On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  As a child, Lucrezia was the little idol of the Vatican. But not for long. She grew up in the company of two phenomenally powerful men: her father, described approvingly by Machiavelli as a man who ‘never did or thought of anything but deceiving people’, and Cesare Borgia, her supremely ambitious elder brother. Less an active participant in the crimes of these men than a useful pawn, Lucrezia was betrothed to five men and married to three of them in the space of ten years, all in accordance with the political and dynastic ambitions of the men who controlled her family.

  Betrothal to two Spanish nobles was followed by two marriages in swift succession, first to Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro, and then to Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglie. In 1500 Lucrezia, still aged only twenty, watched her second husband strangled in their apartment despite her frantic efforts to save him. Within months another politically expedient Alfonso had been selected for her. This time it was Alfonso d’Este, eldest son of the Duke of Ferrara ruler of one of the most glittering courts in Italy. This third marriage took place in February 1502 after a spectacular month-long journey to Ferrara by way of the Borgias’ newly conquered territories, carefully stage-managed by Alexander and Cesare. Lucrezia was accompanied by a thousand-strong entourage of Roman and Spanish gentlemen, ambassadors, prelates, men-at-arms, servants, craftsmen, cooks, entertainers, ladies-in-waiting and 150 mules carrying her trousseau. Amid this ant-like trail of travellers and associated hangers-on, Lucrezia would have stood out in her spectacular trailing cloak of crimson silk and ermine and a plumed hat, her long blonde hair streaming down her back.

  The journey required constant stops for the cavalcade to rest and for the bride to attend to her appearance. A few days out of Ferrara, Lucrezia ordered a rest-stop in Pesaro, where she was met by local noblewomen and led into a private apartment. For the whole of the following day, while some of her ladies-in-waiting danced with the people of Pesaro, Lucrezia locked herself inside the apartment to wash her hair and renew her blonde tints. Reading between the blurred lines of history, we can imagine her maids quickly mixing potent-smelling marinades of celandine roots, cumin oil, box shavings and saffron, and the young bride shedding her rich travelling garments, washing her hair in a basin and then having it anointed with the resultant sludge. For twenty-four hours she sat quietly resting while it dried and fixed the colour. Finally it was then washed off with an evil-smelling lye of cabbage stalks and ashes of rye straw.

  A few days later, for what must have been one of the great and glittering pageants of the century, the bride arrived in Ferrara on a pale grey stallion. She rode beneath a canopy of crimson satin followed by her entourage. Her gown was of mulberry velvet striped with gold, topped with a mantle of cloth of gold and lined with ermine. Over her glittering blonde hair she wore a jewelled cap. Niccolo Cagnolo of Parma described Lucrezia at this time: ‘She is of medium height and slender build; her face is oval, the nose is well formed; her hair is golden, her eyes tawny; the mouth is full and large with the whitest teeth; her throat is smooth and white yet becomingly full. She is all good humour and gaiety.’ The time spent in cosmetic preparation had clearly paid off. The wedding was completed successfully, and the match lasted, untampered with by her scheming male relatives.39

  When Alexander VI died in 1503, Lucrezia ceased to play such an overtly political role for her family. She led a more normal life at the brilliant court of Ferrara, which was a centre for the arts and letters of the time. It was here that she met Cardinal Bembo, a leading member of the Ferrara circle of classical scholars. Bembo and Lucrezia carried on a long and ardently amorous correspondence during their secret affair. A collection of the letters and sonnets composed by the two of them has survived and is preserved today in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Lucrezia was clearly aware of the power of her long blonde hair and in July 1503 she sent him a lock. ‘I rejoice,’ Bembo wrote when he received it, ‘that each day to increase my fire you cunningly devise some fresh incitement, such as that which encircled your glowing brow today.’ One of Bembo’s surviving sonnets hints that he had long coveted such a trophy.40

  The glowing hair I love despite my plight,

  Since love abounds the more I feel the smart,

  Had slipped the snood which keeps the rarest part

  Of all the gold I crave locked out of sight;

  When (alas, past recall now from his flight)

  Into that silken hoard straight winged my heart,

  As might a fledgling to green laurel dart

  Then go from bough to bough in his delight.

