Women who did go to the considerable extent of blonding their hair must have been delighted to discover that their lives were enriched by an unexpected range of powers. Supernatural fantasies, the medieval equivalent of our urban myths, were frequently linked to the blonde. These fantasies, which were of course energetically condemned by the Church, took a specific form in which the female ‘victim’ was visited in the night by a highly charged sexual supernatural being, known as an ‘incubus’. Chaucer wrote about the phenomenon, noting mischievously that incubi had been much less heard of since bands of wandering friars had appeared on the scene. Like travelling salesmen in the 1960s, these happily nomadic friars had the reputation for leaping in most ungodly fashion into bed with married women when their husbands were away. The Church could not of course recognise such behaviour among its own and was forced to accept the reality of these supernatural beings, claiming that they were devils in human shape. By the time Saint Thomas Aquinas picked up on the issue, ranting at length against these demons, it was considered heresy not to believe in their reality.
The belief began to circulate that women with blonde hair were more frequently visited by incubi. In Discoverie of Witchcraft, a history of witchcraft written in the sixteenth century, the medieval period is characterised by the view that blondes, while perhaps more wicked, definitely had a great deal more fun. Under the heading ‘Bishop Sylvanus, his lecherie opened and covered again, how maides having yellow hair are most combred with Incubus’, the story is told of how an incubus once came to a lady’s bedside and made ‘hot loove unto hir’. The blonde lady cried out loudly during this exchange and the company came and found the incubus hiding under her bed in the likeness of Bishop Sylvanus. The belief in the supernatural attractions of blonde hair was still alive in 1650, when John Bulwer, in his book The Artificial Changeling, quoted a saying of St Paul: ‘A woman ought to have her head covered because of the Angels.’ ‘This some have understood of the evil Angels,’ Bulwer explained, ‘whose lust they thought was vehemently provoked and inflam’d by the beauty of womens hairs: and hence your incubi are more troublesome and prone to vex women who have a fair head of hair.’ The myth of the incubi is likely to have both fuelled demand for hair dyes and spurred the Church to even greater hysteria in its condemnation of the outrageous sexiness of blonde hair. Ironically, the Church itself was developing an entirely different symbolism and vocabulary for blonde hair which would cast a new and lasting spell over mankind.24
4
Is She Not Pure Gold?
Blonde hair and sexual attraction were unmistakably entwined. Aphrodite and then Venus had set the parameters of beauty and sexuality in the ancient world. Eve and then Mary Magdalene had added a new and intoxicating flavour of wickedness to the brew, playing the role of iconic bad girls whose behaviour sparked cults of defiant imitation and worship. Yet in spite of the apparent runaway power of blonde hair as a sexual signal, the medieval Church did eventually find itself in possession of one supremely powerful blonde paragon, an opposing examplar whose hair signalled exquisite purity and whose presence and behaviour were beyond suspicion. If Eve and Mary Magdalene were archetypes of blonde vice, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, once unveiled in the late fourteenth century, was a pillar of blonde virtue.
Unlike wanton women and all their daughters on earth who invoked damnation and death, Mary was an agent of redemption who blessed mankind with salvation and eternal life. Mary was in all ways perfect. One of her many distinguishing characteristics was her freedom from carnal desire. Not only had she been conceived immaculately by divine intervention, but her purity had been preserved by the miraculous birth of Jesus Christ. The Virgin Mary was everything that Mary Magdalene was not. She was sacred and sinless. She was modest and humble. She did not seek to inflame men with fripperies and fashions. In contrast to Eve and Mary Magdalene who had brazenly flowing blonde locks, the Virgin Mary wore a modest veil in most of her early devotional images. Gilles d’Orleans, fulminating from the pulpit in 1350s Paris, had already made it clear that the Virgin Mary, a woman of chastity, would never have considered wearing silk belts and jewellery and dyeing or displaying her hair in the way that fashionable women did in his parish. To emphasise her admirable innocence of the sins of fashion, some painters depicted her with brown hair.
