It is equally intriguing that in the same breath in which Giuliano mentions body size, he muses on skin color, suggesting that women who were “fair or dark” might too improve upon their shortcomings through dress. This nod to those of different skin tones may have contained a subtle reference to Africans. Although slavery was not a booming enterprise in Urbino at the time, Africans were not an unknown presence. Giuliano’s own blood relation, Alessandro de Medici, the later Duke of Florence, was also known as il moro—the moor—since his mother was black.33
Figure 1.8. Alessandro de Medici, Duke of Florence, 1535 or later. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier is regarded as a seminal text. An etiquette book of sorts, the work reveals the new rules of conduct at the very moment they were being restated and refined by the Italian upper class. Castiglione’s characters even assume an uncomfortable coyness when it comes to plain speaking about les regoles di bellezza, or the rules of beauty. They tread lightly on topics that the lowly commoner might otherwise pursue with abandon.
Scarcely a whiff of this high-minded affectation is found in Agnolo Firenzuola’s 1541 retort to Castiglione’s work, tellingly titled On the Beauty of Women. Firenzuola was born in Florence in 1493. He traveled to Siena, where he studied law, before heading off to Rome to take holy orders in 1518. In Rome he took vows as a Vallambrosian monk before realizing that the life of the monastic and its attendant celibacy did not really suit him. In 1526, according to contemporary accounts, he was “dispensed from his vows.”34
Firenzuola stayed in Rome, where he entered the shimmering circle of literati that included the distinguished Pietro Bembo. A Catholic cardinal, aristocrat, and student of the works of Plato and Petrarch, Bembo, then in his fifties, had lived in Urbino and was well acquainted with the ruling Medici clan. Along with being known for his own neoclassical poetry, Bembo had famously appeared as an interlocutor in The Book of the Courtier, sparring with Giuliano de Medici on the definition of true beauty.
Inspired by present company, Firenzuola decided to compose his own discourse on beauty. His treatise, like The Book of the Courtier, was written in dialogue form. Firenzuola, however, switched the sexual composition of his group, having four women converse with one man about what precisely constitutes perfect female beauty. In a Christian/neoclassical view that invoked Raphael, he claimed that no one woman had been endowed with all the necessary elements of beauty, but rather that nature had dispersed the good bits here and there. Thus, to animate his vision of perfect female beauty, Firenzuola crafted a montage of body parts taken from the four female conversants in his treatise.35
The first element of true beauty was, of course, proportionality. Clearly inspired by the Neoplatonists such as Bembo, with whom he dined, Celso, the lone male character among his conversants, describes this proportion as “mysterious” and claims that it is “a measure that is not in our books, which we do not know, nor can even imagine.”36 This limitation did not prevent him from trying. For while beauty’s specifications and precise measurements could not be detailed, their intellectual forebears had left them with a vision of feminine perfection: “The Ancients consecrated them to the beautiful Venus.”37 In which case, an important part of Firenzuola’s project is enabling his male mouthpiece, Celso, to sift through the many women he knows, including those present in the dialogues, to identify who has features that approach the exquisite proportions of Venus.
In a nod to both the ancients and Castiglione, Firenzuola writes of his well-proportioned Venus as being medium-sized, but still shapely. Firenzuola conveys this through Celso, who states that the ideal woman is “somewhere between lean and fat, plump and juicy, of the right proportions.”38 That this woman should still remain “plump and juicy” is telling. Evoking others in the Renaissance pantheon, Firenzuola reminds us that even as proportionality is sought, so too is fleshiness. In fact, if one is to drift to one side of the scale, it should be in the direction of voluptuousness, not slimness. Quoting Aristotle, Celso claims, “If the good habits of the body are evident in the firmness and thickness of the flesh, the bad habits must then be evident in its flabbiness and thinness.”39 In other words, “thickness” was a sign of good health, whereas thinness was a signal of poor health and hygiene. In a point-by-point analysis of the figure, Celso informs the women that cleavage should be “plump, so that no sign of bones can be seen,” the hips should be “wide” and “pronounced,” and the arms should be “fleshy and muscular, but with a certain softness.”40
Though thickness had been deemed superior to thinness, the question nevertheless remained: Was it possible that a woman could be considered too fat to be beautiful? When asked this, Celso equivocated momentarily, before responding that even “quite fat” women could achieve the heights of beauty:
CELSO: One likes a robust body, with nimble, capable limbs, well placed and well proportioned. But, I would not want my ideal beauty to be too big or very fat.
SELVAGGIA: Yet, even though Iblea Soporella is quite fat, she is still a very beautiful young lady who carries herself well.…
CELSO: … This young lady has such a majesty in her body, a beauty in her eyes … it seems her fatness has granted her a beauty, that agility.… I judge her to be one of the most beautiful women in these parts of town.41
On the Beauty of Women illustrates the value placed on fleshy feminine forms in Rome, an artistic and intellectual hub of the Renaissance. Its professed preference for plump and proportionate figures echoed the sentiments expressed in The Book of the Courtier. Yet, unlike Castiglione’s masterwork, On the Beauty of Women included a declared preference for fat over thin women. This declaration simultaneously harkened back to Dürer and presaged the growing praise for voluptuous figures that was to come in the world of art and feminine aesthetics.
Though Firenzuola himself mingled with many of the important figures of his time, he never attained the recognition for his work that Castiglione or Raphael had. Still, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have returned to his work for its insights into sixteenth-century aesthetics.42
Firenzuola shared much with the literati of Rome. While there, he contracted syphilis, the same illness many contemporary scholars believed felled Raphael. His contraction of syphilis had the seeming effect of restoring his devotion to God. He returned to the monastery in 1538, becoming an abbot at the San Salvatore monastery in Prato, where he remained until his death in 1543.
Firenzuola did not make any mention of dark-skinned women in his book. In contrast to the Low Countries (where Dürer had encountered Katharina), African slaves were a minimal presence in Rome and many other major Italian centers. This was not the case, however, in Venice. Dark-skinned captives had been brought to the region since the Crusades.43 The slave-trading enterprise in this way expanded, rather than introduced, the population of forced black laborers in the region.
By 1490, when the trade in captured Africans became a bona fide industry, there was already a visible population of Africans in Italy. Venice, a vital center of the Italian Renaissance, was also a key trading destination. By the late fifteenth century, ships bearing African captives were a common sight in this seaport. And whereas many earlier waves of Africans arriving in the region were largely male, by 1490 a sizeable number of black women could be seen among the newly imported vassals.44
The introduction of a significant population of black women and girls in the city made them in many respects a hot commodity. Their presence signaled both the exotic lands beyond the sea and the European conquest of said lands. For these reasons, black women and girls retained as maidservants became a fashionable accessory for aristocratic Italian women.45 This much was evident in a letter composed by Isabella d’Este in 1491. Isabella, the new Marquise of Mantua, was a respected cultural and political figure. She was also a patron of the arts and a lady of fashion. In her letter, written in May of that year, she badgered her agent in Venice to acquire “una moreta,” a young black girl to serve as her maidservant, emphasizing that the girl should be “as black as possible.”46 A month later, Isabella wrote to her sister-in-law Anna Sforza, revealing that this was to be her second black maidservant. Of her original,