Venus, the goddess of love. His first Venus, La Primavera, painted around 1482, shows the goddess standing in a mythically dark forest, surrounded by enticing globes of fruit. She is flanked by gods and nymphs, dancing joyously and reveling in the love inspired by nature’s beauty and bounty. Botticelli’s next Venus was his most iconic painting. The Birth of Venus depicts the goddess naked atop a shell that is gliding into shore. Zephyrs from the left blow her golden hair as she gathers it in her right hand and uses it to conceal her pelvic area. With her left hand she half-heartedly attempts to cover her breasts, coyly leaving one available for the viewer’s gaze. From the right, her handmaiden approaches to provide her with the garments that would be needed to clothe the demure goddess in such a realm.
Botticelli, who was Lorenzo de Medici’s friend and confidant, was a member of the Florentine Academy. He was thus inspired by the poetic works and philosophical tête-à-têtes to which he was privy. The Birth of Venus is often regarded as the earliest Renaissance painting to reimagine a style known as “Venus Pudica,” in which the modest Venus reaches to cover her pubis and often her breasts.31
Figure 1.7. Raphael, La Fornarina, 1518–1520. Image courtesy of Art Resource, New York.
Botticelli would not have been the only artist inspired by the Medicis to paint the goddess of love. Raphael knew the Medicis well, having been commissioned more than once to paint portraits of members of the family. He might not have mentioned a neoclassical influence for his portraits of beautiful women in his letters to Castiglione, a but he painted several Venuses in his lifetime. One of the most mystifying and controversial was a portrait of a nude woman, her hands modestly covering her private parts—said to be his mistress and muse, Margherita Luti.32
The character Giuliano de Medici mentions none of this in his exegesis on beauty in The Book of the Courtier. His family history and their eminence in molding Renaissance aesthetic ideals were left unstated. His contemporaries, however, would have been well aware of the family’s influence on feminine aesthetic standards. This may have been why Castiglione chose to make Giuliano his mouthpiece on the question of feminine loveliness.
Giuliano’s stated preference for women who were both “medium” and “proportionate” was representative of the Italian canon of perspective, as it was embodied by Venus. It is relevant, of course, that this preference was not so rigidly codified that women who were stout or spindly might not be able to make themselves attractive, according to Giuliano, through fashion. If “medium” women were preferred, fat and thin women were not summarily dismissed.
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
