“Practically every single beauty book has recipes for hiding bruises on the face...”
This interview with Professor Jill Burke on Renaissance beauty is mind blowing...
If you follow me on the ‘gram or you’ve read UGLY, you’ll know that history - particularly beauty history - is my obsession. So when I spoke to Professor Jill Burke for a feature for The Guardian, I wanted to share the entire transcript because it was just so bloody brilliant.
Jill is Professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures at the University of Edinburgh and a historian of the body and its visual representation focusing on Italy and Europe from 1400-1700 - best job title, ever right? She was involved with incredible The Cult Of Beauty exhibition at Wellcome Collection - which everyone should go see - and she has a new book out called How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity which is an incredible piece of research work, and a must for beauty and cultural history fans alike.
Honestly, our chat was one of the most fascinating conversations about beauty I’ve had, so I’m publishing the whole interview here. It’s too good not to….
Do share with any beauty history fans, and let me know what surprised you the most too.
Anita: Why do you think the Renaissance has such an interesting beauty culture?
Jill: There’s a really positive side to beauty in this era. It’s as much about women's networks, women's sociability and how they shared beauty recipes as a community as it is how they wanted to look. It's so easy to dismiss beauty, but actually it involves a really impressive knowledge of processes, chemistry and materials that I had absolutely no idea about before I started this project. The makeup recipes are real science - it's not just ‘women's stuff’.
Also, there isn't any photography at this point in time and from the 15th century, people started to become very interested in the nude male form in art, followed by the female nude. My original thought was, ‘why has this happened?’ This is a very Christian society where women are covered up completely and wear veils, so why are images of naked women suddenly appearing on the front of the town halls? I addressed that in my last book The Italian Renaissance Nude but then I started to think ‘but what about the women looking at these pictures?’ Does this have an effect on the way you might understand your own body? So I started to investigate this by firstly looking at body hair removal practices, because it’s striking that all the women are hairless in images from northern Europe, and I found so much evidence for body hair removal being common published in old Italian books.
I also found it fascinating that women were very aware that beauty practices offered both possibilities in terms of enhancing their appearance or and problems too. Men often complain about women doing things with their hair and there’s a really strange belief from male writers of the era, that implies that power of makeup to completely transform someone's looks is deceitful. There’s this idea that ‘you should trick her and see her in the morning to see her without make-up on.’
Anita: We still see that rhetoric in tabloid headlines and on viral Tik Tok’s now, which is scary stuff. Are there any positives of beauty culture from the era?
Jill: Obviously there is an over obsession with female perfection and I'm sure that affected them then, as it does to people now. It was a very repressive, patriarchal society where women were expected to stay in the house a lot of time, especially if they were wealthy. Beauty culture allowed women to get together in a space where men really weren't welcome, and it gave them an excuse to talk to each other. It gave them a chance for creativity, they exchanged recipes and some of the hairstyles at the time were really detailed - if you look at the women painted by Botticelli, they have these amazing sweeping hair and plaits. Most women couldn't be creative in other ways, they were prevented from being guild members or going to having a much education beyond basic reading and counting. Beauty was one aspect that women could actually do to express identity and express friendship.
It also was an income for some women and a lot of these women created new recipes and sold them. Some were specialists in hair care and eyebrow plucking as well, so were like early beauticians. The ability to make money was a constant issue for women, particularly women who had been dumped by their horrendous husbands and or were widowed, so it actually offered them an underground economy.
Doing your hair takes ages in this period. Women had massively long hair and used to bleach it by sitting in the sun for days with various potions on to lighten it. But it’s enjoyable and they get to socialise too. Some women write about how ‘this is all that we've got, you've taken everything else away from us,’ so there’s a sense of how much it means to them. There's a really awful record of one man who drags his wife away by her hair because he's so annoyed that she's gone to bleach it and this forms part of her petition for divorce. But I thought that's really telling because it seemed like often men really resented this beautification.
Anita: The Taliban have just banned beauty salons in Afghanistan…
Jill: Yes, it's really interesting seeing this happen now. I think it's terrifying for some repressive factions to see women having these spaces where they can talk to each other without any limits and those in power don't know what's going on in these spaces so they are wary of them. It's not necessarily the beautification part that is the issue - vanity is used as an excuse. It's really about women having these intimate spaces for conversation where no one else is allowed. It's really really sad because having your hair or eyebrows done feels like a bit of humanity, doesn't it?
Anita: Are there any other interesting parallels to our current times that you've noticed?
Jill: One beauty book from 1562 is really hilarious to read now, because it says things like ‘If you don't keep your skin nice, your husband will leave you and it'll be your fault,’ which is only ever implied today. But people still find a way to tell you ‘you've let yourself go’ and women then and now still think it’s their fault.
But the minute scrutiny women faced then also struck me as a parallel to our present times. This book also looks at every single bit of a woman's body, right from the top of her head to the toes, and tells her how she can make her heels better or make her knees look nicer. It tells you what your hair should look like, how your cheekbones should be and what you can do if you don't have a double chin - which was what was seen as beautiful then. Reading this I thought ‘wow, how exhausting, but how familiar too’. It might be meant in a good way, but it also makes you feel awful about yourself.
Anita: That sounds a bit like women’s magazines used to be, or how social medis can be now. Do you think our self esteem is in a better place compared to then?
Jill: Undoubtedly better now, and certainly better than the Renaissance; despite the social side of the beauty rituals, women were getting beaten up all the time. Practically every single beauty book from the period has recipes for hiding bruises on the face.
Anita: Oh wow that’s bleak. Did anything else surprise or shock you when doing your research?
