Sandro Botticelli was a renowned Italian painter of the Renaissance who had a distinctive style of depicting hair in his portraits of women. He is best known for his iconic painting, The Birth of Venus, that shows the goddess arriving at the shore after her birth, when she had emerged from the sea fully-grown, ankle-length hair a glorious mass of waves and twirls.
Botticelli used intricate hairstyles, rich colors, and lavish ornaments to create a sense of beauty and eroticism. But how is Botticelli’s pictorial treatment of hair consistent with the ideas of his time? And how does it connect with theories already propounded by some of his predecessors like Avicenna, Galen and Leonardo Da Vinci?
On the second day of “Botticelli Week,” a three-day event, Stanford Professor Emanuele Lugli gave a talk at the Center for Italian Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook University during which he delved into all these questions.
Emanuele Lugli is the author of “Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence”, an interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and science of fifteenth-century Florence. Lugli ponders on what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos, contextualizing the issue through the various discourses of the time, including science, religion and custom.
Lugli started his talk with a summary of Leonardo’s theory on the human body’s production of hair. The unrivaled polymath believed that hair was a kind of excretion that emerged from the pores of the skin, similar to sweat or sebum. He wrote: “Hair is produced by the vapours which issue from the pores of the flesh, and these vapours are the superfluities of the nourishment which is distributed to all parts of the body” .
Galen proposed a similar theory: the production of hair “depends on warmth and humidity”. This then leads Lugli to speculation on the many connections that Renaissance scientific discourse proposed between sexual activity, the depletion of body fluids, and baldness.
Botticelli’s treatment of hair was also influenced by classical sources, such as Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, which praised the creative possibilities of hair as an ornament of female charm. Hair was also a marker of social status and marital status in Renaissance Florence.
Botticelli’s portraits of women, such as the Idealized Portrait of a Woman (allegedly Simonetta Vespucci), show them with bound-up hair, which was typical for married women, and decorated with pearls, which were forbidden by sumptuary laws.
Sandro Botticelli’s treatment of hair was thus a way of expressing his artistic vision but also challenging the conventions of his society.
Lugli noted that he was the first to “unveil” women and he discoursed on a comparison of Pollaiuolo’s portrait of a young woman whose hair was covered with a gossamer veil, as contrasted by a similar portrait by Botticelli where he has freed her hair from any covering—thus thrusting portraiture into a new practice.
In a later comparison, we examined a composite of four portraits of goddesses, all similar in representation except for their hairstyles– which then becomes the crucial distinguishing factor, implicitly illustrating Lugli’s thesis, that far from being a trivial subject, hair is instead one which is central to the understanding of Renaissance Florentine culture.
The talk ended with a Q&A period in which the takeaway that became clear is that beyond all the intellectualizing that scholars do about hair, the reality is that the response that we experience is a combination of visceral and rational—an outward manifestation of the internalized cultural beliefs and practices of our time.
