Jill Burke is the author of the book How to be a Renaissance Woman: the untold history of beauty & female creativity. This June, she’s teaming up with licensed guide and art historian Paola Vojnovic for a fascinating dive into the world of being female in Renaissance Florence. The workshops and tours take place June 26-28, 2026 and you can find details below. In advance of this collaboration, Paola has put me in touch with Jill to ask her a few burning questions I’ve had about Renaissance beauty practises. Maybe there’s some good advice there that I can put into practise. Or maybe not…
AMK / What or who dictated the concept of beauty in the Renaissance and how did trends get diffused?
JB / Beauty ideals were explained and confirmed all over the place in the Renaissance, both in written texts – poetry, plays, stories; in medical texts – especially ones dealing with physiognomy and, of course, the visual arts. If you picture one of Titian’s portraits of young women, you’ll get the idea of the kind of beauty ideals that were desired. Crucially the printing press spread ideas that were once ‘high culture’ to a much larger constituency. From the 1520s cheap printed pamphlets sold for a soldo, less than the price of a loaf of bread and instructed all sorts of women, rich and poor, how to achieve the Renaissance ‘look’. The Venustà pamphlet of 1526 was a perfect example: a scrappy thirty-page booklet hawked by street pedlars in the piazzas, its opening poem was probably sung aloud to drum up trade.
Who was the ideal woman in 15th-century Florence and what lengths did women go to look like her?
The ideal woman was essentially Laura from Petrarch’s sonnets made flesh: golden wavy hair, a high spacious forehead, white skin with a flush of red at the cheeks, small rosebud mouth, white hands, and a plump hour-glass figure, practically no body hair, small round breasts, generous stomach and thighs. These lists of qualities appear so frequently throughout Renaissance poetry, plays, card games and medical books that they functioned pretty much as a checklist. There was also what you might call Renaissance ‘influencers’ like Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua, who set fashions not just in clothing but also in hair styles and hair care.
Women did all sorts of things to meet these ideals. For example, they bleached their hair in the hot sun, sitting for hours on Venetian rooftop loggias called altane, wearing crownless straw hats so the brim would shade their faces while the sun worked on their hair. They ate butter and dairy, slept a lot and avoided sex to get fatter. They concocted skin-whitening creams from animal fats and egg white, plucked, waxed and tried to dissolve body and facial hair; they brushed their teeth with ashes or ground coral, reddened their cheeks and lips – even sometimes dying them. They also fought the aging process. People collected recipes for example for post-baby stretch marks, greying hair, saggy breasts, and followed recipes that promised to make you look ’20 or 25 years old’. Pretty much anything you can imagine being marketed as cosmetics, skincare or haircare nowadays had its Renaissance equivalent.
Giovanni Marinello was a Renaissance TikTokker — extend the metaphor
Giovanni Marinello’s “The Ornaments of Ladies” was published in Venice in 1562 and includes more than 1400 recipes for female beautification. Marinello was a social climber. He came from a small town near Modena, the son of another physician and then – I suppose like social media celebrities today – used what was then fairly new technology to enhance his career. The parallels are that he took specialised knowledge and made it accessible, reaching a much broader audience, and packaged his advice in a format that most people could understand. His 1,400-plus recipes covering every part of the body from crown to toe were arranged to flatter and correct the reader simultaneously, like a scrollable feed that shows you your faults and the fix in the same swipe. The other parallel is that giving people advice implies that there is something wrong with them in the first place! Much like today’s influencers, Marinello’s ‘helpful’ tips functioned as a self-dissatisfaction machine — describing the ideal in order to remind you how far you fall short of it. The algorithm of insecurity is older than we think…
What’s the most dangerous historic cosmetic advice you’ve encountered?
Without doubt, Aqua Tofana — a mixture of ground arsenic and lead, boiled together. In 1659, a poisoning network operating in Rome used the cover of cosmetics to distribute what was essentially a husband-killing service. Women who were trapped in violent, abusive marriages with no legal way out would buy a little vial of “liquid tooth polish” or “water to remove blemishes from the complexion” — and gradually poison their husbands to death. This was a period of plague, so no one really knows how many husbands were murdered. The woman at the centre of the network, Giovanna de Grandis, originally bought her arsenic by explaining she needed it to make aqua bella to beautify her complexion. The Mantuan ambassador estimated as many as five hundred men may have died before the network was uncovered. Five of the women were hanged in the Campo de’ Fiori.
What I think is important about this story is that Renaissance women have been mocked for centuries for using poisonous cosmetics, as if they were simply vain and foolish. But arsenic and lead were in standard use all around them, in medicine, in paint, in all sorts of artisanal processes. These women weren’t ignorant. Many of them knew exactly what these substances could do, and locked them away out of children’s reach. You can still see many of these small locked chests that would have housed cosmetics in museums today.
What’s the best and totally still valid historic cosmetic advice you have found — do you use it?
A lot of the advice is really harsh – Marinello says at one point that if you don’t remove body hair it would be your fault if your husband finds another woman, so I’d ignore a lot of that. However, some of the recipes are actually pretty good. The best one is for lip balm. So simple. It’s just rose oil (dried rose petals stepped in olive oil) and a little beeswax, melted together, poured into pots and left to cool. It smells great, it’s inexpensive, the method (essentially a bain-marie on the hob) is simple. You end up making loads, but it keeps for ages and you can give it to people as lip balm is always useful. It’s much better for the environment than those little plastic lip balm sticks. I never buy it now.
I originally made this with my friend, the herbalist Anna Canning. Sharing cosmetic secrets among women was, as I discovered writing this book, one of the great social currencies of the period. Marinello himself acknowledged that no amount of reading would be enough to teach these skills — “your friends will teach you, or some kindly older lady,” he says – it’s great to feel that I am in some way reviving this traditional knowledge through the workshops and classes I run.
Paola and Jill’s retreat in Florence: Florence through her eyes
From June 26-28, 2026, join Paola Vojnovic and Jill Burke for a curated journey into the world of Renaissance women. The programme includes visiting the Biblioteca nazionale to consult early printed books, visiting the Uffizi and a Renaissance garden, cooking with a brilliant female cookbook author (Emiko Davies) and – perhaps best of all? – a workshop to make some of your own Renaissance beauty products. Some meals and networking opportunities are included, while you can stay wherever you wish (including at your own home if you’re a local).
Find all the details at Paola’s website or download the PDF pamphlet here. If you choose to book, do let Paola know you saw it on my (Alexandra’s) website!