Jill: This is going to sound bad, but I think the biggest surprise was how funny a lot of these women were. I didn't expect 16th century women to write about beauty in such a funny and self-deprecating way - they were amazing.
One story that inspired me was about Sofonisba Anguissola (above) an Italian female painter who married very late for that period, at around 40 years old. She went to Spain, but had to come back as her husband died, then on the ship back to Italy she fell in love with the sea captain who was like 20 years younger than her. No one wanted her to marry him - the Duke of Florence even wrote to tell her off. But she still did it - I love that, it's so cool. So women were doing these interesting things and having these interesting thoughts.
Anita: I’d love to know more about these Renaissance beauty recipes - were they easy to make?
Jill: When we actually started to make these recipes, it was strange to me that they often worked; it wasn’t what I expected at all. One recipe for making a moisturiser called for sheep's fat, but it feels like a moisturiser and is light without being greasy. Before I knew about these women, and these recipes, I would never have dreamt I could make a conditioner or shampoo at home in a domestic kitchen. That's amazing.
What’s also interesting is that many of the beauty recipes were actually taken from Islamic medicine, so from North Africa and Turkish culture. A lot of the recipes also seem to have reached Italy via Jewish refugees that were expelled from Spain in the 1490s and when they came to southern Italy these recipes were shared to Italian women of all faiths.
Because there's a massive printing industry in Italy, the recipes were printed in Italian and then translated into English, French, German, Hungarian - so that’s how they would have spread across Europe. Not everything was adopted though; body hair removal was so popular in Italy and southern Europe then, but they didn't really remove body hair in England or Germany. A lot of the recipes that you get in England later on into the next century are Italian because people think Italians are sophisticated and have this slightly risky culture that they want to emulate.
Anita: What were beauty standards like then?
Jill: Clear skin was spoken about a lot and that would have been very harder for Renaissance women to achieve because the infectious diseases like smallpox which could really scar you. Dark arched eyebrows were another desirable quality. But they weren't interested in eyes themselves at all in Europe, so there isn’t much advice for eye makeup, which is very different to other places in that time period. I didn’t come across a single eyeshadow recipe at all doing my research.
Weight was one issue that surprised me. They were worried about getting too fat or becoming too thin back then - particularly the upper classes. Men had to wear these really tight hose – a type of stocking that was worn under a hip-skimming tunic - so if you had fat legs, it was really obvious. So there's a lot of recipes for men to lose weight for this reason.
Anita: Was there any evidence of anti-ageing products?
Jill: There’s loads of recipes for anti-wrinkle creams and dyeing grey hair. Lots of recipes say they will make you look 25, so you know it's obviously there. Women are obviously trying to look younger but men are actually trying to look younger too. But women were basically on the shelf when they were about 20, if they hadn't gotten married by that time, so anti-ageing was a big thing then too.
Anita: Were they preoccupied with skin colour too?
Jill: The skin had to be pale, and white with pinky bits on it. People think Europe was completely white at that time, but that’s not true, because the Spanish and Portuguese Empires imported slaves from sub-Saharan Africa during the 15th and 16th centuries. The story of transatlantic slavery is much earlier than we initially thought, now it’s believed to start in the 15th and 16th centuries rather than the 17th and 18th centuries. In Italy, particularly Venice, there’s also a lot of people from North Africa because they captured and imported Muslim slaves and as part of the Mediterranean skirmishes between Christians and the Ottoman Empire.
They do have these ideas around certain kinds of beauty. As a woman if you're dark skinned and you've got dark and particularly curly hair, then you’re seen to be not ‘womanly’ and you're likely to be infertile and really argumentative. They also have this idea that if you're blonde you're likely to be stupid. They have all these massive manuals of physiognomy that tell you what people are like or going to be like, and how to pick good women who will be fertile and bear you clever children. The ideal was to have wavy, dark blonde hair and a light complexion. There is some appreciation of darker skinned beauty particularly in the poetry of this era, but often it’s about people falling in love with their slaves. There's never equality there.
Anita: And did they mention anything relating to gender norms and beauty?
Jill: It's really difficult for historians to say whether this person thought of themselves as male, or straight or female etc. People don't tend to talk about this often, but there are definitely quite a lot of women who dressed up as men and partly this was because it was much easier to travel if you were pretending to be male. There was definitely evidence suggesting that somebody could be transgender though.
For example a woman called Catalina De Erauso who was a Spanish soldier in the 16th and 17th centuries lived as a man. She took medicine to make her breasts become smaller, had relationships with women, and even led a regiment in the Spanish army. She’s an amazing person, but it’s hard to gender people retrospectively - which is why historians tend to stick to the gender assigned to people at birth - although we can guess they would have perhaps identified as another gender.
Anita: And finally, can you tell me more about your Beauty Sensorium installation at The Cult Of Beauty exhibition - it sounds fascinating?
Jill: It is. It’s based on my original research into Renaissance women and how they made cosmetics and how they felt in relation to beauty culture. During my two-year research project Renaissance Goo, I discovered that Renaissance women used to create all kinds of incredible beauty products at home, from make-up to shampoo and moisturiser.
I worked with Professor Wilson Poon, a soft-matter scientist, on the project to investigate these early modern personal care recipes. For the exhibition, the brilliant creative art and design team, Baum and Leahy took my research and made it into an amazing installation (above) so everyone can experience Renaissance beauty for themselves. There's lots of gooey sounds, lots of ASMR and other sensations too.
Huge thanks to Jill, and please do like and share this if you enjoyed it!
Brilliant interview and it explores so many interesting points. Thanks for sharing. 🤩
I loved reading this piece. Definitely not enough exposure in the mainstream media behind the history of beauty!