But the Blessed Virgin Mary was eventually to succumb to the powers of blonde hair and emerge in dazzling capillary raiment of an entirely new sort. The change came at the end of the fourteenth century, when the graphic revelations of the Swedish visionary Saint Bridget swept medieval Europe and began to influence visual portrayals of the Virgin. Saint Bridget, born in Sweden in 1303, was the founder of the Bridgettine order and spent most of her adult life in Italy, touring shrines, looking after the poor and working among them the sort of inexplicable cures essential for posthumous canonisation. During her lifetime she was already widely known for her visions, which were written down in Swedish and translated into Latin. But as the Bridgettine cult grew, copies of her revelations were translated into most European languages (about 150 Latin manuscripts still exist in libraries around the world and there are numerous records of translations of the book in fifteenth-century wills). Within a few decades of her death in 1373, the revelations had became a standard part of works of devotion. Saint Bridget was canonised in 1391 for her virtues, for her work as a foundress, her services to the poor and the sick and her devotion to helping pilgrims. But it was her visions that had caught the public imagination. Of these the most pictorially vivid were those of the Virgin Mary, long hymns in praise of her beauty, specifying long blonde hair, bright like sunshine, falling freely over her shoulders.
Her vision of the Nativity in Bethlehem is recognised as her most important because of its striking departure from mainstream representations of the scene. The Latin original gives a long and detailed description:
I beheld a virgin of extreme beauty . . . well wrapped in a white mantle and a delicate tunic, through which I clearly perceived her virgin body . . . With her was an old man of great honesty, and they brought with them an ox and an ass . . . Then the virgin pulled off the shoes from her feet, drew off the white mantle that enveloped her, removed the veil from her head, laying it by her side, thus remaining in her tunic alone with her beautiful golden hair falling loosely down her shoulders . . .25
The vision continues with a description of Mary kneeling down as if praying at the moment of the birth, rather than in the traditional lying posture shown in portrayals up to then. Art historians have argued that Saint Bridget’s visions revolutionised depictions of the Nativity in Christian iconography. From this point on, beginning in Italian art and spreading to all European art, the stable scene with the Virgin lying on a bed was often replaced by the scene outside the stable door, with the Virgin kneeling and worshipping the newborn baby. Saint Bridget’s striking vision of flowing blonde hair was also adopted by artists and influenced some of the most transcendently beautiful fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings of the Virgin.
It was owing to the newly blonde Virgin Mary of the late fourteenth century and her accompanying pantheons of sinless angels that blonde hair began to acquire a powerful new symbolism. On the Virgin it became the ultimate manifestation of pure, superior beauty. The exquisite blonde virgin and her blonde angels were the celestial messengers of God. As such they stood high above the ranks of ordinary mortals. They were there for legitimate worship.
Few perhaps made the comparison at the time, but the symbolic purity of the Virgin Mary’s colouring provided the first evidence of the dichotomy in blondeness that was to plague and intrigue men and women for hundreds of years to come. With the unveiling of the Virgin, blonde hair was shown to possess a dangerous ambivalence. It could signify immaculate, innocent and uncorruptible beauty – no one could better the Virgin Mary in divine beauty, or it could signal the greedily manipulative desire to seduce, manifest in such wily operators as Eve and Mary Magdalene. Contex
t was essential for judgment and the clues were generally pretty clear. Both types of blonde are shown in the 1410 image Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, painted by the Master of the Straus Madonna. Eve, dressed in a diaphanous shawl, lies at the feet of the enthroned and magnificently aloof Virgin. Eve’s blonde hair tumbles luxuriantly over her shoulders, pointing suggestively down towards her breasts. The Virgin Mary’s is more modest and partially veiled, though no less splendidly blonde. The differing symbolism of the two blondes is abundantly clear in this picture, but it has not always been so. In the centuries to come, blondes of all sorts were to learn to manipulate this ambivalence to their advantage.
