The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How to paint the perfect wife
Did Renaissance marriage portraits celebrate women – or commodify them?
Hairy, bold women were to be avoided at all costs, one popular handbook advised
Marriage doesn’t seem to have made Joan Thornbury very happy, judging by her 1566 portrait by Hans Eworth – a Flemish artist known for his paintings of gentry and nobility in Tudor England. This month, Thornbury will be reunited with her husband Richard Wakeman (Eworth’s portraits of the couple were originally intended to be hung together) in Painted Love: Renaissance Marriage Portraits at the Holburne Museum in Bath.
The exhibition will document how marriage provided a pretext for all sorts of glamorous purchases in the Renaissance – as it does today – from paintings and jewellery to commemorative tableware. In doing so, it charts how marital mores changed across the period. At the dawn of the Renaissance, brides were often shown off in all their finery. As a good Christian marriage increasingly became a moral imperative in the era of Protestant reform and Catholic counter-reform, the attention switched to matrimony itself. Couples like the Wakemans were presented as upholders of a godly society with the family at its core. Romantic love often had little to do with it.
Swathed in tight black velvet with a heavy knotted chain around her neck (sadly symbolic of her never-to-be-sundered wedded state), Thornbury’s set, pallid face looks rather glum. And no wonder. The memento mori inscriptions set into the top right of each painting seem to be reprimanding her. The phrase above her swaggering husband who glares out of his picture (one hand on hip, the other on a suggestive sword) asks: “Why do you show off your changing face?”
She admits: “My childhood past that beautified my flesh, and gone my youth that gave me colour fresh, I am now come to those ripe years at last [...] I once was young and now am as you see.” She was just 36.
This portrait is emblematic of the essential inequality at the heart of Renaissance marriage. Men – and wealthy men at that – were responsible for the vast majority of the surviving documents available now to historians, commissioned and created the vast majority of artworks, and largely controlled how both men and women were represented. Thornton’s words were likely put in her mouth by her husband to show how well his wife was kept under the patriarchal thumb. Late 16thcentury England saw a moral campaign against female beautification – vanity wasn’t appropriate for an obedient wife like Joan Thornbury.
Yet over in beauty-obsessed late 15th-century Italy, young women would go to great lengths to be assessed as “beautiful” as they were launched on to the marriage market. If you think the heavily filtered photos on Tinder are superficial, you should be grateful you weren’t an adolescent girl in Renaissance Florence. Girls’ looks were minutely inspected from the age of 14 to check if they’d make for a good marriage, or be condemned to a convent.
In 1465, the formidable matriarch of the prominent Strozzi family, Alessandra, was looking for a match for her sons, Filippo and Lorenzo (37 and 33 respectively). She sent a family friend around Florence to look at potential brides – all of whom were a good two decades younger than the grooms. The girls’ parents offered them up for display, eagerly showing off their daughters in their underdresses. Strozzi also managed to catch a glimpse of one prospect at church – “she seemed to me to have a beautiful figure and to be well put together,” the mother reported. On the minus side, her skin wasn’t sufficiently pale, she had “a long face and her features aren’t very delicate, but,” Strozzi added reassuringly, “they’re not like a peasant’s”.
Portraits made at the time – such as the spectacular painting of a young bride by the Florentine artist, Alesso Baldovinetti, on loan to the Holburne from the National Gallery – display these young women as objects to scrutinise. Baldovinetti’s anonymous beauty sits in profile, her golden hair and yellow dress singing out against the rich blue background. She wears the wealth of her husband’s lineage in the pearls that adorn her neck and hair, and embroidered sleeves, which display her new family’s coat of arms. At marriage, an upper-class girl like her – typically between 15 and 18 years old – would leave her family and be paraded through the streets to her new husband’s home, often to share her life with a man she barely knew.
Baldovinetti’s Lady in Yellow would have been a good catch, with her fashionably high forehead (achieved by plucking the hair), blonde locks, dark eyes, and clear skin. Physiognomy was all the rage, with physical appearance widely believed to offer great insight into inner character. Popular handbooks promised to guide eager male readers through the minefield of marriage by teaching them the qualities they should look for in a bride.
