Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (14 page)

In Renaissance universities, professors were not dissimilar to Shakespeare’s actors, in that they were expected perform in public with eloquence and panache. The primary stage was the “disputation,” a formal public argument at a set place and time in which a scholar would defend one or more propositions against counterarguments raised by the audience. In one case, a man named Albertazzi, who taught logic at the University of Bologna and who clearly wished to advance his reputation and career, announced that on November 28, 1594, at nine o’clock in the morning, he would defend one hundred theses in humanist studies, logic, natural sciences, mathematics, philosophy, and theology.
46
Whether he was successful is not recorded, but it was probably a noisy affair, with friends and critics enthusiastically interjecting praise and opprobrium. A serious disputation between professors might last for days, enhancing or damaging the reputations of the participants. In print too, scholars jousted with one another, or with long-dead authorities, about matters of law, philosophy, theology, and natural science. It should come as no surprise, then, that at the height of the beard movement, the subject of facial hair would become a matter of dispute at Europe’s most famous university.

Modern science as we know it was just beginning to take shape in Italian cities during the 1500s. A generation before Shakespeare was born, an Italian-educated Pole, Nicolaus Copernicus, had used mathematics and observation to dispute ancient and biblical theories of the solar system. At the same time, a Belgian professor of medicine at the University of Padua, Andreas Vesalius, drew on meticulous dissections to overthrow long-established errors with respect to human anatomy. By the late 1500s, European academics were gradually shedding their fawning reverence for ancient authorities like Aristotle, Galen, and Ptolemy, and charting a new course for science. This had the effect, of course, of intensifying academic combat. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Italy produced the Copernicus of beard science, Marco Antonio Olmo (Marcus Ulmus in Latin).

Little is known about Olmo other than that he was from Padua and served as a professor of medicine and natural philosophy at the University of Bologna, Renaissance Italy’s largest and most prestigious university.
In 1603, he published
Physiologia Barbae Humanae
(Physiology of the Human Beard). In three hundred pages of densely printed Latin, Olmo presented the best science had to offer on the subject of the body, the beard, and manliness.

Olmo was convinced that facial hair had been overlooked and misunderstood in medical science and natural philosophy. Reviewing the literature, he found error everywhere, and his book showed the fire, as well as the scars, of many arguments he had endured with his colleagues. Olmo was convinced that the ancient physician Galen was wrong in believing that hair’s primary function was the excretion of waste from the body. He also rejected the argument of Renaissance natural philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger that facial hair had no use whatever, and that mustaches in particular were a regrettable hindrance. Nature does nothing in vain, Olmo insisted, announcing that through painstaking work he had discovered what the beard was meant to do. “It does not serve the purpose of decoration, age, gender, cleansing, or covering,” he wrote, “but is something quite different, and performs a task proper to the powers of the human soul.”
47

The soul is not a typical subject for science these days, but it was for Renaissance science, which fused (some might say confused) ancient Greek science, systematic observations, and Christian theology. Olmo, guided by Christian precepts as much as natural logic, worked from the core axiom that hair was part of the body, the purpose of which is to serve the soul. Therefore, hair must also serve the soul in some way. It does so, he concluded, by providing an outward sign of the “genital spirits” and the maturation of manhood, a manifestation of the life force present in male generative powers. In short, God created the beard as a physical image of the manly spirit.

While Olmo’s claim that hair originates from the blood makes little sense to modern physiologists, one can readily sympathize with his insistence that hair is more than an excretion of waste material, for this ancient notion was also wrong. In this sense, Olmo was like his near contemporaries Copernicus and Vesalius, doing battle with ancient errors. Olmo’s second main contention, that “the beard inevitably follows the male procreative power of our race,” also seems plausible.
48
He observed that when males reach sexual maturity, “the power that makes the beard is advanced by the male procreative faculty to perform
its own particular task, which is to clothe and equip certain specific places on the face with hairs, as though the male power of procreation were crying out aloud through the beard, like some kind of trumpeter, that it had arrived.”
49
In his analysis, observation proves this proposition in both a positive and negative sense: a sexually mature man will have a beard; conversely, a man without a beard is not capable of procreation. A key piece of evidence for him was the case of eunuchs, who lost both beard and potency if castrated before puberty. He recognized exceptions to the rule, as in the case of bearded women, but rare exceptions need not invalidate the basic principle.

