The master artist Raphael rendered this portrait of a maiden with a unicorn. It’s a paean to the way Italian 16th-century men concieved of beauty and virtue — the two were inextricably woven together. And perhaps Raphael didn’t mean it, but his painting also shows how fantastical and unrealistic these expectations were for most women of the day. The maiden here has white, unwrinkled, smooth and hairless skin; her lips are rosy and her hair blond. She has small breasts and a high forehead. Her outward appearance was thought to be a manesfestation of an inner moral purity. Like the unicorn, however, these standards would have been impossible to maintain for women throughout their lives. Normal aging and bouts of smallpox, hairy and darker bodies would have been the norm for women, and thus they were faced with a dilemma. “Much is lacking for a woman who lacks beauty,” writes the 16th century Castiglione in his famous advice book for wealthy Italians in _The Book of the Courtier_.
Where these patriarchal standards came from is a long story, but part of it was wrapped up in marital patterns of the day, in which the rich families arranged marriages for women that were maybe 16 to men in their 30s. The ideal bride was *young* and so was the ideal female age for beauty. Also, with the rise of the African slave trade, whiteness in skin and light hair were prized — the women who had whiter skin were also of a social class that didn’t have to spend time outdoors in manual labor, showing their wealth.
And so, Italian women turned to cosmetics as a way to conform to society’s beauty standards and as a way to sneak around them, using blush, dilapidaries, and “arschemica” or the art of chemistry “to make a woman appear to be a virgin even if she is of the age to be corrupted” as Caterina Sforza, the Countess of Forli, put it. Many of the concoctions women used included newer uses of metals and minerals, and some were deeply harmful — lead, mercury, arsenic, for instance, but also using various plants like sandalwood or pomegranate juice.
Men of the time ridiculed women who used “too much makeup,” even as they valued women for these unrealistic standards.
Sources: _Science Histiry Institute_, “Controversy, Control, and Cosmetics in Early Modern Italy” Claire Litt, July 3, 2024. Marisa den Hartog, _Leiden Medievalists Blog_, “Makeup and Beauty Standards in Renaissance Italy,” July 10, 2020. See the recent wok by Jill Burke _How to Be a Renaissance Woman_, Pegasus Books, 2024