  Whereat two hands lovely beyond compare

  Gathering the loosened tresses to her nape

  Entangled him within, and bound them taut.

  Cry as I would, the voice that did escape

  Lacked any strength, my blood had chilled for fear:

  Therewith the heart was torn from me and caught.41

  Bembo preserved his prize inside a folded sheet of vellum wrapped around with four pink ribbons. Today the lock of hair is still displayed in the Ambrosiana Museum, like a holy relic, lodged between two sheets of glass in an elaborate 1920s pearl and malachite reliquary. But the romance of Lucrezia’s hair has one more flourishing coda. In 1816 Byron visited the Ambrosiana and read the letters, which he declared ‘the prettiest love letters in the world’. He became enchanted with and then obsessed by the lock of hair, which he described in a letter to a friend as ‘more blonde than can be imagined’. He committed some of the letters to memory as he was not allowed to make copies and then, when the librarian was out of the room, he stole one long golden strand from that lock of hair, ‘the prettiest and fairest imaginable’.

  While the poets competed in their worship of blonde hair, so the Italian painters of the Renaissance developed their own artistic standards of beauty in accordance with the irresistible classical conventions set in antiquity. Sandro Botticelli, many of whose magical paintings of the human form were done under the patronage of the Medici family, produced dozens of images of female perfection. These ethereal goddesses are now considered to be among the most powerful manifestations of the Renaissance. The Primavera, The Birth of Venus, Pallas and the Centaur, Mars and Venus – all of these works depict women conforming to the standard beauty ideals of the time. The painting by the Botticelli workshop of Venus of about i486, now in the Berlin Staatliche Museen, is one of the most stunning evocations ever made of the goddess of love. Venus stands on a simple grey plinth against a pure black background. She is naked except for her mass of luxuriant golden-blonde hair, which cascades down below her hips and is then lifted like a loose folding curtain to cover her genitals. Her body is a lush feast of creamy flesh, her face a picture of graceful and delicate beauty. But the eye is drawn again and again to the mass of flowing hair in which the powerful sexuality of this image lies. Botticelli’s working of the hair is a piece of unapologetic virtuoso work displaying his total mastery of the form. Smooth sinuous locks flow softly in the wind. Tighter curls, vital with erotic energy, quiver beneath a delicately loaded paintbrush. Snakily braided plaits hang down to her breasts and long loose tresses descend with a sensuous shimmer over her shoulders, their curling golden ends catching the light at her elbow and above her knee and sparkling against the black background like twitching fireflies. The motifs of the hair were probably influenced by the architect Alberti’s famous passage on hair in Delia pittura: ‘Let it wind itself into a coil as if desiring to knot itself and let it wave in the air like unto flames: let part weave itself among the rest like a snake, part grow to one side, part to the other . . .’

  Botticelli set a stupendous visual standard of feminine beauty for the late fifteenth century. As well as creating some of the most evocative blonde goddesses ever painted, he was also commissioned to paint some of northern Italy’s most powerful ladies, for whom appearances were of crucial importance. One of these was Caterina Sforza, a woman of high birth who used her augmented feminine beauty to disguise her unladylike ambitions in the political sphere. C
aterina was born in 1462, the illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, later Duke of Milan, and his mistress. As a child she was a beautiful tomboy – her biographers note her pearly white teeth, her creamy skin, her blonde hair and blue eyes – and she was soon parcelled off into a politically expedient marriage, at the age of fifteen, to Girolamo Riario, nephew of the then Pope Sixtus IV. Boisterous childhood adventures soon evolved into genuine martial activities on behalf of her spouse, and by 1483 Caterina was busy defending her husband’s territory of Forli – an area stretching from Ravenna through the Romagna – from the Venetian threat. A painting of the early 1480s, attributed by some to Botticelli and thought to be of Caterina, shows her in profile gazing thoughtfully out of a window at an Arcadian landscape. Her dress is simple, her hands large and capable and her neck bullishly strong. Her face has all the classic features of the unisex early Renaissance Italian aristocrat: high-bridged nose with flaring nostrils, plump chin, full lower lip and large, determined eyes. But it is the hair that strikes the viewer most forcefully. Bunched into a fat and complicated wreath at the back, it is smooth on top and curled into a pattern of wormlike waves over the ear. And it is a stunning shade of white blonde, overtly bleached in contrast with her dark eyebrows. Her complexion is pale and fine, her hair the ultimate in Italian beauty. Both would have cost Caterina dear in terms of time and expense. Both were part of a deliberate statement.

