 Welcome everyone to the Paul Mellon Centre. Those of you who are in the room with us this evening at Bedford Square and those of you who are joining us online. It's always great to have such a large and lively community who join our research seminars and hear about some really interesting and new work. My name is Sarah Turner. I'm the director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. I know quite a few people in the room, but for those of you who are new and coming to the centre for the first time, I want to extend a particularly warm welcome and say I hope you'll stay around after the seminar for those very important parts of the whole intellectual offering, the drinks, where we also get to talk to one another and network. For those of you who are online, I hope you also feel very much included and will join the conversation and the questions through our chat box and also offering questions online. We will read those out after the seminar. It's a really great pleasure to welcome Jill Burke to the Paul Mellon Centre. Jill told me we were having a chat before the event. We had a first visit to the centre so a really warm welcome to you, Jill. We were having a bit of a chat about what she's doing and I said we're really expanding the boundaries of British art. She said good because this isn't really British or art, but I promised her that the Paul Mellon Centre offers a very generous and expansive research space. We're always interested in themes and topics and ideas in history of art, in visual culture, in material cultures, and I know we'll find many deep and interesting connections in your paper tonight. Jill is a cultural historian and professor of Renaissance visual and material cultures at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on Italy and Europe around 1400 to 1700. Her most recent book, How to be a Renaissance Woman, the Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity, was published in 2023 and that considers women's creative engagement with beauty cultures in early modern Italy. If you want to, Jill's got an amazing career and lots of incredible publications and there's a bio online so I will direct you to that because I know you've come to listen to her and not me. The title of this paper, as you can see on our screen, is Cosmetics, Beauty and the Nature of Renaissance Women. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Jill and ask you to join with me in giving her a very warm welcome. Thank you and thank you for coming and thank you to the Paul Mellon Centre for inviting me. It's really great to be here even though I'm an interloper because I don't do British art at all. I don't do Italian things and maybe I'll tempt you all over to Italy which isn't probably very hard sell to be honest. Though it's very nice where they're in London at the moment. So it's been for me a really busy year. My book came out last August and here it is. It's available at all good book shops and it's coming out in back in August. It was and also I was involved in an exhibition and an installation that's now on at the welcome collection where I worked with some designers to put together a multi sensorial installation about Renaissance women's engagement with beauty. That's part of the cult of beauty exhibition. It's free and you go along to see it. Now I talked so much about Renaissance cosmetics over the past few months. I was really expecting this paper to be a doddle to write and of course it wasn't at all. It was really tough because one of the things I wanted to do today is to think about things that I hadn't thought about for the book and I hadn't thought about for the exhibition. And in particular kind of wanted to niggle away at something that I've been thinking about for a while, which is a relationship between cosmetics and artifice and cosmetics and gender. Why cosmetics associated with women mainly? And this is the question that in Renaissance Italy and today and this is the question that I want to ask today and how that's related to ideas of nature. So the relationship between cosmetics, nature and artifice thread through the sources, all the sources that I've looked at for the book. I wrote down thread through the sources like a running stitch that I've tried to gather here without too much snagging. There is a lot of snagging because the sources about cosmetics, the sources about women using cosmetics are normally written by men. Because a lot of women couldn't write. And so one of the challenges in this research is trying to find women's voices. But I hope as well, sorry I'm just carrying on, this is the last threading metaphor. I hope there's creative possibilities in these loose threads, in this lack of voices. This is also kind of a space that we can think about, we can fill in with more innovative methodologies. Okay, and although this isn't really about art, this paper, we're going to start with the painting anyway. So this is Caravaggio's Martha and Mary from 1598. So it was rediscovered in the 1970s, one of those exciting rediscoveries and cleaned and everyone agreed it was by Caravaggio. And like all paintings by someone really famous, there's a lot of disagreement about what it's really about. And because it's Caravaggio people want him to be the first person to have painted this subject, but in fact it's not true at all. This is quite a well-known subject in the 16th and 17th century. And there's an earlier painting associated with this by Bernardo Luini who was in the circle of Leonardo da Vinci. Anyway. So make-up plays a role in the story of Mary Magdalene, particularly in the 16th and 17th century. And if you look at popular tracks from this period, popular poems and verses plays like this representation of the conversion of Santa Maria Magdalene of Saint Mary Magdalene from the late 16th century. They imagine a conversation between Mary and her sister Martha. Martha was converted to Christ before Mary, and Martha urges her to come to a sermon delivered by Christ. And this is what's happening in Caravaggio's painting. In the popular, and what happens is that Mary converts and then she's so repentant that she loosens her hair that has been beautifully co-offed and beautifully put up. She loosens her hair and washes the feet of Christ with it and pours a big jar of expensive perfume over his feet as well to show that she's eschewed the things of this world. Now, this imagined conversation is really bigged up in these 16th and 17th century versions of the story and I'll show you another one here. And it's used to talk about the nature of women and their love for make-up. So this says in the top bit here, I'll translate the Italian. She used ointments of great value, Mary used ointments of great value and noble waters of fragrant herbs. And so with great pomp she went about all the civius and as she walked proudly she made her body smell so wonderful. It sweetened every sour muddle so that when she went outside the whole town rushed to see her. Which sounds great but apparently that was not a good thing. So in this story, in the way that Mary Magdalene was conceived, cosmetics and beauty and perfume was the external sign of a wayward soul, a shorthand for a kind of errant femininity. It was fine to be beautiful and the Magdalene was beautiful and that was okay and I'll tell you why she had to be beautiful later on. But it's not fine for her to care about being beautiful. Too much interest in one's appearance was an essentially feminine sin. Men who cared about their appearance and there were a lot of men who cared about their appearance and the renaissance were castigated for being too much like women. So just as Caravaggio was painting this in the late 50s and 90s, a second edition of this book came out. Cosmo Nell is loving advice about the abuses of vain women. And it came out in this, I mean honestly they're not very nice about women, this is going to