On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  Titian’s gallery of female subjects is filled with examples of the temptress. He painted these sensual beauties as mythological creatures, revelling in their blonde locks, the sign of their eroticism. Titian’s blondes appear in all guises, repeatedly as Venus (he painted at least ten of them) and as Mary Magdalene, but also as Lucrezia, Diana, Flora, Violante and as anonymous ‘ladies’ variously at their toilet. Each one is portrayed as a vision of passive beauty and palpitating sexual delight. Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino, for example, is a sleek and seductive goddess, a blatantly sexual created object whose loose golden hair, delicate coral mouth, soft pale thighs and directly inviting gaze are all designed to provoke erotic thoughts in the beholder. One of his depictions of Flora, which hangs in the Uffizi, is a siren half-undressed, her blonde hair tumbling down over her round white shoulders and in her hand a bunch of flowers. These are not innocent girls, chaste and modest and pure. These are knowing women, dressed as goddesses or saints, who are fully aware of their own ravishing appeal.

  There was one female subject whom Titian invariably depicted with brown hair – the Virgin Mary. It may be that for Titian, living in the rich and cynical display-culture of High Renaissance Venice, blonde hair was so closely associated with sexuality, with artifice and manipulation, that he wished to emphasise the Virgin’s immaculate innocence with her contrasting brown hair. In Titian’s paintings, the Virgin Mary is untouchable in her perfection and is guarded from base male thoughts by her hair colour.

  On the whole, though, Titian favoured blondes. But he was not painting them in isolation. Carpaccio’s much admired painting of around 1495, The Two Courtesans, shows two defiantly blonded ladies sitting on their balcony amusing themselves with peacocks and dogs in the heat of the day while waiting for their men to return from a hunting expedition. Ruskin described it as ‘the best picture in the world’. One of Palma Vecchio’s loveliest images of a woman is his portrait, entitled simply Blonde Woman, now in Milan’s Museo Poldi-Pezzoli. This uninhibited and intimate painting is lavishly coloured and textured. The subject’s silken gown glimmers as it falls down from her right shoulder, its brocade edging elaborately patterned and quilted, her soft white undershirt voluminous in its pleats and folds. All this rich, high texture serves to accentuate and enhance the luminous milkiness of her exposed breasts and shoulders and of course the exquisite waves of her blonde hair. Over her shoulders cascades this flood of hair, shining, loose and free, the crowning glory of this overtly sensual painting.

  There is little doubt that the mythological paintings of Titian and his contemporaries were regarded as explicitly erotic images. Titian himself would have agreed. In a letter to Philip II, he wrote that after the ‘Danae where one could see everything from the front’,43 he promised to send another painting, of Venus and Adonis, in which it would be possible to view just to vary things. . . the other side’. Ludovico Dolce, a friend and admirer of Titian’s, wrote to Alessandro Contarini about the same Venus and Adonis:

  the miraculous shrewdness of that divine spirit [Titian] is also revealed that in her intimate parts we recognise the creases on the flesh caused by her seated position. Why, it can in truth be said that every stroke of the brush is one of those strokes that nature executes with its own hand . . . I swear to you, sir, that there is no man so keen in sight or judgment, that seeing does not believe her alive; nor anyone made so cold by the years, or so hardened in his being who does not feel a warming, a softening, a stirring of the blood in his veins. It is a real marvel . . .44

  Among the powerful circles of well-connected men who viewed these kinds of sensual painting, blonde hair was all about the titillation of dangerous pleasure.

  Deliberately erotic images, then, were held in great numbers in the private networks of the elite. Leonardo da Vinci was well aware of the potent spell that his paintings could cast. ‘The painter’s power over men’s minds,’ he wrote:

  is even greater [than the poet’s], for he can induce them . . . to fall in love with a picture which does not portray any living woman . . . It once happened to me that I made a picture representing a sacred subject which was bought by one who loved it and who then wished to remove the symbols of divinity in order that he might kiss her without misgivings. Finally his conscience overcame his sighs of desire and he . . . was obliged to remove the painting from his house.45

