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

By Jill Burke

An alternative history of the Renaissance—as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips—focusing on the actresses, authors, and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era.

Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this fascinating period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives.

Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century?

As the Renaissance visual world became populated by female nudes from the likes of Michelangelo and Titian, a vibrant literary scene of beauty tips emerged, fueling debates about cosmetics and adornment. Telling the stories of courtesans, artists, actresses, and writers rebelling against the strictures of their time, when burgeoning colonialism gave rise to increasingly sinister evaluations of bodies and skin color, this book puts beauty culture into the frame.

How to Be a Renaissance Woman will take readers from bustling Italian market squares, the places where the poorest women and immigrant communities influenced cosmetic products and practices, to the highest echelons of Renaissance society, where beauty could be a powerful weapon in securing strategic marriages and family alliances. It will investigate how skin-whitening practices shifted in step with the emerging sub-Saharan African slave trade, how fads for fattening and thinning diets came and went, and how hairstyles and fashion could be a tool for dissent and rebellion—then as now.

This surprising and illuminating narrative will make you question your ideas about your own body, and ask: Why are women often so critical of their appearance? What do we stand to lose, but also to gain, from beauty culture? What is the relationship between looks and power?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Release date: Jan 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781639365913

Jill Burke

Jill Burke is a professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures at the University of Edinburgh and writes about the body and its representation, focussing on Italy and Europe 1400-1700. Her most recent book The Italian Renaissance Nude was deemed "a keystone for future studies" and selected for Choice's 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles list. A member of the curatorial team for The Renaissance Nude exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and the J. Paul Getty Museum in New York in 2018-19, she co-edited the exhibition catalogue. Jill talks regularly about renaissance bodies on TV, radio and podcasts and discusses ideas about the history of art and beauty on "Jill Burke's Blog". Her current research interest is how people in the Renaissance sought to change their bodies, faces and hairstyles to meet beauty ideals. This includes trying out renaissance cosmetics recipes at home and experimenting with physicists in a lab in an unlikely but fruitful collaboration between the history of skincare and soft-matter science.

Book preview

How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity, by Jill Burke.How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity, by Jill Burke. Pegasus Books. New York | London.

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.

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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