According to some historians, the king, who liked to wander around cities incognito, was never quite the same again. But he did take the opportunity between festivities to pay a visit to Veronica Franco, whom he had heard about from one of her admirers. The visit was supposed to be secret, but naturally all of Venice heard about it. We are told that they talked about Veronica’s literary work. She later composed two sonnets and a dedicatory letter to the King. No thanks, she wrote, ‘could possibly, even in part, requite the infinite kindness of your benign and gracious offers made to me about the book, which I am about to dedicate to you’. Henri’s visit is unlikely to have been entirely for their mutual literary edification. He would probably have been aware of her reputation beyond poetry, and indeed Veronica had no shame in advertising her own abilities and comparing herself to the prototypical blonde, the goddess of love, Venus. She wrote in one of her love poems:51
So sweet and appetising do I become when I find myself in bed with he who loves and welcomes me, that our pleasure surpasses all delight . . . Phoebus [Apollo] who served the goddess of love, received from her recompense so sweet that it meant more to him than to be a god, his bliss, to make my meaning clear, were those pleasures that Venus afforded him when she held him in her soft embrace: I too am versed in those same arts, and am so practised in the pleasures of the bed, that there I surpass by far Apollo’s mastery of the arts.52
Veronica died in 1591, aged forty-five, after a month of fever. Her last years had been financially difficult, and towards the end of her life her reputation began to wane. A scurrilous friend of the poet Aretino remarked that her breasts hung so low she could paddle a gondola with them, but still paid homage to how well she could sing.
Veronica remains one of Venice’s most famous and distinctive beauties in a society which idolised beauty as an expression of sanctity. She was well-known in Venice and was probably painted by many of the city’s leading artists. Two portraits attributed to the school of Tintoretto, Portrait of a Lady (Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts) and Portrait of a Woman (Museo del Prado, Madrid), show beautiful young blondes with heart-shaped faces, dressed in sumptuous brocades, silks and velvets, each showing a bare breast. Some art historians believe that both portraits are of Veronica.
In an age when the codes of feminine beauty, based on the fabled glories of Venus, were so clearly laid down in the works of contemporary poets and painters, it is not surprising that leisured and wealthy ladies as well as courtesans desired to emulate the ideal. Blonde hair was the most effective key to beauty and in some ways it was the easiest element in the package to fake. Observant men were intrigued by the concerted efforts made by Venetian ladies to bleach their hair. Cesare Vecellio, a cousin of Titian’s, described the elaborate arrangements in 1589:
The houses of Venice are commonly crowned with little constructions in wood, resembling a turret without a roof . . . During the hours when the sun darts its most vertical and scorching rays they repair to these boxes and condemn themselves to broil in them unattended. Seated there they keep on wetting their hair with a sponge dipped in some elixir of youth, prepared with their own hands or purchased. They moisten their hair afresh as fast as it is dried by the sun and it is by the unceasing renewal of this operation that they become what you see them – blondes.53
Coryate, who was delighted to be granted ‘a favour not affoorded to every stranger’, watched the Venetian wife of an Englishman engaged in just this mucky business, noting that ‘All the women of Venice every Saturday in the afternoone doe use to annoint their haire with oyle, or some other drugs, to the end to make it looke faire, that is whitish. For that colour is most affected of the Venetian Dames and Lasses.’54
The case for the Italians as blonde fetishists ought not to be overstated, but it was certainly in northern Italy that the most active blonding took place. Fortunately a few of the many beauty manuals of Renaissance Italy survive, one of them being Giovanni Marinelli’s Gli ornament! delle donne (Ways for Women to Adorn Themselves) published in Venice in 1562. Volume II supplies various recipes for Venetian bleach, including one which recommends boiling up a kind of minestrone of vine ashes in pure water with sprinklings of barley shafts, twig bark, peeled and chopped licorice wood and a lime. ‘Make a concoction of these ingredients; pour it off. Wash your hair, let it dry, then apply this liquid. Your hair will be shiny strands of gold.’ Either that or you will be bald.