be a lot more of this I'm afraid. And that came out in Bologna which is a counter-reformation hotbed. Useful, as the frontispiece explains, for virgins, widows and married women, this pamphlet was issued at least three times in 1582, 92 and 1600. And here is the opening couple of sentences and again I'm translating from this section here. Women, Angelli explains, are curious by nature and long for beauty and ornaments, almost as if self-aware of their natural imperfections. They search through these means, that's through the means of cosmetics, to mitigate for the deficiency of nature and thus to place themselves in men's favour and be esteemed by them. So that it mostly happens as women's reason is weak and their appetites are robust and strong, that they allow themselves to be easily carried away and indulging in these particular varied excesses and disorders. Angelli picks out three areas for criticism that have been the focus of hatred of women since classical times. Women should not bleach and dress their hair in extravagant ways, they should not use make-up to cover their faces or powder their chests or indeed leave their chests overly revealed and they should not wear platform shoes that distort their bodily proportions. One of the things that happens with make-up as a cosmetics historian is that you can find echoes of criticism of the use of cosmetics that are really similar and they bounce from period to period in different ways but the discourse is very similar between lots of different time periods. These diverse tactics that women used, used the body as an artwork, create and recreate looks even when antagonised rather than attracted men and that to some men was baffling and it was down to women's fundamental and natural deficiencies. At this stage I've just put a painting by Sophonys Brangusola of her sisters playing chess in this just so we can get a little bit of up, like Renaissance women actually did some great things as well as kind of hung around getting criticised by all these men. Why did Aniele see women as needing to make up for their deficiencies of nature? So rather than listen to more early modern men, early modern men's hot takes of what's wrong with women, let's go to a text written by a woman and this is my favourite book of the Italian early modern Italy and Modestapotso here who writes under the pen name of Modestapote is a bit of a proto-feminist hero and she wrote one of the first texts along with Lucretia Marinella, the first pro-feminist book was published in her name in 1600, actually eight years after she'd actually died in childbirth and it's called The Worth of Women in Merida de la Donne and it's been translated into English so no one has an excuse not to read it. The worth of women where clearly you discover how they are worthy and more perfect than men. Fonte explains the humoral system here that is the basis of the way that the body was understood in the early modern period all over Europe and beyond. She says 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, collar from fire and melancholy from earth. Since antiquity these humas had been associated with the body's degree of moisture and heat associated with the four elements and also with types of personality. The planets for example were said to govern different humas as melancholics are born under Saturn for example which meant that astrology also played an important part in early modern medicine. A swante notes, balances of humas result in different body types, propensuses to illness and personalities and this included your sex so most Renaissance medics believed an idea originally proposed by Aristotle that embryos become female because they don't have sufficient heat to push out male genitalia. So women are dominated by cold and damp humas whereas energetic masculinity is hot and dry and there's a famous image that I always students really love to talk about that's of the uterus, this is an image of the uterus in Vesalius's dehumaniacorporus fabrica very important anatomical text that came out in 1542 and it takes up the Galenic idea actually that was very popular in the early 16th century that women's genitalia are merely inverted versions of men that didn't have enough heat to get pushed outwards. So this means that women were naturally inferior to men. Castiglione in his book of the courtier has a character called Gasparre who claims that man is by his natural qualities more perfect than woman who is cold by temperament and man warm and warm is far nobler and more perfect than cold because it is active and productive. The fragidity of women's temperament is the cause of their abasement and timidity. The idea that women were naturally less intelligent, more timid and generally less capable than men was therefore rooted in biology in the 16th, 17th century. Fonte agrees with this basic premise that women are colder and damper than men and she explains that this is why women are calmer than men, weaker and more apprehensive by nature, more credulous and easily swayed. But she also says that women are naturally kinder, less angry and less ruled by emotion. But it's telling that even Fonte, who was very pro-women, believes that it's easy for women to be swayed, to be led one way or another, that they have potential, in other words, for transformation. That transformation is a central part of the ability to transform is a central part of femininity and that biological basis of femininity. The relationship between the balance of humours on the interior of the body affected the appearance of the exterior too. This led in the 16th century to the popularity of physiognomical handbooks where people would be told how to understand the personality of people that they met just through looking at them. This is a handbook in Latin by Bartolome de la Roca. What we're seeing here, these two people here have a hot temperament. This is the hot man and woman and you can see he's got curly hair and she's got disordered hair and they're looking quite cross. This is because they're overly hot, so to speak. Here we've got some people with dry temperaments and in this image here this man and woman, and I don't really know what's happening with his hat. I've never really figured that out. They have the perfect balance of humours. People with the perfect balance of humours are ideally beautiful and beautiful people are by definition the most healthy. Appearance, what you look like, whether you meet beauty ideals isn't just about your external appearance, it's about what happens on the inside. You get some people like Juan Juarte who wrote these books in English The Examination Man's Wits, but was originally written in Spanish. He was a Spanish physician writing in the 1570s and his aim was to advise men on the best occupation to take up related to their humours. He also advised them on how to find a good wife and his advice was this. He divides women into three grades of coldness and dampness. The best women are grade two and that's really typical because everything in the Renaissance is best in the middle. The grade two women are the three of the best. Grade two women are beautiful, they are gentle and they laugh easily. They have golden hair, peaches and cream skin and a soft voice. Their body hair is sparse and blonde, it's barely visible. They are obedient by nature. Absolutely completely fertile and suitable to marry any man no matter what his humour or composition is. Grade three women are foolish and ditzy and they are platinum blonde. They are overly fat with a very white and hairless skin and not very beautiful. They should only marry men with hot and dry humour, but the best one are the grade one women. These are the ones you aspire to be when you read the text because they have the lowest levels of coldness and dampness. They like to be infertile, they have coarse deep voices, they're thin, dark skin and have a lot of