No abstract

Early modern physicians, theorists, and artists shared a knowledge of the human body that merged aesthetics with empirical knowledge about the realities of the physical constitution. For instance, books of secrets, such as Giovanni Marinello’s ‘Women’s Embellishments’ (Gli ornamenti delle donne, 1562), discussed at great length ‘infirmities’ of the skin, including stains, odours and bodily fluids that unsettled normative beauty standards. This essay considers examples of such ambivalent discourses in medical writings (Mercurialis) and books of secrets (Marinello, Della Porta) written in humanistic settings with regard to treatments of the body such as cosmetics practices in the context of Early Modern dietetics.

Alongside Richard Haydocke's translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's treatise on painting (1598), the article examines concepts of color concerning cosmetics, painting and complexion as they relate to aesthetics, artistic and medical practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with white and red as ideal colors of beauty in Agnolo Firenzuola's Discourse on the beauty of women (1541), the essay places color in relation to major issues in art, medicine and empiricism by discussing beauty as a quality of humoral theory and its colors as visual results of physiological processes. Challenging the relation of art and nature, gender and production, Lomazzo's account of complexion and Haydocke's additions on cosmetic practices and face-painting provide key passages that shed light on the relation of cosmetics colors, art writing and artistic practices at the convergence of the body, art and medicine in the context of the emerging English virtuosi around 1600.

No abstract

No abstract