To Olmo, this correlation meant that the beard was intended by nature to communicate the masculine characteristics of a person. On a purely medical level, the beard serves as an “indicator of the temperament of the organs which serve the same power, and in particular of the testes,” and “supplies this information in accordance with all its own accidental qualities.”
50
That is to say, one should be able to diagnose the constitutional vigor of a man by the shape and fullness of his beard. If Olmo were alive today, he would be proud to know that modern biologists have proposed a similar argument in explaining the evolution of beards (see
chapter 1
).

Olmo was not content to let it rest there, however. To his thinking, the face was a spiritually significant part of the body, and any sign placed there by nature was very important indeed. He pondered Aristotle’s argument that procreation was the divine principle working within the human body, endowing semen with the life force that made procreation possible. As beards and procreation were so closely connected, beards must be directly expressive of the divine life force present in the male body.
51
“Thus the divine origin of man,” Olmo reasoned, “which is the work of the divine power of procreation, is opportunely and appropriately indicated in the divine part of the body of the same.” As a consequence, “the movements of all the powers of the soul are clear to see on our faces, and can be recognized by the most practiced of men.“
52

This is a grand claim, indeed. In Olmo’s defense, it cannot be denied that beards had an ineffable mystique, particularly during his lifetime. Olmo believed he could explain the impressiveness of facial hair in scientific terms, and his conclusions paralleled Shakespeare’s views in several ways. The beard was not simply a part of a man. It should be
possible, both believed, to perceive something of the inner man by considering the hair on his face. As Shakespeare implied, King Lear might have avoided his sad fate had he given more thought as a young man to the humble condition of his immature beard.

Flemish scientist Jan Baptiste Van Helmont (1580–1644) was another great mind of the era who believed he had discovered the true meaning of beards. Known today as a pioneer in chemistry, Van Helmont was similar to Olmo in blending physical observation and metaphysical speculation. Like Olmo, Van Helmont recognized a direct link between beards, virility, and the soul, but unlike Olmo, he considered this to be a lamentable rather than an honorable connection. Beards did indeed signal the condition of the masculine soul, but they were the unfortunate marks of original sin. By Van Helmont’s reckoning, Adam was created in the Garden of Eden without a beard, but eating the forbidden apple stirred in him carnal lust such that he “deflowered” Eve. A beard then sprouted on his chin as a sign of shame. “Wherefore,” Van Helmont maintained, “that the first infringer of modesty, and deflowerer of a Virgin might be made known, God would that hairs should grow on the chin, cheeks, and lips of Adam, that he might be . . . like unto many four-footed beasts.”
53
From this reasoning, the Flemish scientist derived a corollary theory. If beards were sinful, true angels could not be bearded. If a spirit were to appear on earth with a beard, one could instantly spot him as evil.
54

The idea that Adam was beardless in Eden circulated in the Muslim world as well. But the Muslim interpretation of Adam’s new beard was precisely the reverse of Van Helmont’s. According to Mohammad Baqir Majlisi, a Persian contemporary of Van Helmont, Adam was reconciled with God after the exile and asked the creator for a more pleasing appearance. When he received a black beard, Adam asked what it was. God replied, “This is your ornament, as well as the ornament of your men and your children until the Day of Judgment.”
55
The beard, in other words, was a blessing rather than a curse.