  When her husband died in 1488, murdered by the Orsini family, Caterina effectively became the ruler of Forli. For the next twelve years she defended it against attempted incursions from neighbouring territories, papal claims and finally the arrival of the French. For her role as the beautiful, invincible virago, she cultivated a dual image, using whichever mask suited her situation to greater advantage. At times she presented herself as a rare warrior woman. Cruel and unforgiving, she developed a ghastly desire for revenge against the Orsini and arranged public executions, secret murders and eventually the grotesque public killing of the eighty-year-old Orsini patriarch, Andrea.

  She also occasionally affected the timidity and modesty of a delicately pretty high-born lady, imbued with the sort of’mere womanliness’ expected of ladies of her age and background. In a letter to her uncle Ludovico Sforza, predicting the threat of a Venetian invasion of Marradi, she wrote: ‘nobody believes me . . . being just a lady and timid, too’. She took great pains to develop and preserve a ladylike beauty and wrote a book around 1499 on her personal cosmetic secrets. Experimenti showed Caterina to be obsessed with her appearance: preparations of nettleseed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron and sulphur were regularly applied to maintain the colour of her famously blonde hair and to help it grow down to her ankles. Other lotions, made from boiling fruits, eggshells and other ingredients, removed unwanted hair, and teeth were polished with burned rosemary stems and pulverised marble. Her eyes were bathed in rose-water, and special creamy concoctions were slathered daily on her milky-white breasts.42

  Naturally, such vanities did not augur well for Caterina. Soon after her book was written, she lost her territories of Forli and Imola to the predatory Borgia family. Characteristically hungry for vengeance, she resorted to trickery and dispatched a series of lethal letters to the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, some of them impregnated with poison, others infected with the plague. But no Borgia was ever easily disposed of, and her plans failed. Caterina died in 1509. Her life had been wild, brave and tragic, the life of both a virago and a victim as well as a celebrated beauty who had gone to great lengths to make sure she fitted the model of feminine perfection as laid down in the poetic canons of the period.

  Perfection in Caterina’s day required the creation and maintenance of a head of blonde hair, and this was a fantastically expensive business in fifteenth-century Italy. Exotic ingredients for blonde hair dyes were hard to come by. Some recipes required powdered silver in the mix. Most needed quantities of saffron. So in an age when power and wealth were brandished in displays of conspicuous consumption (fashionable clothes made from costly brocades and silks, enormous banquets of expensive food and drink, palace receptions, tournaments, concert parties, theatrical evenings, masked balls and lavish gifts), blonde hair was one more sure way of displaying one’s means.

  As in previous centuries, the ecclesiastical authorities were of course violently opposed to the Italian delight in luxuries. By the end of the fifteenth century a series of targeted backlashes had attempted, without notable success, to banish such excess. The Patriarch of Venice Lorenzo Giustinian had already tried introducing sumptuary laws in 1437 outlawing fake blonde hair in the city as well as excessively sumptuous clothes for women. He had threatened excommunication for all who disobeyed. But on the whole, in spite of a magistracy set up to deal with the problem of display, these laws were feebly enforced and energetically flouted: perhaps native acumen recognised the value of conspicuous glamour and realised that beautiful women were a commercial asset to the city.