  In an ironic twist, the very churchmen who had for generations so energetically damned such wickedness were accused themselves of harbouring paintings of blonde biblical and mythological beauties for their own erotic gratification. In a treatise published in 1552, Ambrogio Politi, a Dominican cleric, accused priests of downright idolatry and was unconvinced by the excuses of ‘corrupt’ men who alleged that they collected and preserved these pictures ‘not for the purpose of revering them or adoring them, but for the enjoyment of the spectacles and in memory of the ancients, as a demonstration of the skill of the artist’.46

  Sin came in many forms in the sixteenth century, but initially avarice was the sin discussed and abhorred at greatest length in manuals for confessors, with lust following a close second. By the end of the century, however, lust had emerged in the confessionals as the number-one sin. There is no simple explanation for this, but the historian Carlo Ginzburg believes it may be that, with the spread of printing and the increased circulation of images, sight was emerging as the pre-eminent erotic sense. This, combined with the Counter-Reformation’s repression of sexual life in Catholic countries and Calvin’s equivalent repression in Protestant countries, perhaps turned lust into the primary sin.

  In Italy, it was recognised that images possessed great power to arouse. Erotic pictures were often hung in the bedchamber as a kind of fertility talisman, ‘because once seen they serve to arouse one and to make beautiful, healthy and charming children’. To conceive a child under the sign of Venus, it was believed, increased the chance of generating beauty – and blondeness. In 1587 an English translation was published of the ancient Greek story Aethiopica by Heliodorus about the birth of a fair-haired and fair-skinned girl, Chancleia, to royal Ethiopian parents, both dark-haired and dark-skinned. The story turns on the improbability of her belonging to this family, until her mother, Persina, admits that during conception she thought about a painting of the naked blonde Andromeda which hung in the palace bedroom. Eventually the girl’s unique birthmark is found and recognised, and she is accepted. The story became very popular and its central concept must have been widely circulated and understood.

  Images and their stories in this way reinforced the singularity of blondeness for contemporary Italians and, increasingly, given the growing scope of travel, for a wider European audience too. Painters and poets fed off each other for inspiration. Poetry was cast in a wide arc from Venice, the works of High Renaissance poets such as Firenzuola and Luigini vigorously promoting the Venetian ideal of feminine beauty to a broad European public. Firenzuola, in his 1548 Dialogue of the Beauty of Women, describes the imagined conversation at two social gatherings of leading Florentine men and women. Celso, the author’s mouthpiece, fills page after page with his detailed discussions of feminine beauty. He defines it in both theoretical and empirical fashion, and lists the ideal shape, proportions, colour and ornamentation of the female body. He describes the precise details of the face, eyes, nose, eyebrows, eyelashes, teeth and gums. Even the tip of the tongue is discussed. On hair he is unwavering in his worship of blonde.

  A lady’s hair is of fine gold, woven in a crown of bright and crisped gold . . . you know that the true and right colour for hair is fair yellow . . . the hair should be fine and fair, in the similitude now of gold, now of honey and now of the bright and shining rays of the sun; waving, thick, abundant and long . . .

  He goes on to quote Apuleius on the same subject: ‘If you should remove from the shining head of any well-favoured maiden the glory of the bright light of her fair hair, you would find her bereft of every grace and lacking all charm . . .’

 
Federigo Luigini’s Book of Fair Women, published in 1554, is set in the villa where Luigini dreamed that he and four male friends, one evening after a day’s hunting, had set themselves the pleasurable task of ‘taking up brushes and colours’ to ‘paint’, in words, the image of the perfect woman. The five gentlemen work their way systematically down through an elaborate catalogue of the parts of the female body from head to toe, referring to the beauties described by classical and contemporary poets known to them. Hair is tackled first:

  I desire to take first her hair, for that, methinks, is of more importance to her beauty than any other of her charms, seeing that without it she would be even as a garden without flowers or a ring without jewels . . . Tresses, therefore, must adorn our Lady, and in colour they shall be like unto clear shining gold, for that in truth affords more delight to the eye than any other whatsoever . . .