The aesthetic passion for blonde hair at this time, whether honey- or amber-coloured, golden or saffron, was linked to the contemporary love of light and colour. This was a spontaneous response to beauty, pure and simple, which was expressed in the paintings, miniatures, frescos, literature and poetry of the period. The fifteenth-century poet Olivier de la Marche wallowed in erotic fantasy as he marvelled at the beauty of sunlight on golden hair. And Baldwin of Canterbury wrote at length on the aesthetic appeal, the exceptional succulence, of gleaming plaits. The delight in bright colours as an expression of beauty was linked with the brilliance of light, and both were seen at their most dazzling in the stained glasswork of Gothic cathedrals. Ordinary people of the period were enthralled by brightness and luminosity, by the brilliance of daylight, sunshine and fire. They often formed a conception of God in terms of ecstasies of beauty which appeared as shining golden light. Church illumination and imagery were designed to lift humble spirits, to leaven the dull lives of ordinary people and make them bearable with the dream of another world. The effect was much like that of the movies. The medieval Church’s gleaming blondes were an early incarnation of the iconic blonde goddesses waiting to slink out on to the movie screens of 1930s Hollywood.
For medieval artists, therefore, the colour gold, according to the standard iconography of the day, came to signify a sacred realm.b They painted religious figures against gold backdrops and with a variant of the same colour for the often luxuriant hair wreathed around their faces. Contemporary artistic thought held that faces would radiate light when set against the intense gold of the hair and background. Competing theories of optics were raging at the time, and many artists were convinced that an abstract gold frame would also sharpen the contours of a form and make it appear almost tangible. It was recognised that the power of the painted golden aura and its effects on the common people were considerable. To those churchmen in the business of inspiring awe, they were clearly worth analysing and harnessing.
Highlighting the Virgin Mary’s symbolically immaculate blondeness were hosts of angels, the spiritual messengers of God, who were always blonde. Angels were sexless and therefore sinless, and were depicted as innocent young beauties. Hundreds of thousands of blonde angels emerged from the brushes of medieval painters. Some of them, such as those painted by Fra Angelico, were creatures of exquisite grace. The eleven angels in the famous Wilton Diptych, painted by an unknown artist around 1395, are celestial beings of sublime beauty, blessed with curling pale gold ringlets of hair held in place beneath crowns of blue and white flowers.
The concept of the angel was hugely popular in the Middle Ages. Sometime during the thirteenth century, the heavenly host had been totted up, after a fashion. It was found to number over three hundred million, prompting the eruption of a kind of angel fever. Angels were believed to govern not only the seven planets, the four seasons, the months of the year and the days of the week, but also the hours of the day and night. The fact also, according to biblical lore, that every blade of grass had its own personal guardian angel urging it to grow meant there was a teeming proliferation of blondes up in heaven.
The Archangel Gabriel was almost universally depicted as a dazzling blond. Stefan Lochner’s Annunciation, on the closed panels of his Adoration of the Magi of 1445, shows a glistening blond Angel Gabriel bringing news to an equally radiant Mary, their long waving golden hair symbolic of their purity and divinity.
In many cases the hair and haloes of these celestial beings were actually gilded. The gold was pounded and beaten into delicate wafer-thin leaves so fine that they would fly away and crumple to virtually nothing in the slightest breeze. The leaves were applied to an image with great difficulty and smoothed on millimetre by millimetre, finally held in place with a fixative. The fascination with the lustre of blonde hair derived some of its power at this time from the contemporary obsession with gold, the metal of ultimate desire. The similarities were considerable. Gold, like hair, is supremely malleable. It can be heated and stretched, hammered, baked, sizzled and crimped, and still it never dulls. Resisting corrosion and oxidation, gold never loses its luminous glow. One gram of gold can be drawn into wire almost three kilometres long; and according to Pliny, an ounce of gold can be pounded into 750 fine leaves, each four inches square. Gold’s fiery power lay, it was believed, in its purity, just as the Virgin Mary’s power lay in her purity and, in ancient times, Aphrodite’s power lay in her golden purity, which was free, as Sappho tells us, from pollution.
Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, the Benedictine nun, mystic and preacher, had written at length in the twelfth century about the powers and curative properties of gold. She raised its spiritual and aesthetic appeal for the many ordinary men and women who knew of her visions and teachings through anthologised snippets. Gold, she wrote in her medical treatise Physica, is hot and its nature is like the sun’s. Anyone suffering from ‘virgichtiget’ (arthritis) should reduce a piece of gold to a powder, knead it with flour and water into a cake and cook it for eating before breakfast. Even the deaf, she claimed, could be cured with gold: ‘prepare a paste with gold dust and fine flour, and stick a little of it in the ears. The heat will pass into the ear and if he does this often he will recover his hearing’ either that or his ears will be fatally and expensively blocked.26
As a celebrated prophet, famed for her denunciations of bishops and emperors, Hildegard was one of history’s great autodidacts. She hoovered up everything she could lay her hands on, from biblical commentaries to translations of Arabic medical writers borrowed from her monastic friends. She made forays into medicine, poetry, music and astronomy, but was probably most famous for her visions in which she witnessed golden light as the original metaphor for spiritual reality. Images painted to spread the news of her visions often showed figures associated with the Church as golden blondes.
Hildegard’s own hair colour has been obscured by the passage of time and by the ecclesiastical wimple. But one of the earliest surviving images of her unveiled is in a copy of an 1175 book of her visions. A figure thought to be Hildegard herself is seen dressed in dark red with long flowing blonde hair, surrounded by eight blonde virgins. A hand-coloured lithograph of Hildegard made in 1493 in Nuremberg (admittedly three hundred years after her death) shows a young figure dressed in the robes of the convent holding a reed, with her long and abundant golden yellow hair tumbling down over her shoulders.
Whatever its true colour, Hildegard’s hair had its own special curative properties. As a mystic to whom crowds flocked from all over France and Germany for blessings, Hildegard gained a reputation as something of a miracle worker. The monk Theodoric of Echternach, the final editor of Hildegard’s memoir, Vita, explained in the text that when a small lock of her hair was applied to any of the sick, they were restored to their former health. The wife of the mayor of Bingen, for example, suffering in childbirth, was given a plait of Hildegard’s hair to gird round her naked waist. ‘When this was done, she happily went forward with the birth, and was freed from death’. And he reports that Henry, a canon of Bingen, said on oath that when he applied hairs of the blessed Hildegard to two sick women, they were immediately set free from the demons. During the years that she was touring the country as a celebrated mystic, much miracle-working and many sudden healings and unexplained feats were performed with the help
of Hildegard’s hair.27
There were, then, ample reasons why the people of medieval northern Europe should have been particularly aware of blonde hair. It denoted, they were frequently told, lust and lechery, weakness and sloth, and was associated with all the sins of the world. It was also considered to be something special, powerful, sacred and almost supernatural, and in the case of women, the crowning evidence of pure beauty. In addition, it had created a currency for itself as a desirable property, particularly in the East Mediterranean and Arab world, where its rarity guaranteed its demand. The Crusades had played a part in the commercialisation of blonde hair, generating a brisk trade in the Middle East for European women of loose morals and keen business noses. Thousands of them travelled out to Muslim countries to follow and sustain the fighting men of Europe. A colourful account survives from Imad ad-Din, a twelfth-century Arab historian, of a shipload of western European prostitutes arriving to service the Crusaders:
There arrived by ship three hundred lovely Frankish women, full of youth and beauty, assembled from beyond the sea and offering themselves for sin. They were expatriates come to help expatriates, ready to cheer the fallen and sustained in turn to give support and assistance, and they glowed with ardour for carnal intercourse. They were all licentious harlots, proud and scornful, who took and gave, foul-fleshed and sinful, singers and coquettes, appearing proudly in public, ardent and inflamed, tinted and painted . . . selling themselves for gold, bold and ardent, loving and passionate, pink-faced and unblushing . . . blue-eyed and grey-eyed, broken-down little fools.28
On Blondes Page 5