Women were “created by God as cold and moist, which temperaments are apt for fertility and birth, but contrary to wisdom”, claimed the Spanish physician, Juan Huarte in his bestselling advice book, The Examination of Men’s Wits (1575). They should be “silent and learn and be obedient to their husbands”. The ghastly Huarte explained that, in order to ensure a fertile and passive bride, women could be divided into three “grades” – the best ones to marry were “grade two”. These women were soft, gentle and laughed easily. They had golden hair, peaches-and-cream skin and a soothing voice. Their body hair was barely visible. Meanwhile, “grade three” women were fat, “foolish and ditzy”; and “grade one” women were to be avoided at all costs – dark-skinned, deepvoiced, hairy, likely infertile, and, Huarte warned, “not afraid to look men in the eye”.
It will come as little surprise that Italian art of the period is overpopulated by “grade two” beauties, with blonde hair and rosy cheeks – like the woman featured on the Ierolima Bella bowl shown at the Holburne. Vessels like this were in high demand in the early 16th century, and gave less wealthy grooms a way to celebrate their bride’s loveliness. Such objects were often decorated with idealised female faces and names were added afterwards, depending on the wishes of the client. The individuality of the sitter was much less important than their ability to meet Renaissance beauty ideals. These portraits both showed women what they should be aspiring towards, and acted as a road map for male desire.
To the consternation of many men, however, women of the era often sought to game the marriage market by experimenting with cosmetics to lighten hair, brighten the complexion, whiten teeth and create rosebud lips. Their aim was to make themselves appear naturally beautiful, without men realising that they’d had help.
Among the recipes for hair dye, scabies ointment and anti-wrinkle cream in Giovanni Marinello’s much-emulated publication The Ornaments of Women (1562), are nuggets of wisdom for wives. “All my work aims to please you, and to make sure you are loved and caressed by your husbands,” he explained “who, because of some bodily defect of yours, will not keep their promises of faithfulness, and will go behind your back to some other woman.” Some men in turn plotted ways to see their potential spouses without make-up – like surprising them early in the morning. It would be mad, claimed the 16th-century cleric Juan Luis Vives, to buy horses or slaves covered with ornaments, so why did men do so with wives?
In another portrait from the show, William Brooke (Lord Cobham) and his wife Frances Newton show off their six healthy children; a brood large enough to strike terror into even the most efficient of mothers. This genre of marriage portrait celebrated the fecundity of the couple and acted as a permanent example for their descendants. Yet some women of the period rankled under such pressure – whether impossible beauty standards, demonstrations of fertility or displays of marital perfection.
The plot of Giulia Bigolina’s 1550 romance, Urania, centres on a man who stupidly rejected the eponymous heroine in favour of a better- looking rival. After many adventures the virtuous but notparticularly-pretty Urania returns triumphant to claim her man, who had been spurned by his emptyheaded love interest. Urania’s victory was proof that love should not focus on the “corruptible and fleeting” beauty of the body, but instead be aimed at the “incorruptible and immortal” soul.
In real life, some women made light of their own lack of beauty. The poet and ruler of the small Italian county of Correggio, Veronica Gambara sought to make the best of the looks she had – buying expensive clothing, jewellery and cosmetics – but she was also able to joke about her appearance. In 1535 she sent her friend Agostino Ercolani a dog, which she admitted seemed at first sight to be very ugly, but who she thought would win him around: “Like often happens to many men, who, seeing an ugly woman or a really ugly man, dislike them at first sight, but then chatting a little, find under that ugly shell a most beautiful soul, and a thousand excellent parts within” – presumably a knowing reference to her own looks.
The wittiest observer of gender roles in this era, though, has to be Moderata Fonte, a Venetian writer who died in childbirth in 1592 at the age of 37. Her feminist treatise, The Worth of Women, gives an unprecedented insight into how Renaissance women felt – forever looked at, denigrated and criticised. In a series of fictional conversations between female friends, Fonte’s interlocutors question why women get married at all: “They lose their property, lose themselves, and get nothing in return, except children to trouble them and the rule of a man, who orders them about at his will.”
Once you have read Fonte, it’s hard not to look at the brides and wives in Renaissance portraits, and to wonder what women like the miserable Joan Thornbury or Baldovinetti’s Lady in Yellow were really thinking. Perhaps when perusing these pictures, we should keep Fonte’s words in mind: “It would be much better for most women,” one of her characters concludes, “if instead of taking a husband, they just bought a nice pig.”
Painted Love is at the Holburne Museum, Bath (holburne.org) from Friday; Jill Burke’s How to Be a Renaissance Woman (Wellcome, £25) is out on August 3