How to Be a Renaissance Woman
The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
An alternative history of the Renaissance—as seen through the emerging literature of beauty tips—focusing on the actresses, authors, and courtesans who rebelled against the misogyny of their era.
Beauty, make-up, art, power: How to Be a Renaissance Woman presents an alternative history of this fascinating period as told by the women behind the paintings, providing a window into their often overlooked or silenced lives.
Can the pressures women feel to look good be traced back to the sixteenth century?
As the Renaissance visual world became populated by female nudes from the likes of Michelangelo and Titian, a vibrant literary scene of beauty tips emerged, fueling debates about cosmetics and adornment. Telling the stories of courtesans, artists, actresses, and writers rebelling against the strictures of their time, when burgeoning colonialism gave rise to increasingly sinister evaluations of bodies and skin color, this book puts beauty culture into the frame.
How to Be a Renaissance Woman will take readers from bustling Italian market squares, the places where the poorest women and immigrant communities influenced cosmetic products and practices, to the highest echelons of Renaissance society, where beauty could be a powerful weapon in securing strategic marriages and family alliances. It will investigate how skin-whitening practices shifted in step with the emerging sub-Saharan African slave trade, how fads for fattening and thinning diets came and went, and how hairstyles and fashion could be a tool for dissent and rebellion—then as now.
This surprising and illuminating narrative will make you question your ideas about your own body, and ask: Why are women often so critical of their appearance? What do we stand to lose, but also to gain, from beauty culture? What is the relationship between looks and power?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art historian Burke (Changing Patrons) takes an eye-opening look at the lives of women during the Italian Renaissance. Arguing that the era experienced the first modern wave of unrealistic beauty standards for women, Burke tracks how an upswell of personal beautification methods was tied to developments in art, especially painting and sculpture's newly popular classical form (an hourglass shape, distinct from the large-bellied Gothic ideal of the preceding era) and new negative aesthetic connotations for dark hair and skin color and positive ones for whiteness that emerged alongside the sub-Saharan slave trade. However, as Burke makes clear, personal beautification methods could also be used by women as a way to increase their influence, maintain their security, or rebel against conventions. Providing vivid descriptions of the practice and origins of beauty methods, such as body hair removal (popular in Islamic-influenced cultures of southern Europe but also a centerpiece of witch trials, where hair was removed from defendants), and in-depth analyses of the beauty guides and diet books that proliferated in this era, Burke convincingly builds her case that "the celebrated poems, plays, and paintings of the time had profound effects on how real people perceived bodies and beauty" but were also in dialogue with women's attempts to push back against and manipulate beauty standards. It's a novel and immersive history.