body hair and sometimes even a bit of a beard. Usually these types he says are good in conversation. Oh Jesus! And afraid to look men in the eye, they are ugly and have lots of dark unruly hair. These women he says are great intelligence and ability with a good imagination and this is my favourite bit. It's an argument no matter how small it is and therefore become unbearable. So when Renaissance artists portrayed these beautiful women and Italian art probably more than other places French to, it's really full of just generic beautiful women. They're called beledone pictures in Italian because we don't really know what to do with these images or how to really understand them. They've all got white skin and flashy bodies. They're not just demonstrating this kind of artistic ideal of female beauty but engaging with this idea of temperament a kind of, you know, this idea that you can tell what's going on from interior science, showing men what the perfect woman is and showing women the kind of look to trying to achieve. Because of this relationship between exterior and interior, Renaissance men are obsessed with cosmetics. This is one of the reasons why people are so obsessed with cosmetics because they see things like hair bleaching as a lie because women are lying about what's happening on their interior and they see things like face cream that masks the face of what we'd call foundation as fundamentally deceitful and so they kind of talk all the time about surprising women when they're getting ready to go out. I mean it is really a topos that comes up again and again in Italian text and this must be related to this new genre of painting, the woman at her toilet painting which comes into being in the early 16th century and pioneered by Titian and Giovanni Bellini. So just an example of this kind of weird obsession with women's deception in cosmetics is Juan Luis Vives' education of women which is a very important text all over Europe originally published in Latin in 1523 and he berates women for their trickery. He says, miserable you if you attract a husband solely through make-up because then when you've washed it off how will he feel about you? It would be mad he explains to buy a horse if you only saw the animal covered with ornaments rather than its natural body. We buy slaves and horses uncovered he says but not wives. So this idea that it was okay to care about your humour system and your humour should reflect and your exterior reflected your humour meant that the way that people understood ornament and beauty and cosmetics was divided up in the 16th century between cosmetics that worked what we say from the inside out. So when cosmetics starts to be taught on the university curriculum which it was in Padua and the University of Padua it was taught to physicians in the 1550s by Gabriela Falopio. They're very careful about saying exactly what they're teaching. So this is Falopio's de decorazione which is his lectures on decoration or on the ornaments of the body cosmetics and he's not the only person who taught cosmetics his successor in the post of the professor of surgery at Padua also did to Girolamo Macariale and I'm showing you his book there. So Falopio said Falopio's remedy is here and mainly designed to make the body better proportioned and then mainly related to changing things in the interior. So he has a lot of prescriptions, a lot of advice for fitness and for obesity. He has advice about what to do about overly large breasts and most breasts are overly large in this period because they really hate large breasts or overly large foreskins as well. I don't really want to think about that. So he shunned what we now call colour cosmetics, anything that covers the face. So right at the beginning of this book he explains what he means by decoration and what he means by beauty and he says beauty he explains is everything that is natural. Anything else is mud and we call it horish. Falopio's clean dividing lines between the natural and the horish was in practice very difficult to maintain but I just want to draw your attention that this kind of beauty is feminised in the way that he thinks about it as well. The nature of illnesses, particularly skin conditions, could mean that clearing the condition led to a facial body that was deemed more beautiful and this is a let out clause that a lot of physicians were to use later on in publishing their beauty books. In an era where wrinkles are thought to relate to the drying of humours, anti-wrinkle cream could be seen as medicinal. This would quite naturally bring us on to one of the most significant beauty books of the Renaissance period and I have a copy here. Giovanni Marinella is which you can have a look at. This is from 1574, it's very interesting. Giovanni Marinella is ornamented Elidoni or ornaments of women but before we look at this book and before I share some anti-wrinkle cream for you to try some Renaissance anti-wrinkle cream you have to listen to a bit more and me telling you about nature. Honestly, it will happen. But this bit is important. I find it interesting. The first printed cosmetic recipe book was printed in 1526. It's much earlier than most people think and it's tiny. It's a pamphlet of 24 pages. It would be very cheap. You could have bought it for pennies. It was aimed explicitly at women. You can see 1526 here. There's actually two editions in 1526. You can see in the terrible poem that opens the book. Ladies who wish to be fair, this book will fulfil your desire. I've tried to translate it with a scunch and I won't read all this out because my translation is also really terrible but the poem is a terrible translation and it's really a terrible poem. This places it. This shortness of the book, the fact that these pamphlets were sold for pennies, places it really within, squarely within popular, what we call popular culture. It's normally thought that it's only aristocratic women that use cosmetics but this doesn't seem to be the case at all. This is the kind of market square that people would buy these cosmetic books. They were likely to be sold alongside cosmetics ingredients like roses or things like mirrors and pomades, oil-based cosmetics that were sold widely. Here's some mounting bunks and the street sellers would call these poems out to drum up their business. The fact that these texts survive at all indicates that they're probably very common and they're likely to be many, many more of them than is now extant. Not surprising in that case and they're likely to be related. Something happens around 1500 in Italy and I have no idea what it is and I'll tell you that later in just like two, five minutes but around 1500 you get a massive expansion of the range of cosmetic recipes available in Italy and that happens both in printed forms of these books that come out in about 1526 and in manuscripts. You start to get manuscripts dedicated to women that were presumably more fancy and more aristocratic women and I'm showing you two here. This is a really beautiful one from Baltimore in the Walters Museum. That's Italian Venetian probably around 1500 and another one from The Welcome which is dated at the end of 1596 but looks to me like it was started earlier judging by the handwriting. Cosmetics play a really important role in books of secrets and I'm showing you here Alessio Piumanteza's Book of Secrets from 1555 which is a landmark example of this entire genre of books. Much bigger and more expansive than earlier recipe books. It was also notably more popular around to hundreds of editions. This is like the book that people owned in early modern Italy and across Europe. Many, many translations. As historians have noted the use of the word secrets was not simply a marketing trick though it definitely was a marketing trick. These books promise to reveal the trade secrets of artisanal practice or the special tricks of aristocratic households