  He goes on to refer to the Knidos Aphrodite, to Venus, Poppaea, Ovid’s blondes, Petrarch’s Laura and to the writings of Bembo and other blondophile Renaissance poets. In conclusion he says: ‘our Lady’s hair shall be long, thick, golden and softly curling, flowing down her back in fair loose tresses, not hidden away in any net of gold or silk, but open to the gaze, so that each favoured mortal may behold it without breathing an inward malediction on that which half hides it from his view.’

  Blonde was the colour on the lips of all the poets of the time, not least Pietro Aretino, poet, dramatist and pornographer. Aretino was famed throughout Europe for his lewd sonnets and dialogues. He settled in Venice in 1527 where he became great friends with Titian, and lived in a grand and dissolute style, writing satirical attacks on the powerful, and scurrilous exposes of prostitutes and their clients. In his Dialogues, in which the blonde Nanna teaches her daughter Pippa the fine arts of courtesanship, he describes the difficulties that courtesans have in a city overrun with rivals. ‘Why nowadays whores come in hordes, and a girl who can’t perform miracles of wise living will never rub a supper against a lunch. No, it’s not enough to be made of good solid flesh, have lovely eyes and blonde tresses – you need art or luck to get through the undergrowth, and all the rest is just bells to hang on a cat’s neck.’ Nanna advises Pippa to cultivate an intellectual image, to leave volumes of Petrarch’s poetry and Boccaccio’s stories open and prominently visible in her salon.47

  Aretino was well acquainted with the courtesans of Venice. He probably introduced several of them to Titian, who may have employed them as the models for his mythological and biblical subjects. As the art historian Rona Goffen notes, ‘The actual identities of these models have been lost to history, although they may well have been prostitutes, given that such women often combined modelling with the oldest profession; and for all we know, they may indeed have been employed by Titian also in this sense.’48

  So who were these courtesans who made Venice famous throughout Europe as the ‘terra da donned’ Thomas Coryate, an English traveller who walked from Somerset to Venice and back in the early seventeenth century, wrote in his Coryat’s Crudities, ‘For so infinite are the allurements of these amorous Calypsoes, that the fame of them hath drawen many to Venice from some of the remotest parts of Chnstendome, to contemplate their beauties, and enjoy their pleasing dalliances.’49

  The word cortigiana or courtesan came into vogue at the end of the fifteenth century to describe women similar to the hetairai of the Greek world. The courtesans were refined, gifted and much-courted ladies who captivated powerful men with their intelligence and their beauty. On the whole, they were highly cultured, often accomplished in literature and music. They were popular guests at parties for their informed and witty conversation, their charm, their stylish dress and their beauty.

  The top-ranking courtesans became prosperous and entertained lavishly in their own apartments. These were like oversized jewel boxes, typically stuffed with velvets, brocades, inlaid furniture, musical instruments and carefully selected volumes of verse. Renaissance culture was a display culture, and the leading courtesans no less than any other members of high society made a point of parading themselves and their finery in public. They were assiduous church-goers and were welcomed as prospective penitents by some churches, where their numbers no doubt helped to boost the congregations. But their main purpose was publicity. Church-going was an excellent stage on which to advertise their beauty, their charms, their luxurious clothes, and to display their power and even, in a few cheeky cases, their piety. Crowds gathered around the church doors to watch as the leading courtesan of the moment arrived, like a Hollywood star at a movie premiere, preceded by several pages and manservants, surrounded by her admirers and with her hand on the arm of her current favourite.

  Such a scene is described in a dialogue, thought to have been written by Aretino, between two women, Maddalena and Giulia. ‘Did you see La Tortora’s wonderful clothes when she went into S. Agostino? I didn’t know her, I thought she was a baroness . . . And did you see the way her hair was done? It looked like one mass of curled gold on top of another. And that black velvet and gold robe, with gold cords interlaced over the velvet, and velvet ones over the gold. The work alone must have cost the world. And her rings and pearls and necklaces, and all the other beautiful things she had?’ Giulia replies, ‘Yes I saw it all, and I marvelled, because I remember La Tortora in Venice in an old sack of a dress, with her hands and ankles dirty, wearing old house slippers without heels.’50