For hundreds of years sharp-witted Italian men flogged to a ravenous female public what they claimed were the ultimate secrets of blonde hair. Women were advised to comb olive oil and white wine through their hair, or ivy bark and hayseeds. Even horse urine was used. John Baptista della Porta’s 1669 Ninth Book of Natural Magick: How to Adorn Women and Make them Beautiful opens with a series of recipes for dyeing hair blonde. ‘Women hold the Hair to be the greatest ornament of the Body, that if that be taken away, all the Beauty is gone; and they think it the more beautiful, the more yellow, shining and radiant it is,’ it begins. Eight recipes follow for blonde hair dye.
Modern readers armed with tubes of sweet-smelling unguents from L’Oreal or Clairol may be sceptical as to the efficacy of these disgusting potions. But evidence suggests that they were effective. Armand Brachet, in a treatise published in 1865, Les Femmes blondes selon les peintres de Vecole de Venise, lists no fewer than thirty-six Renaissance recipes for preparing bleach, a solution known as aqua bionda. Konrad Bloch, a modern American chemist, has deduced that their ingredients would have combined to form potent bleaches, with hydrogen peroxide as the most likely active ingredient. Although hydrogen peroxide was not discovered until as late as 1812, ‘there is a certain rationale’, he says ‘to the Venetian recipes; they cannot be discredited as alchemy.’
Potent they clearly were, but also damaging. John Bulwer records in his book The Artificial Changeling (1650) the cases of several unfortunate Italian bleach addicts:
The Women of old time did most love yellow Haire . . . The Venetian Women at this day, and the Paduan, and those of Verona, and other parts of Italy practice the same vanitie, and receive the same recompence for their affectation, there being in all these Cities, open and manifest examples of those who have undergone a kinde of Martyrdome, to render their Haire yellow. Schenkius relates unto us the History of a certaine Noble Gentlewoman, about sixteen or seventeen yeares of age, that would expose her bare Head to the fervent heat of the Sun daily for some houres, that shee might purchase yellow and long Haire, by anointing them with a certain unguent; and although she obtained the effect of her desires, yet withall, shee procured to her selfe a violent Head ach, and bled almost every day abundantly through the Nose . . . Another maid also by using this same Art, became almost blind with sore Eyes.55
Clearly these ladies were not aware of – or preferred to ignore – the warnings of Giovanni Marinelli, who cautioned strongly against the use of hair dyes in his 1562 treatise upon the adornment of women. ‘Permit me to remind you honoured and honourable ladies that the application of so many colours to your hair may strike a chill into the head like the shock of a shower-bath, that it affects and penetrates, and what is worse, may entail divers grave maladies and infirmities . . . We frequently see the hair affected in its essentials, or at its roots grow weak and fall off and the complexion destroyed through the use of so many injurious liquids and decoctions.’56
This was fighting talk. But although many such warnings were issued, few chose to heed them when so much glory and power could be obtained from the universally accepted status of blondeness. Threats were still being hurled from the pulpit, too, but the ears of Italy’s blonded beauties were deaf to them. Blonde hair was highly divisive and provoked extreme reactions. To some it was the epitome of sensual beauty. To others it was the sign of evil vanity and folly. Both swooning worship and thunderous denunciation hinted at calamities in the offing. But for the moment blonde hair still ruled unchallenged.
7
Like a Virgin
It was
Queen Elizabeth I’s finest moment. On the morning of Sunday 24 November 1588, England’s triumphant monarch set off from Somerset House for St Paul’s Cathedral to attend the service of thanksgiving for England’s mighty victory over the Spanish Armada. This was England’s greatest victory since Agincourt, and the queen wished to acknowledge her debt to God and to Providence. She also wished to make a superlative statement, to fix in the minds of her people and of all Christendom her status as the greatest, most illustrious divine ruler, ‘Eliza Triumphant’.