to a wider audience but also the secrets of nature the secrets of nature herself. The thinking was that all natural things were upon earth by God to age humanity but humanity needed expertise, needed understanding needed to investigate nature better to extract these qualities. So this might involve experimenting with plants, minerals and animals and transforming I've got some nice pictures of transforming or combining them through processes such as heating, steeping, crushing, distillation. Human action allowed the secret properties of these ingredients to be revealed for wounds to be solved, conditions to be remedied, horses to be dyed green there was lots of strange recipes in these books. Moderata Fonte again says God would hardly have placed so many curative powers within plants and stones as he has if we didn't need them and if we weren't intended to use them. Now it's this revealing of the hidden secrets of nature that form the connection between the recipes in these books. If you have a look at some of these books of secrets as a modern person they can be quite baffling and they can seem to make no sense at all. So in the six books of Alistair Piedmontese's secret book of secrets we have medicines then we had scented water perfumes basically then conserves, jam basically then beleti which is make-up then dyson inks and then metals and gems. Combination seems a strange one but the logic behind it is that all these things involve a transformation of natural ingredients. This revealing of the hidden, the occult secrets of nature that form a narrative thread are also seen in early books of magic. So this is the Italian translation of Gian Battista della Porta's natural magic which was again a very well-known book. All of these books I talked about are very well known across Europe first written in Latin in 1558 and Gian Battista della Porta in his book on magic has an entire section, it's divided into 12 but he has an entire section on cosmetics. Cosmetics are from natural take things from nature and they also change the body naturally they enact change. So this clustering of cosmetics with medicine on one side and with secrets and magics on the other is also seen in women's recipe books this is a relatively recently found a book by the Countess of Forle Caterina Sforza who may or may not be pictured here and her book there's been a published book of hers called The Experimentary which has been known for a long time but recently they found in the Biblioteca Nationali in Florence another volume and you can see this is a this is a table of contents of this and these are recipes for what you would call cosmetic recipes these are recipes for alchemy these are recipes for horse medicine and these are these are recipes for medicine for human medicine and these are spells in county so this is a relationship between magic, cosmetics, medicine and alchemy that is very prevalent in these texts in the 16th century Caterina Sforza wasn't alone in these experimentations here's a letter and it wasn't just rich women either we just know about the rich women more this is a letter that was written to her by a woman called Anna Ebrea who sent some samples of her cosmetic treatments in 1508 she also and women are very closely associated with the manipulation of natural materials in the 15th and 16th centuries particularly distillation they often supplied things like rose water which is made from the distillation of rose petals to all over the place in Renaissance medicine and cosmetic recipes and they supplied that to apothecary so we have documentation that shows women in this role however a lot of these women what for men might seem ingenious and exciting and playing with nature and finding nature's secrets for women seemed revolting often and unpleasant and there's a genre of text called the evils of women that always thinks about women making and applying cosmetics and this is an example these are two examples one is from the 1490s and the other one is from the 1530s and the full title is the evils and wisdom of women narrating all their makeup and distilled waters sublimates bleaches, powders and pastes that they use to make themselves beautiful and some advice from a philosopher about whether you should marry or not and the answer to that is no the idea of this verse this book what happens in this verse is they tell the reader to imagine a woman sitting in her chamber and now I quote from my translation she should be stripped from the belt upwards this is very you can quite imagine why this is exciting for men to think about stripped from the belt upwards and then it gets worse actually arms bear to better plaster her face first she starts to apply oils to make rough skin fresh they often used to chewed up bitter almonds or peach stones with water from cooked bread to wash the face and neck and the whole belly she starts to remove hair with tweezers first eyebrows and then the pubic pigsty and when it's removed she puts their bat's blood so that these pores remain closed and smooth and bat's blood also used after hair removal and makes the skin bold and without hair pine water and lemon juice orange flower water and mussel shells from the sea and more ingredients some are distilled and some are placed steaming on the faces of these most evil demons and all these things that I've told you they adopt when they're making themselves up oh just look at the shit they cover themselves with so there's this weird kind of prurience in this verse imagine this woman in her chamber and then there's also this kind of revulsion but also actually there's a real insight and knowledge of cosmetic procedures because all these things that they mention are used in cosmetics including shit actually but I haven't bought that as a sample for you to try so the we can get more insight into these wet men in a variety of sauces so this is an amazing sauce called the portrait of Lozana Andalusia that was a play written by a recent convert from Judaism to Christianity the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 and many of them came to Italy because of big Jewish communities in Italy and this is really where these recipes are coming from there's a very sophisticated culture of cosmetic use between Muslim, Jewish Christian women in medieval Spain and there's been some great work on this by Spanish historians and when they come when these immigrants come to Italy it seems likely that this is why in round 1500 you see this explosion in cosmetics culture and this book traces what happens to one of these Jewish immigrants called Lozana and I'm showing you here an image from the book and this is Lozana plucking she works as a beautician basically and she plucks the eyebrows of one of her friends she also lends out beds for sex workers and here are things that she's drying and here's her helper who's making things in a pestle and mortar so Lozana he says makes her living by concocting facial preparations with powders, rouges and creams and plucking eyebrows and beautifying betrothed women while they prepare treatments of rock candy lotions from the jujube tree and astringents for female parts now I've only just really started this work but there is associations between cosmetic and particularly novel cosmetic practice with these Jewish immigrants and often this leads to a lot to anti-semitism as well people like Ludovico Ariasto who's this really important poet and playwright in 16th century Italy who writes a lot about cosmetics actually both men and women's cosmetics use but he was really vicious about Jewish suppliers and this is satire number five and I apologise in advance because this is really horrible if Herculin he says knew where he put his lips when he kisses Lydia he'd be more disgusted than if he kissed an asshole marked with scabies he doesn't know that face cream is made with the spit of the Jewish women who sell it nor