In this visually stunning and thought-provoking book, Evelyn Welch examines the multivalent meanings and understandings of skin in early modern Europe. Her approach is multidisciplinary, and she draws on a dazzling array of sources—visual, material, and textual. These sources include medical and anatomical works, books on carving meat, diaries and letters, the bejeweled earrings on lap dogs in the work of Italian painter Lavinia Fontana, the taxidermized horse of the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, and the English dolls Lord and Lady Clapham and their fashionable wardrobes. Renaissance Skin intervenes in a wide range of scholarly literature, including histories of art, fashion, food, science and medicine, material culture, and race.

Renaissance physicians inherited an understanding of skin from ancient and medieval writers. Aristotle had described the top layer of skin as “the condensation of internal bodily vapours as they cooled.” (12) Skin, in this view, was like the scum that forms on top of boiled milk or porridge as it cools, or, as the sixteenth-century Italian anatomist Alessandro Benedetti put it, “like the dried crust of polenta.” (12) These older ideas continued to inform early modern medical understandings of skin and persisted alongside new ideas and techniques of investigation. While ancient and medieval physicians believed that internal diseases could manifest themselves on the skin, they did not consider skin an organ in its own right with its own diseases. The sixteenth-century Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale was the first to devote an entire treatise to skin and its diseases. The rise of anatomy in the sixteenth century included greater attention to the properties of skin. Visitors to the University of Leiden’s anatomy theater, the Surgeons’ Guildhall in Amsterdam, or the Royal Society collections in London could observe (and sometimes even handle) the flayed skin of human cadavers.

Anatomical knowledge of skin and other body parts “was not confined to a learned elite or human dissection.” (205) Welch argues for “a close connection between cooking and other household activities on the one hand and anatomical knowledge on the other.” (189) Butchers, tanners, and housewives skinned animals, cut their bodies into pieces for cooking, and carved them at the table. All these activities required considerable skill and specialized equipment and provided ample opportunities for observing comparative anatomy. Although early modern physicians increasingly valorized experiential knowledge, they sought to distinguish the knowledge they gained from dissecting human cadavers from the “tactile, embodied experience” of women and tradesmen. (183)

Welch teases out the tangled relationship between health, beauty, and virtue in the appearance of skin. Proper maintenance of the skin was essential to health because the pores of the skin allowed noxious effluvia to leave the body. It was important to keep the skin clean and to change clothing and bedding regularly, lest the sweat and other bodily exhalations be trapped next to the skin and reabsorbed into the body. Internal diseases—like syphilis, plague, and smallpox—marked the skin, sometimes permanently. Imperfections on the skin, such as freckles, pimples, and redness, indicated health problems. The French physician Jean Riolan the Younger, for example, declared that ruddy cheeks were “a sign of a hot liver.” (34) Clear, smooth, pale skin free of blemishes was a marker of good health and was perceived as beautiful. It was also a mark of class status, because the diet, skin care regimen, regular changes of bed linens and underclothing, and avoidance of sun and wind, essential for perfect skin and its accoutrements, lustrous hair and nails, were only accessible to the wealthy. Flawless skin had moral connotations as well: “skin signalled health but also indicated virtue.” (71) It was a sign of clean living and the absence of venereal disease. When artists painted portraits of wealthy men and women, they frequently depicted their subjects with smooth, even, pale skin, even when the reality was different. The artist Justus Sustermans, for example, painted Ferdinando II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, “with the smooth, polished skin expected of a ruler’s idealized image,” even though he had recently recovered from smallpox. (53) By contrast, artists depicted poor subjects with scabby, blotchy, wrinkled skin.

In a world where beautiful skin signified virtue as well as health, covering skin or disguising blemishes excited moral condemnation. Elite women were expected both to dress modestly and to display wide expanses of “unbroken, unblemished, spot-free” skin, not just on their faces, but on their hands, arms, and decolletage as well. Masks protected the face from sun and wind and helped preserve the pallor that was so admired, but they could also hide signs of syphilis and other diseases. Similarly, the fashion for “mouches,” black velvet patches glued to the face, was widely criticized. Mouches could cover blemishes and even contain medicine to treat them, but they were also used to accentuate the whiteness of a person’s complexion. The fact that an observer could not tell why a person was wearing a mouche—fashion statement or concealing syphilitic sores—made them deeply suspect.

As contact with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Asia increased in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans became increasingly interested in the different appearances of skin in various parts of the world. Europeans were both fascinated and repulsed by the tattooing practices of other cultures. And of course, they were intrigued by different colors of skin. Ancient and medieval notions of skin color as a product of geography and climate continued to be invoked in the early modern period, but anatomists were also keen to dissect non-European skin and to examine it under the microscope. The Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leewenhoek, for example, sliced skin samples off a (living) thirteen-year-old Black girl, observed them under the microscope, and declared that her skin was composed of “little scales,” very like those he had observed in his own skin, but darker in color. Not surprisingly, Europeans considered pale skin the most beautiful, but during this period, the preference for pale skin had not yet hardened into the view that darker skin was ugly. Welch points out that “early commentators were equally comfortable praising black skin, as long as it was smooth and polished.” (297) Yet we can see this attitude beginning to change in the fashion for including young Black children (most likely enslaved) in the portraits of aristocratic women. In these paintings, the child indicates the elite woman’s possession of “global luxury and wealth” and highlights her “gleaming, highly polished white skin.” (304)

The goal of this book is to understand “period skin,” to interrogate how early modern Europeans understood and experienced skin—their own skin, other people’s skin, and animal skins. Throughout, Welch refrains from comparing what early modern people “believed” about their skin to what we moderns “know” about our skin. And yet, I kept feeling a sense of déjà vu as I read this book. Many products on the market today are intended to smooth and polish the skin, or to remove or conceal freckles or ruddiness, things early modern Europeans desired. Further, the regular criticisms of make-up as “deceitful,” as well as the ongoing valorization of white skin as both the norm and standard of beauty, also suggest that some of our ideas about what makes skin beautiful, as well as the connections between health, beauty, and virtue, have not changed very much in the past three centuries.