  Wealthy cavaliers attracted by such showy displays were required to enter into long and complicated transactions if they wanted to strike up relations with a courtesan. Elegant love letters full of erudite literary references first had to be written, followed by verbal pledges of love. The great courtesans were visited by powerful and illustrious men, so the competition was fierce. Reaching her audience chamber, however, did not necessarily mean that they would reach her private chamber, let alone her bedchamber. For that the aspiring lovers would have to demonstrate further abilities, quoting fashionable poetry, playing madrigals, improvising songs and handing out expensive gifts. They had to be well-prepared to launch their bid for the bedchamber, and among the Venetians a class of agent-consultants known as the mezzauo sprang up to furnish would-be lovers with the necessary weapons of seduction. Poems, sonnets and love letters could be provided, at a price, and when his client was fully prepared the mezzano would arrange the first meeting and, if successful, follow it through with the negotiations for the final bargain.

  For their elegance, their wit and their learning, courtesans were considered to be a cut above mere prostitutes, and for a while in the sixteenth century some Venetian women born into good bourgeois families took up the career of courtesan. Sometimes they had been orphaned or widowed, or disowned by their families for becoming single mothers. Often the mere fact that they were single, in a city where 95 per cent of women were married by the age of eighteen, was enough to lead them into courtesanship as a socially acceptable solution to their awkward status.

  One such woman was Veronica Franco, born in 1546, the only daughter among three sons in a bourgeois family sufficiently socially elevated to have its own coat of arms. Mystery surrounds the reason for Veronica’s original entry into this profession. She is thought to have been married very young, but became pregnant by a wealthy lover when she was eighteen. She soon followed her mother into the profession and rose fast to become what her admirers called ‘an expensive mouthful’ who would not give a kiss for less than five or six scudi. Soon she was asking fifty scudi for what Montaigne graciously described as ‘la négociation entiéré She was reputedly very beautiful, with blonde hair dyed to the shade of gold supposedly desired by all the men of Europe. She had blue eyes, a heart-shaped face with a broad brow and a small pointed chin. Tintoretto, who was a friend of hers, painted a portrait of Veronica which is now lost; but an engraving of her made when she was twenty-three still survives in Venice. She looks slight, almost childlike, with an elfin delicacy of feature, carefully plucked eyebrows and rows of shining ringlets
primped and arranged around her forehead to give her face its distinctive heart shape. Her eyes are sharp and her expression thoughtful: Veronica was clearly both attractive and intelligent. She was well versed in the classics, wrote fine letters and poetry in the style of Dante and became part of an intellectual salon run by the poet Domenico Venier, who acted as her literary adviser and critic. She played the harpsichord, and entertained clients and friends with fine concerts of madrigals, with word games and story-telling. She had several children, and was left interesting legacies by men of the wealthiest and grandest Venetian families. One bequeathed to her a feather bed and his annual income of four blocks of caviare and four sausages.

  But it was in 1574 that Veronica’s reputation as the most famous and gifted courtesan in Venice was sealed. On 18 July of that year, the 22-year-old Henri de Valois arrived m Venice on his way to be crowned King Henry III of France, after the death of his brother Charles IX. Always keen to throw their weight about in the company of monarchs, the Venetians put on a pageant of such grotesquely whole-hog extravagance and plutocratic vulgarity that no witness could doubt the city’s legendary powers of raw wealth. Triumphal arches were designed by Palladio and decorated by Tintoretto and Veronese. Henry was carried to the city on a boat rowed by four hundred Slav oarsmen with an escort of fourteen galleys. The Ca’ Foscari on the Grand Canal had been turned into a treasure palace for the king, full of rare marble and cloth of gold and hung with paintings by Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto and Veronese. For the principal banquet in the Doge’s palace, two hundred of the most beautiful women of Venice appeared in dazzling white, their throats adorned with enormous pearls. The three thousand guests picked heroically at the twelve hundred dishes on the bill of fare and the feast was rounded off with three hundred different kinds of bonbon. When the king at last staggered out into the night, he found that a galley, shown to him earlier in the evening in its component parts, had been assembled outside. It was launched into the lagoon with a blast from a huge cannon which had been cast while he dined.