  Some years after Giustinian’s attempts, however, Florentines became aware of a Dominican preacher named Girolamo Savonarola, who furiously disapproved of feminine luxuries and vanities and commanded an extraordinary following for his electric sermons, much like those of Saint Bernardino, who had toured northern Italy some years earlier. Savonarola never tired of warning those who attended his sermous that they could have no blessing from God and no abiding prosperity unless they repented their sins. And their sins were apparently multiple. Savonarola sent out spies who reported back in suitably shocked tones that the Italians gambled, read lascivious classical poetry, gazed at erotic paintings, and adorned themselves with rich clothes and vanities. What is more, they went shopping on holy days. His sermons must have been truly cataclysmic, for one of the writers employed to record them omitted large portions, being unable to continue for weeping. As men and women left his sermons they reportedly tore off their ornaments and gave them as offerings to God. From the pulpit of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s cathedral, Savonarola hurled down his denunciations of every form of inquity, and the vanities and luxuries disappeared from the streets and the homes of Florence. A kind of wholesale reformation of manners took place. Workmen, it is said, began to devote their leisure hours to reading the Bible. Men of business were inspired to return money they had unjustly acquired. Churches became crowded and the number of candidates for admission into the priesthood rocketed.

  But not everyone agreed with Savonarola. His attempts to repress every kind of immorality with moral fervour were eventually to lead to his downfall. Convinced that vice should not be tolerated, he did battle with the Florentines prohibiting the balls and festivals so beloved of them. He drilled bands of children to scour the towns, knocking on the doors of the rich and demanding that all things of luxury and vanity be given up. Carnival masks, dresses, wigs of bleached hair, musical instruments, books containing indecent or immoral tales and pictures were to be handed over. In 1496 Savonarola arranged for a huge bonfire to be built in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. The Bonfire of the Vanities, as this came to be known, was an eight-sided pyramid, 60 feet high by 240 feet wide. Each side had fifteen steps, on which was deposited all the evidence of self-indulgence, classified according to type. On one side were indecent dresses, on the second were pictures of the beauties of Florence, many of them provocatively blonde. On the third there were chessboards, dice and packs of cards; on the fourth were music, harps and lutes. The fifth side contained women’s cosmetics and beauty aids: matted clumps of false bleached hair, piles of mirrors and jewellery. The sixth side was devoted to lascivious and provocative books written by the poets, including volumes of Petrarch and an entire collected edition of Boccaccio. The seventh side contained masks, beards and other carnival ornaments; and the eighth side was piled up with erotic sculptures in ivory and marble.

  The spectacle could not have been better designed to rouse the Florentine masses, notoriously greedy for excitement. The piazza was teeming with people, buzzing with the religious frenzy of
the occasion. Stoking the atmosphere were Savonarola’s teams of children, who were massed to one side, chanting religious songs. The tension was electric. Finally, at a given signal Savonarola’s men lowered burning stakes to four corners of the pyramid and four huge tongues of livid flame leaped up into the sky, rising quickly to engulf the whole. A team of trumpeters blew a series of furious blasts, the bells of the Palazzo rang out and the crowd raised a deafening shout.

  Some of the contemporary accounts of the bonfire, which was repeated a year later, are thought to be exaggerated. But reputable writers, including Giorgio Vasari and the poet Girolamo Benivieni, recorded the burning of lewd, vain and detestable things, some of them by their own makers, including Fra Bartolommeo, who was roused to throw his paintings of nudes on to the fire. In 1498, Savonarola himself was hunted down by a mob acting on instructions from the Pope. He was arrested, tortured, hanged and burned for defiance of the pope, false prophecy, false pride and other indiscretions.

  6

  Four Blocks of Caviare and a Feather Bed

  The tide of the Italian Renaissance was reaching its gilded height. The harsh austerities of Savonarola’s canon had failed to take root in a culture still steeped in the sensuous pleasures of beauty and luxury. It was in such a climate in the first half of the sixteenth century that a new and daring master of painted beauty emerged, whose work was arguably to represent the Renaissance peak of Italian cultural power and influence. Titian was a man imbued with the glories of Venice, a lover of women, a connoisseur of all the subtle little hints in a woman’s appearance that signalled the presence or absence of morality, virtue, rank and relationships. He was also obsessed with the colour, texture and aura of golden hair.

  A lady’s hair was an essential part of Renaissance Venice’s coding system. Respectable married women of this period were expected to conceal their hair under a veil or net to keep erotic imaginings under control. Uncovered, free-flowing hair cast a potent sexual spell for the Italians. Rarely seen on mature women in public, it was connected with the bewitching fantasy sirens and the sensual goddesses of antiquity.