that they temper it with musk to hide its evil smell he doesn't know they mix the shit they the shit they mix in with the circumcisions of their children and the fat of horrid snakes that they always have ready farmed there are numerous other fragments where you can see that Jewish people did actually make a living in creating cosmetic treatments Emanuele Ongoro for example which means Hungarian Emanuele in 1590 was given a licence in Manchuw which is a very liberal city for Jewish people was given the exclusive right to make and sell musk and ambergrig paste in Giuseppe Passe's text the defects of women which is another one of these hate women misogynistic text against women and particularly make-up women sell hair pieces fake hair pieces and this is something that I've come across in other texts about Jewish people creating these amazing loops and long hairdresses and things that they added to her in the Renaissance they always have innumerable braids he says to sell and haggle over cosmetic manufacture was perhaps like usury something that was both needed but frowned upon in Christian practice so the gap was filled by those at the margins of society as Natasem and Davis has suggested the margins could be areas of necessary creativity there are also intriguing connections between the cultures of cosmetics folk medicine and witchcraft much of the population I'm just showing you I'll come to that in a minute and this is an image that I think is probably of a witch they used to say it was Saint Margaret but I really don't think it's Saint Margaret they are judging by her gesture and her dress and this strange thing here there are also intriguing connections between the culture of cosmetics folk medicine and witchcraft an archetypal example might be a woman named Madeleina the Weaver who was put on trial in Rome in 1613 for manufacturing poison and I've got a whole chapter on murder and make-up in my book and there's a lot of relationships between women getting arsenic and things and pretending it's for poison and using it to poison their horrible husbands Madeleina offered love magic to clients as well as poison rented out rooms to sex workers and also made waters for washing women's faces oils and herbs of various kinds love magic was a really common form of witchcraft in Italy there's lots of examples of women being hold up before the Italian Inquisition for creating love magic and it was often like a lot of witchcraft had similar ingredients and similar techniques to cosmetics manufacture so you get some women in Venice in the 1590s were hold up before the Inquisition for using oil using holy oil to kiss their suitors with to bind them and others use things like oils to rub on their suitor this witch manual of 1608 the Compendium Maleficiarum talks a lot about witches anointing their victims with lotions waters, oils and unguents he says they anoint the thighs or belly or head throw breast ribs or some other part of the body witches use flying ointment and recipes often do things like bats but they do contain things that we consider quite witchy special ointments, oils, salves and potions often described in trials generally of course from confessions extracted under torture so you have to be really careful about how you use this material so this is I think a really stunning document it's a it's an autograph a confession of someone who was in prison for witchcraft called Balezza Ursini from 1528 and it's a really distressing story actually because she killed herself in prison when she was 60 rather than be executed before she died she wrote a plea for forgiveness in her own hand and there's about six pages of this these pages filled with a childlike halting script admit to all sorts of sorcery having sex with the devil, killing and eating infants at his best, teaching other women sorcery and bewitching people in various ways she also insisted that she helped many people too medicating and curing diseases of all kinds like Countess Caterina Swartza Balezza claimed she'd written a book of secrets which included recipes, incantations and ointments whilst Caterina was heralded for her knowledge if censored after her death Balezza killed herself in prison so cosmetics isn't just this calling women too curious constantly interested in cosmetics constantly interested in nature does have this kind of side of danger is an indication you have to remember how misogynistic and how difficult women's lives are in the early modern period anyway, so you have this impossible situation where women are meant to look in a certain way but they're not meant to really make cosmetics and they're distrusted if they experiment and so what you do is doctors basically come in to fill that gap and other men who take these recipes that are part of a folk tradition so the first text of this kind which is named is this one it's 1555 and it's by a guy called Giovanni Metvatorra Rossetti and it has loads of recipes for potions and it says for perfumes, oils balls, muskballs, little balls and it's clear that he's brought together numerous secrets and he said and there's no poison in it at all and this is something that they really said it says no poison, you won't get poisoned by this because this is obviously that they're worried about women poisoning people there is a little difference he said between the application of his staff of his art what he calls it his art and nature he said one is the mother nature is the mother and the other is the daughter so basically it's not going to change it's not going to falsify nature his book was pretty successful but not as successful as this one and this is Giovanni Marinella's ornaments of ladies and this is why I went on, this whole project is down it could be blamed on this book I started my research here Marinella was a physician and this book is great because he was slightly embarrassed Marinella was slightly embarrassed about makeup, about being associated with makeup and so he writes this really big excuse right at the beginning in his dedicatory lasso which is really interesting so it's over 600 pages it contains 1400 more than 1400 recipes for various types of cosmetic and hygiene product and it's organized in four sections each section it goes from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet and each section is prefaced by an explanation of what women should look like he explains that all women should be seen as naturally beautiful and then he says, I mean by naturally beautiful the beauty, the quality is described by ancient and modern poets and painters so basically he means that women should look like fictional characters and he goes and he quotes Petrach he says Petrach says that you should look like this and Arioste says you should look like this and this is how to get that look and that basically goes right through the book Marinella though is interesting because he gives wholesale justifications for women's cosmetic practice he doesn't divide up so this is one of his prefaces which starts to talk about his justifications and why women should have cosmetic practice he explains we like ornate manners we admire well proportioned bodies and love natural beauties but how much more if we like these natural things how much more should we like admire and love manners bodies and beauties in industry in other words it's better cosmetics are better than nature I don't know if you're familiar I don't know you might be familiar with Vizari, Georgia Vizari's life of the artists and in the third life the life of Michelangelo and the life of Leonardo da Vinci he says that artists instead of emulating nature are surpassing nature by the 1550s and this is exactly what Giovanni Marinello is claiming he's claiming that doctors are surpassing nature and can make nature better even if you're already beautiful Marinello says you can be more beautiful if you buy his book although a woman may be