Professor Jill Burke’s How to Be A Renaissance Woman: The Untold Story of Beauty and Female Creativity (Pegasus Books, 2024)is an extraordinary confluence of Renaissance culture, women’s history, and cosmetic history. Jill Burke tracks Renaissance beauty standards, cosmetic trends, and their cultural influences. Burke collects historical, literary, and artistic sources to create a fascinating exploration. This nonfiction is accessible yet incredibly detailed. Burke does not assume that her readers are scholars: she provides historical and geographic context for the general reader.
What was the Renaissance ideal of female beauty?
Perhaps it’s no surprise that our ideas about Renaissance beauty come from male-authored sources, which used physical beauty to determine a woman’s moral fitness and likelihood to bear children. In Chapter 3: Sprezatura and the Natural Look, Burke provides the beauty hierarchy of a 1575 Spanish source, which sorted women into three levels based on hair color, body size, and skin color. A woman’s clear complexion, well-formed limbs, and soft doe eyes supposedly indicated a docile, industrious nature. Pale white skin with rosy lips and cheeks was idealized, as well as blonde hair. However, Burke’s historical sources specify a golden shade, rather than pale or platinum blonde. Such beauties laughed easily and posed no intellectual threat to men.
Renaissance women were supposed to be naturally beautiful, and several of the male sources decried the efforts a woman might take to lighten her hair, remove her body hair, or whiten her skin. These authors worried that a woman was somehow withholding essential information by altering her appearance. The idea that makeup conceals necessary truths about a woman’s health has persisted down the centuries, even to our “clean girl aesthetic” today.
So, how do I rate myself against these 16th-century notions? I have the pale skin, rosy cheeks, and dark eyebrows. But my plentiful dark and curly hair may have indicated an intellectual, imaginative, and argumentative nature.
What makes this book special?
Burke covers more than just Renaissance beauty recipes. She invokes a wealth of sources to contradict cultural myths — citing the letters and writings of actual Renaissance women. Burke shows how the Renaissance invention of the full-length mirror affected women’s literal vision of themselves — as well as artistic depictions of women at their dressing tables. She allows many perspectives to converse in this book, including the misogynistic words of women who disparaged cosmetics and beauty treatments.
Burke recognizes the race and class implications of Renaissance beauty standards. She charts the progression of Renaissance beauty guides: from cheap pamphlets for peasant women to illustrious beauty manuals for noblewomen. She discusses the difficult situation of enslaved black women in the Renaissance, detailing challenging artistic depictions of dominance. And she attends to the driving force of the “marriage market” as an unflinching judge of women’s physical traits. Even aristocratic women faced intense pressure to conform with cultural and problematic beauty ideals — all while making the natural look seem effortless.
Want to learn more?
A Renaissance beauty routine:
A detailed podcast interview with Jill Burke:
Jill Burke’s lecture on Renaissance art:
Getting dressed in Renaissance Florence, Italy:
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