Clear Skies and High Foreheads in Renaissance Italy
For me, Agnolo Firenzuola’s Dialogo della Bellezza delle Donne (1548) is often the first point of call when looking to pinpoint or evidence feminine beauty ideals for specific body parts in sixteenth-century Italy. Firenzuola’s text recounts an imagined conversation between Celso and four Pratese women, which is not only impressively detailed in describing individual features of women; the poetic tone of such descriptions reminds us of the poetic and Petrarchan roots of such beauty ideals. Firenzuola’s gentlemanly Celso, therefore, does not disappoint in his outline of an ideal forehead:
Figure 1: detail of Leonardo da Vinci, The Proportions of the head, and a standing nude, c.1490, in the Royal Collection Trust.
The annotation reads: It is as far from a to b, that is, from the start of the hair at the front to the line of the top of the head, as it is from c to d, that is, from the lower end of the nose to the junction of the lips at the front of the mouth. It is as far from the tearduct of the eye m to the top of the head a, as it is from m to below the chin s. s c f b are equal to one another as to distance.
‘The forehead must be broad, that is, wide, high, fair, and serene. Many people prefer the height, which is measured from the hairline to the edge of the eyebrows and the nose, to be a third of the face; the second third is down to the upper lip, and the last third all the rest including the entire chin….’[1]
Influenced by Polykleitos’ Canon, a detailed mathematical interest in the division and proportion of bodily and facial features is frequently found in Renaissance literature. The division of the face is visualised in drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, and Albrecht Durer’s manuscripts, published posthumously in Four Books on Human Proportion (1528). Leonardo’s drawing [Fig.1] is annotated with an algebraic formula that almost reads like a riddle, though his diagram also demarcates the forehead (brow-hairline) as one of three equal sections of the face.
Similarly, Cennino Cennini’s instructional artistic manual divides the face into the same three sections of the face - the forehead, the nose down to the top lip, and the lips and chin - in both his chapter on depicting the flesh of young figures’ faces, and his chapter on the proportion of the human body.[2] As a woman’s face was considered the seat of her beauty, and the forehead was understood to constitute a third of the face, it is understandable why early modern women were concerned with enhancing the forehead and conforming to contemporary ideals - it was an important site for female beauty. Certainly, the forehead was not exempt from medieval and Renaissance poets’ descriptions of women’s beauty, as outlined by Firenzuola:
‘Our poets call such a forehead serene, and rightly so, because, just as the clear sky that has no trace of cloud or any manner of spot is called serene, so the forehead that is clear, open, without furrows or spots, without powders, quiet, and tranquil, can rightfully be called serene’[3]
Firenzuola may have been thinking of Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere, in which the medieval poet expresses his idealised love, and extols the idealised beauty, of Laura. Petrarch describes Laura’s forehead as more serene than the sky. Such description is echoed in Giovanni Marinello’s section on the forehead, which outlines the ideal forehead as ‘so serene, that it matches the sky,’ and even quotes the aforementioned excerpt of ll Canzoniere describing Laura’s forehead, followed by a similar quotation of Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Canto Settimo, XI), who describes a beauty’s forehead as ‘smooth ivory’. Certainly, as well as providing his readers with imagery of beautiful foreheads to which they could aspire, Marinello also reinforces the prevalence and impact of poets’ - medieval and contemporary - descriptions of ideal beauty in Renaissance literature.
Florentine School, Profile portrait of a lady, c.1465-1475, in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Artworks, too, worked to reinforce beauty ideals expounded by poets, and many depictions of Renaissance women exhibit the ideal forehead as outlined by Firenzuola. Portraits in profile are particularly effective at drawing attention to or accentuating a sitter’s high forehead. A Florentine School artist’s late fifteenth-century Profile portrait of a lady [Fig.2] offers a fitting example. The sitter’s forehead closely aligns with the characteristics Marinello attributes to a beautiful forehead which, he argues, should be fair, shiny like a mirror, clear, broad and high. Blemish free, with fair skin accentuated by her dark eyebrows, this sitter’s forehead is undeniably, unnaturally, broad and high. Though her hairstyle causes some ambiguity as to the size of her head, almost half of the top - certainly, the entire frontal region - is without any hair.
This unnaturally high hairline strongly suggests this sitter had removed the front line of her hair. Receding the hairline to increase the perceived height of one’s forehead was a common solution, found throughout empirical texts with health and beauty practices, for meeting the height and breadth prescribed for an ideal, beautiful forehead. Although the forehead could be - and was - simply plucked, there is also an impressive number of recipes for forehead hair removal in sixteenth-century Italian ricettari, especially when including those depilatory recipes which do not specify the forehead as a site for use. Many do specifically target the forehead, though, and several are advertised for their longevity; the objective is to not simply remove existing hairs, but prevent further growth - a perpetually clear and cloudless sky.
De’ Secreti del Alessio Piemontese recounts a recipe apparently used by Moorish women, so their daughters do not grow underarm hair (or hair in any other place you don’t want them - read into that what you will). Readers are instructed to take a plate of fine gold, or a ducat or ring, and heat it in a fire until it is burning and red-hot, and then place it on the place where hair is undesired, followed by rose or violet oil.[4] This should be repeated in twenty-four hours time. Although described as a remedy for underarm hair, Piemontese also explains that many gentlewomen also use it to remove hair from the forehead, which they have found to be effective and keep it as a great secret. I would like to emphasise that Piemontese’s source for this approach to forehead hair removal, gentlewomen, would have been of some means, and that this method was surely not a possibility for all women - not everyone would have a ducat or gold ring to spare, after all!
Crucially, it is not only male authors who advertise these methods for forehead enlargement. Caterina Sforza’s Gli Experimenti includes a recipe to make hairs on the forehead go away which, the recipe title states, is ‘very ugly’ (bruttissimo).[5] She concludes the recipe, which incorporates egg whites, mastic, lead, and bat blood, by claiming that the hair will fall from the forehead, and leave the forehead beautiful, broad, and without marks.
Another option, proffered by Marinello, is not enticing in the least, though it was supplied to Marinello ‘by the doctor of a great woman’.[6] Readers must buy beef, and allow it to spoil, and become infested with vermin. Said vermin are to be removed, and left to soak in verjus (juice of unripe grapes). They are then to be dried in the sun, then soaked in the verjus once more, and dried again. Once dry, they should be powdered, and this powder applied to the forehead. Marinello explains that users will only need to undertake this method once, because it is so effective. Considering the ingredients, though, it is hard to imagine women rushing out to buy some beef in their quest for a beautiful forehead, at least from a twenty-first century perspective.
[1] Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, trans. Konrad Eisenbichler, Jacqueline Murray (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 49.
[2] Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman's Handbook, trans. Daniel V. Thompson Jr (New York: Dover Publications, 2012), 120, 126.
[3] Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women, 51.
[4] Girolamo Ruscelli? De' Secreti del R.D. Alessio Piemontese (Venice: Lucio Spineda, 1603), 94r-94v.
[5] Caterina Sforza, ‘Gli Experimenti,’ in Caterina Sforza, ed. Pier Desiderio Pasolini (Rome: Ermanno Loescher E C, 1893), 653.
[6] Giovanni Marinello, Gli Ornamenti delle Donne (Venice: Francesco de Franceshi, 1562), 48r.