beautiful she should not disdain he says the enhancement of her beauty given that nothing is perfect in this world moreover just as a beautiful horse that is not tamed a lot of comparing of women to horses is not of great value excellent virtue in an ugly body is buried in dung basically if you read Marinello's book and look at the recipes a lot of the recipes are nicked from women and he does ascribe them sometimes to like aristocratic ladies so he says this is from a grand Arabic lady or this is from the empress Byzantium Irene and but often and the first edition he says all the recipes are from a by a Greek queen he makes up this, fabricates as Greek queen but also dotted through acknowledges other debts so he says this recipe is from some beautiful women a pleasant lady a damsel of my district or one of our young little country girls there are recipes from men too especially a troop of worthy doctors but these are vastly outnumbered by the women hit that he mentions and this is really commonplace in books of secrets too that they mention this is from the Duchess of Imla this is from this woman this is from that woman as well as a humbler folk and I always say this and I hope she publishes it soon because at a recent research workshop the historian Montserrac de Bray calls these repeated attributions recipes to women's small stories so you get these tiny fragmented stories into this lost world of women's cosmetics and women's knowledge and women's expertise that's brought to us unfortunately by these male writers and a major challenge for the historian is how to make these small stories bigger and one of the ways we've been doing this is through reconstruction I've been reconstructing make-up recipes for years now for about 15 years and I'm still we're still reconstruction as a historical methodology is still relatively in its infancy that it's getting much more popular and here's some recent books on the subject and one of the things that I've been looking at is how to choose which of these 1400 recipes to make and we have been making recipes particularly that have been annotated a lot in different versions of the book so one of the things that's clear from looking at all these annotations is that people like recipes that are easy that the shorter they are the fewer ingredients they have they tend to have more annotations and this is an example of a lemon balm cure for scabies scabies is a very common I'll show you some pictures of scabies in a minute but you can't wait I haven't bought this one but it doesn't just cure scabies it basically has this whole list of things that it does from console afflicting spirits to curing to curing strokes and this is scabies very very common in the Renaissance very itchy, quite unpleasant very difficult to cure at that point easy to make you just make lemon balm and wine and then you just distill it as long as you've got distillation equipment or a pan with an upturned lid you can do it I didn't bring that because I think it might be illegal to distill wine at home so I have made it but I just worry about sharing it with people but I have bought this one so this is a recipe for anti-wrinkle cream and it has in it sheep fat I'll show you you can pass it around sheep fat that has been washed nine times in cold water and I'll show you how this works later mixed with egg white and with a bit of butter then add some powdered mastic mastic frankincense and apply it to the forehead now you're very very welcome to try this you can smell it I've got some cotton buds that afterwards perhaps you can come up with it if you want to try some on but if you just want to smell these we can hand these around now while you do that I'll just explain why it's difficult to make early modern recipes one of the reasons why it's difficult to make early modern recipes is that the system of weights and measures is completely different they often don't mention weights and measures so I made actually 100g of this but the original recipe was for a pound of mutton tallow which is a lot of mutton tallow and this is likely that it was made to be shared yeah it's not bad is it hahaha so mutton tallow you have to wash the mutton tallow first it's very squee, it's very friable fat okay I'll show you my mutton tallow washing you have to wash it nine times in cold water this is horrible today and every time I make this mutton tallow I think why do I do this because it's not a nice job at all there we go that's me washing it you can hear how squidgy it is but what you're doing here is just trying to integrate a tiny little bit of water in the mutton tallow then you have to mix it with egg white formed with pestle and mortar and now this is me pretending pretending that I have mixed this with a wooden spoon but I haven't, I've mixed it with a cake mixer because women in their innocence were much better at mixing things they did they had much better arm strength because honestly I got so bored of mixing it with a wooden spoon I just couldn't be bothered anymore and I wasn't fast enough so that's why I needed a mixer but women in their innocence would have been better at it I presume and what this does is it forms an emulsion and so when you can feel the cream which will do whenever maybe at the drinks or something it will feel like a moisturiser it doesn't feel like a fat it feels fluffy and like it feels like Nivea cream or something like that heavy moisturiser and then we added some powdered mastic and incense do you smell the mastic and incense this is much nicer this is much better part of the process and actually it was great I didn't know what mastic or incense smelled like really before I did this these are tree gums mastic is has antibacterial properties frankincense is widely used was widely used in church might still smell churchy to some of you and crushing them is a really satisfying thing to do because they don't smell very much when they're in the form of tears and then suddenly crush them in the kitchen smells of mastic and frankincense they I have to say my family are a bit bored of the kitchen smelling of mastic and frankincense now because I've done this recipe several times so so one of the things so what we learn really by doing this and this is the fundamental thing we learn is how much we didn't know about the properties of these ingredients and how you mix them and this was everyday knowledge this isn't a lot of this knowledge that we got from making the recipe wasn't included in the recipe itself because everyone knew everyone knew what it meant to wash fat everyone knew what would happen at the end of the recipe if you mix egg white and turns into this fluffy white material it wasn't necessary to write that down this recipe appears in many many texts not just Mary Nello so it's quite a popular one and it really made me think about my attitude to renaissance women which was somehow that I know more than them but that's just not the case it really humbles you in the face of the knowledge of the past in terms of the properties of the ingredients tallo actually has vitamin E has linolag acid and it has several ingredients that are now used in skin care and thought to prevent skin aging mastic and frankincense are anti-microbial properties anti-inflammatory and calm the skin and they also stop you smelling of sheep too much it's still a bit sheepy they can have possibly known this information in their nascent but perhaps through experience and repeated use this was somehow understood as being something that was useful for stretch marks it was used for stretch marks and for wrinkles of the face and I'll just wind up by going back to the beginning so after this long, too long journey around renaissance cosmetics culture I'm going to end where we began with the Caravaggio Martha and Mary so this painting so often talked about in terms of Caravaggio's genius or the patron's interest in the counter