The public mood was especially jubilant that day. Tens of thousands of people clamoured for a glimpse of the queen and her cavalcade, cheering and waving banners. Snaking lines of scarlet-suited aldermen lined the route with gentlemen of the city dressed in their brilliantly coloured liveries. In front of the queen stretched a huge procession of blazing magnificence. There were heralds and trumpeters, judges of the realm, ambassadors, knights, barons, viscounts and hundreds of honourable gentlemen and ladies on horseback, all making their way towards the great cathedral amid the jangling of harnesses and the thunderous roar of hoofs. The queen, bejewelled and poised, the very image of a goddess, joined the cavalcade in an open carriage drawn by two white horses. Behind her head was a canopy laden with motifs: a crown, a lion, a dragon and the arms of England.
A procession of this scale and splendour had not been seen since the queen’s coronation in 1558, and it was designed to match the magnitude of the event it celebrated. Pageants and ballads were performed in the queen’s honour as she passed. Gifts of jewels and precious books were given and speeches made as the victorious queen made her way slowly down the paved Strand and then up muddy Ludgate Hill. She was dressed in one of her most dazzling embroidered robes, covered with a not of gold braid and myriads of little jewels which sparkled and caught the light as she moved graciously to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd. Eventually reaching the cathedral at midday, she alighted from her carriage at the West Door, fell to her knees and ‘made her hearty prayers unto God’ before the enormous crowds. She entered the cathedral, which was hung with captured banners, and listened to a sermon before reading a prayer of her own and addressing the congregation. When she asked her people to have gratitude for their great victory, they replied with a deafening roar, shouting their praise of the queen. After a grand celebratory banquet hosted by the Bishop of London at the nearby Bishop’s Palace, the queen’s hundreds of attendants were marshalled again on horseback and with Elizabeth again poised in her open carriage like some magnificent living treasure, they made their dazzling return procession, this time ‘with great light of torches’, back to Somerset House.
Queen Elizabeth must have permitted herself a private glow of satisfaction. Her reputation had never been greater. Even her enemies, Pope Sixtus V, Henry III and the Ottoman sultan sang her praises, lauding her valour, her spirit and her courage. At home she was a goddess, hypnotic and untouchable, the very incarnation of divine majesty. Naturally a sitting was arranged for a portrait to mark the occasion. Three versions of the spectacular Armada Portrait survive, all following the same pattern. The queen stands, brilliantly lit, before two windows, one showing the sending of the English ships into the advancing Spanish fleet, the other showing the Spanish ships being dashed to pieces off the rocky coasts of Scotland. One elegant hand rests on a globe and on a table sits a heavily jewelled crown. But even that fades into the background next to the queen herself. She wears a magnificent robe of black and white, encrusted with huge pearls and starry jewels, stiff with gold thread, tasselled and spangled with a riot of bows and ribbons and finished off with eight ropes of enormous pearls which hang down to her waist. Her face is a smooth, pale and lustrous mask: despite her fifty-five years, she has the flawless complexion of a twenty-year-old. The face is poised on a stiff froth of lace, a cartwheel ruff, its circle completed by a halo of barbered golden blonde curls studded with enormous pearls.
Attentive schoolgirls may remember being told that Queen Elizabeth I had auburn hair. If we look at her early portraits, thought to be the most realistic records of her appearance because they were painted before she was ever considered seriously as a successor to the throne, her hair is indeed pale auburn. But by the time of the Armada victoiy it was actually well on the way to turning grey. She was wearing a golden blonde wig.
The Armada Portrait marks the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s transformation into a blonde. After her thirty years on the throne, generally recognised as a reign of exceptional prudence and felicity, the English regarded their queen as some kind of saviour sent by God. The Armada victory provided the final impetus for the creation of a Queen Elizabeth cult. She assumed the status of an immortal, and her image, spread by the work of sympathetic painters, turned her from something approximating to a human being into a spectacular jewelled icon, a hypnotic creature set apart from reality. She was a golden ruler of a golden age, and her blonde hair was part of this divine unreality. In 1588, to mark Sir Thomas Heneage’s role in England’s Armada victory, the queen gave him a specially commissioned miniature of herself, painted by Nicholas Hilliard and mounted in a case of enamelled gold, set with diamonds and rubies. It showed her as a dazzling young blonde.
