauty.

Interestingly, women who chose to live, or simply dress up, in male clothing seem to have been treated less harshly.

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

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.

Renaissance culture was fascinated with what you might call the performativity of everyday life, and the relationship between exterior appearance and interior essence.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

increasing one’s anxiety featured as part of Renaissance slimming advice,

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.

The earliest printed book aimed specifically at helping people keep weight off (and advice on how to put it on) was published in 1481.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

By the end of the sixteenth century, walking was agreed by most authorities to be the best exercise.

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

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.

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.’

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.

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.

Wild hair is an outward sign of interior imagination, a sign of melancholy creativity and a ‘masculine’ temperament.

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.

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.

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

‘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.