reformation can also be understood and I think can really use for Libya understood as a tiny fragment of a whole world of cosmetics and beauty that we still actually know very little about very few people have write about cosmetics and despite the massive amount of family source material that's related to it this is a realm of knowledge cosmetics is a realm of knowledge formally dominated by women that was increasingly taken over by male physicians as the 16th century war on and something that women were increasingly criticised for during the counter reformation it's a whole field that gives us new insights into the obsessive revisiting of the relationship between art and nature that's to dominate the 16th century interestingly because of Mary Magdalene's saintly fate ffate commentators were keen to show that despite her initial sinfulness she was still naturally superior to other women the 1546 text that I talked about earlier explains washes, varnishes and sublimates skin peels and white lead and colours and tweezers to make eyelashes eyelashes arched as our maidens do they were never used by this woman by Mary Magdalene who by nature had beautiful skin with the forces of nature and a misogynistic patriarchy ranged against them however much ingenuity they displayed it seems that renaissance women could never win thank you thank you so much first of all that was such a fascinating for me as well a journey into something that I'm not very familiar with and just made me think about how you can look differently at things that we know quite well or it's a very different approach from the great artist method as well to think of how other details can take you into other worlds which feel quite distant to us but there's also some familiarity I think maybe as a woman just thinking about the role that cosmetics play you know my own life and so that's really that sort of turning these worlds and art worlds upside down or inside out so thank you for that just kind of made me think very differently but I just wanted to know about your own journey and how you came to this research and this work you don't have to recite your CV to us but you know what was it that kind of gave you the way into this it was via body hair removal as things so many things are because I wrote a book on the nude on the Italian renaissance nude and I was looking at female life models and about the advent of life drawing and I looked at men and I looked at women and a lot of the female life models had no body hair and I thought well is that a practice that was is that to do with artists just not drawing body hair it's obviously to do with classical sculpture but is it the case that women did women remove their body hair in renaissance Italy and I thought there wouldn't be any sources and then I looked at my own word so many sources about body hair removal so I started I thought well there's a scene to write about this and my interest initially was really to think about the pressure of visual culture what's the influence of the nude suddenly kind of exploding on visual culture how does that make people feel about their own bodies and I was particularly interested in both men and women but then there was much more on women's bodies and women's relationship with cosmetics and it was just clear that no one is so important to people people's lives and that the history of cosmetics is a very understudied field I know the people who study I know all of them we all know each other the role of secrecy and how that's still perpetuated in a way the kind of these great mysteries of youth looking glowing so it is interesting again it sort of speaks to our ages I'm going to open up any questions from the floor or online we've got one here and Kathleen is going to bring you a microphone so people online can hear hi thank you for this fantastic talk I really enjoyed it my question is about the sourcing of the ingredients and this might be my own bias as an Americanist but have you found any of the materials or the ingredients that's come specifically from other places that are maybe considered exotic and like what's their role how do they feature in the stories are they perceived as maybe more dangerous this dangerous like what's the deal with them this is a really good question and in a very kind of and there's a lot of material that you could work on with this but that work really remains to be done largely so most a lot of the ingredients from cosmetics are imported so mastic for example is imported then when you get into the 16th century you do get ingredients coming from the Americas as well and ingredients exported to the Americas from Spain there's just been a recent article about 16th century boats going to islands the islands I think and I think the mainland in the new world from Spain with things like white lead and are used for cosmetics extensively so and the ingredients are considered the more strange the ingredient the more exciting the cosmetic seems to be so you get things like pearls used as well and powdered marble and some massively long ingredient lists so they're obviously they're obviously prized but really I think that's a research project that just does need to be done I think it's a really interesting question but and my hunch is that there'll be a lot there yeah thank you pass it along thanks so much Jill that was absolutely brilliant I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about your recreative methodologies was that something you set out to do with the project at the very beginning or was it more as you really kind of uncovered the number of the bees that you thought actually this is something to try out and see how that played out but also I mean you sort of reference it a little bit in terms of what it make remaking it actually shifted in terms of the tacit knowledge but can you say a little bit more about any other surprises that came through actually the remaking practice that you weren't getting from the visual and material or textual sources thank you so there's two questions there really so the first one is that we started reconstruction I used to live downstairs in Edinburgh from a herbalist and she's like a really great friend now and we started we just talked about so why are they using nettles Anna tell me about nettles and she said oh nettles are great for the skin blah blah blah and so we started making these things and I had a long time ago I had a leave a home grant and I just spent that on working with a student of mine Jackie Spicer who did a PhD on earlier cosmetics and we did this big event at the National Gallery of Scotland and we made all these cosmetics and it was brilliant and actually did every nascent's makeover used some colour cosmetics to see some things like so for example there's this pastiche of renaissance make-up that's this white mask like you see on images of Elizabeth I or like films of Elizabeth I but that really comes from films actually if you actually recreate the make-up even because you can't use white light unfortunately because of health and safety even using like something like titanium dioxide the way that the make-up goes on the skin is much more like foundation so a lot of this stuff disentangling like a centuries of misogyny and distrust of make-up from actually what is actually going on with this make-up in these sources and and I'm still not happy with reconstruction as a methodology I still don't think I've quite got that right yet about how to write about and how to think about it but it's one of the only ways that I feel that I've had anything like the experience of these poor women who are making the make-up there's just no other way because the only evidence you get from them directly is through trials and that's really compromised evidence so at least somehow through re-creating this and I'm also thinking you know from the perspective of someone who works with images