Official images of the monarch were probably circulated more widely and seen by more subjects during Elizabeth’s long reign than those of any previous ruler. Hundreds of paintings, miniatures, woodcuts and engravings were made during her life, some of them reproduced in vast numbers as frontispieces for Elizabethan editions of the Bible. In a country where the portrait was still a relative novelty to the majority of society, those images must have had an enormous impact as a political tool and focus of reverence.
For Elizabeth, blonde hair became an important element of her image and it fulfilled several functions. To start with it served as a cultural code which emphasised the queen’s uncorrupted and untouchable virginity. Elizabeth had witnessed the disastrous marriages of both her sister Queen Mary and later her cousin Mary Queen of Scots. Many historians believe that Elizabeth had never had any intention of bowing to the rule of a husband, that she had probably resolved at quite a young age to rule alone. For years she had jousted flirtatiously with favoured courtiers at home and played the inevitable marriage games with strings of suitors from Catholic Europe, playing them off against one another. But in spite of the best negotiating efforts of her foreign policy ministers she had decisively rejected them all. When after a long period of coquetry she eventually dismissed the unfortunately pockmarked French Duke of Anjou, a man almost half her age whom she playfully referred to as her Trog’, and he died in 1584, Elizabeth finally came off the marriage market. She was fifty-one years old and even the most optimistic of her supporters agreed that it was too late for her to produce an heir. Elizabeth had won. She was to remain a virgin queen; a bride, she reminded her subjects, wedded exclusively to her country. It was a typically brilliant piece of public relations and from then on the emphasis in Elizabeth’s portraits was placed increasingly on a symbolically youthful virginity indicated by an abundant use of pearls (a symbol of virginity) and her blonde hair, a sign of her pure, unsullied femininity.
Elizabeth knew how to make the most of her gender. In August 1588 she had visited her army at Tilbury on the eve of the anticipated Spanish invasion and must have cut a stunning figure on horseback among her thousands of troops. ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,’ she told them, ‘but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’. With characteristically assertive self-promotion, she played on the supposed weakness of her sex to highlight her own courage all the more forcefully. Within months she was to tweak that image of femininity one notch higher by becoming a blonde. Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queen, his long song of love for Queen Elizabeth, was to describe the aftermath of a battle scene in which Britomart, a valiant, chaste and queenly woman knight, removes her helmet to reveal long tumbling blonde hair ‘like sunny beams’, the proof of her gender and evidence
of a courage all the greater.
Elizabeth’s blonde hair played an important role, too, in her calculated styling as England’s fairest maiden, the ultimate object of courtly love. This chivalric ideal, a leftover from medieval times, regarded chaste devotion to an elevated, beautiful and traditionally blonde mistress as a spiritually elevating thing. It served as a useful vehicle for devotion to the queen and perfectly suited Elizabeth’s tastes and requirements. Elizabethan chivalry worked to inspire large numbers of fighting men in the Armada crisis. It also worked to encourage pleasing displays of loyalty and veneration on a day-to-day basis. The queen was a frequent and enthusiastic attendant at the royal Tilts, tournaments in which knights competed for her favour in jousting competitions. These were spectacular theatrical pageants, in which the knights appeared in inventive and often mythological costumes, and presented gifts to the queen as she sat with her ladies in the gallery overlooking a tiltyard sited on what is now Horse Guards Parade. The queen herself sometimes appeared m costume, too, dressed as Astraea, the virgin goddess of justice, as blonde Belphoebe, or in later years as Glonana, the golden-haired Faerie Queen of Edmund Spenser’s famous poem. Symbolically attired, she would acknowledge the homage of her gallant knights in this last flowering of medieval chivalry and then watch her champion defend her honour against all rivals.
On Blondes Page 9