a lot does all the evidence we need does it always need to be verbal why is reconstructing any more problematic or any less problematic than using your own text so I'm also thinking on those lines as well but I'm still definitely in development I think Rebecca has some questions from our online audience so we'll hear we have quite a few so we may need to kind of alternate this is Mike working I think yeah starting wearing oxanon says clearly men were deeply concerned about being tricked by women and their cosmetics and obviously misogynistic anxiety that is mystifyingly popular today are there publications directed on how to improve themselves or on how to know if they're being duped by women or was all the expectation and blame laid at women thank you yeah there are publications like the one that I read out which said oh I'm going to reveal all the secrets of women this is how you can tell if you're being duped there's advice for example and some of it's kind of half joking that if you're going to get married to a woman you should try and surprise her in the morning before she's got a make-up on and then there's advice to women there's advice to women to wear like lip stains so that if you get surprised in the morning you still have red lips and red cheeks so this is kind of back and forth between these this kind of text I think there's also many men that are also under constant scrutiny in this period and there's a lot of advice to them about having an upright demeanour about exercise about correct deportment and things like that it just takes a different kind of flavour to that of women should I keep going? yeah thanks for the fascinating talk what about using cosmetics to mask certain attitudes I'm thinking of Alessandro Picolomini's claim that shame can be faked through fake blushing for example do you think women use these pockets of cosmetic creativity to fake it? well big, I mean I suppose the most obvious example there would be courtesanct and you know these women here you dress in a certain way and used ornament in a certain way to mimic you know the anxiety was that they dress like aristocratic men and you couldn't tell the difference so I suppose that would be the difference I mean blushing has a whole history of its own in terms of replicating blush and pretending to blush and pretending to be shame faced and there are actually articles later on there's a whole book I think about blushing in an English context in the 18th and 19th centuries but again that work hasn't been done yet in Italy so if anyone wants to work on this please do ok so you haven't done that there's a lot of work that needs to be done there's a question here hi, you mentioned how beauty and health were ideas that were connected and it made me think about how during the 19th century consumption and pale young women that died and especially poets as well men also they were considered really beautiful even though they were ill and I wondered if that idea was also present in the renaissance or at what point that changed there's something about renaissance illnesses that's very different but I've come across that as well because I've got a student who's working on pre-referlite models and the the big feared illnesses in renaissance weren't weren't consumption, weren't consumptive and didn't last a long time so if you got the plague for example you'd be dead within a day or two so there isn't a lot of time to sit around looking beautiful also they also tend to mark the skin a lot of the diseases that were around so smallpox for example is a massively feared disease that marked the skin really badly and also caused lots of hair amongst women and so you don't have this beautiful wave thing health is all associated with a certain kind of plump plump wellness that you don't get in the 16th century I think or maybe there's other times to do it but certainly it's not I've not come across in the 16th century while you've got the mic let's have another online question maybe there's one more in the room we have a lot online so I might need to show these with you later that's what we'll do definitely Jillian Forrester says a fascinating lecture thank you Jill the welcome exhibition is also remarkable could you talk about the role of mirrors in these discourses on cosmetics and female beauty I think that functional glass mirrors were not in use until the early 16th century with the most advanced made in Venice and they must have been very costly initially I noticed that the mirrors in the Titian and the Caravaggio you showed were both convex what impact would that have had on views on the aesthetics of beauty I actually have a chapter on mirrors in my book because one of the things I do talk about is the invention of the full length mirror so that you don't get full length mirrors until the very late 15th century and they don't get common until the early years of the 16th century and I think it does have a massive impact on people's understandings of their bodies and what they look like to an outsider and this is possibly related also to things like dieting culture and to this obsession that you get in the 16th century with putting the body in proportion which you don't get in 15th century texts which is all to do with facial makeup because you can see yourself accurately, clearly as the whole body as other people more or less see you which you simply can't do in a convex mirror Was there another question in the room? Okay, great or maybe one more, let's have one more if there's some good questions lining up Lorraine Murray apologises that she missed the start of the talk but is interested in the possibility of regional variations or published books do they concentrate on particular places or evidence of similar books or recorded practices elsewhere? You can't say but elsewhere a lot of these books Italy is a particular Italy is very important central for publishing in the 16th century so a lot of these books come out of Italy partly because a lot of books come out of Italy but also Venice becomes particularly famous for its beauty culture and its cosmetic culture and there's almost some eroticisation of Venetian women bleaching their hair and things like that so they are particularly satiated with Italy but Marinello for example there's a version of Marinello's text in French and then it gets translated into English in the 17th century by this guy called Jameson in a book called Artificial Embellishments which is very so misogynistic, it's quite funny my students really love it but the recipes change so they pick and choose the recipes they're not direct translations and this is very common with recipe books and so you get very common recipes in the English context like rosemary for example rosemary in wine beauty recipe that's used all the time in England that's hardly ever seen you don't really see it so much in Italy so yeah it does change Great, well thank you so much Jill and thank you to everyone for those really fascinating questions the in-house audience are probably desperate to try out the anti-wrinkle cream but we'll go out and we'll all be 20 years younger new women and men so thank you so much and thank you for everyone joining us here in Bedford Square and online and I think we have another event on Friday our research lunch so if you're in London please do join us oh it's online, fantastic if you are in the world you can join us for that and that's the last event of our season we'll have a short break for Easter and then we've got a really packed programme of evening events of lunchtime events of workshops and conferences so I hope that you'll be able to join us for some of those in the future as well but let's all just thank Jill for such an enlightening and really interesting talk which has taken us through so many ingredients through painting through so many materials as well as methods so thank you so much Jill thank you