Though Renaissance artists frequently depicted a beardless Adam in the Garden, Van Helmont’s notion that a beard was sign of shame was decidedly a minority view in the West.
56
Most people in his time had a sunnier view of nature’s purposes. On the other hand, nature also produced surprises that scientists were hard-pressed to explain. One of the more baffling conundrums was the existence of bearded women.

Renaissance people, seeking to understand the rules of nature, were inevitably fascinated when these rules seemed to break down. A bearded woman seemed definitely to break the rules. Women with thick, full beards were, and are, rare, and each example created great interest, disgust, and sometimes admiration. Were such people really men, women, or hermaphrodites? Was nature unstable? What does it mean when sex and gender become so confused?

The most striking example of Renaissance interest in bearded women is Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera’s 1631 portrait of Magdalena Ventura. All we know about its subject comes from a long inscription on the right side of the portrait. Entitled “Behold a Great Wonder of Nature,” it explains that Magdalena was a wife and mother from Abruzzi in southern Italy who, at the age of thirty-seven, began to grow a beard “so long and thick that it seems more like that of any bearded gentleman than of a woman who had borne three children by her husband.”
57
Ribera’s depiction makes this point very clear. Magdalena has a higher forehead than her husband, who stands meekly in the background, and her beard is far more impressive. Her strong, defiant pose adds to her manly demeanor. At the same time, her femininity is also emphasized: she is shown flanked by a spinning bobbin, suckling her child, and wearing the clothing of a respectable woman of her time.
58
The inscription is not judgmental. The purpose of the portrait was to amaze the viewer with a woman whose hair and face are entirely masculine, but who is in all other respects feminine. Nature, Ribera seemed to say, is capable of pulling some great tricks, and a beard is not always reliably masculine.

Magdalena Ventura was not the only celebrated bearded woman of the Renaissance. The sisters Francesca, Maddalena, and Antonietta Gonzales had created a sensation in France and Italy in the late 1500s for being hairy all over their faces and bodies. The same was true of Barbara Vanbeck, born in Augsburg just a few years before Ribera painted Ventura’s portrait.
59
What were Renaissance men, who had invested so much in the symbolism of the beard, to make of all this? Ribera’s painting was commissioned by an erudite and powerful Spanish nobleman, Fernando Afán de Ribera, duke of Alcala, who spent much of his career as a diplomat and viceroy in Italy. The perspective of the duke and his
painter was in some respects rather traditional. To them, Ventura’s hair was a miracle—a gift—similar to miraculous beards recorded in the Middle Ages. The legends of St. Galla, St. Paula of Avila, and St. Wilgefortis (or Uncumber) are examples, and all share a similar story line. In each case a woman who faced an undesirable marriage was granted the miracle of disfiguring facial hair, which prevented the nuptials and freed her to devote her life to God.
60
St. Galla and St. Paula became holy celibates, but Wilgefortis was supposedly crucified by her angry father, the king of Portugal. The strange tale of Wilgefortis became quite popular in the late Middle Ages, for it fused the older theme of the miraculous beard with the passion of Christ. It also bespoke the suffering of women under male tyranny.

In medieval lore, miraculous beards unsexed specially chosen women, providing an escape from masculine constraints. Ribera’s painting of Magdalena Ventura shares with these stories a wonder at the miraculous, yet rejects the element of unsexing. Ventura is represented as a woman who was not liberated from her husband, even if he is pushed to the background. Nor does she escape her motherly duties. Instead, the artist works hard to demonstrate her essential femininity. The message is that the beard may deviate from the order of nature, but it does not undermine either sex or gender.

Attitudes toward the hairy Gonzales girls were much the same. Today, their rare genetic condition is called
hypertrichosis univeralis
. Thick hair grew all over their bodies, not just their faces. The trait, passed from the father, affected one of the sons as well as the three daughters. Like Ventura later, these celebrities of abnormality were much admired, and members of the family were “collected” by powerful families. The father was appointed to a minor post in the French royal court in the mid-1500s, and members of his family later became dependents of the Farnese family in northern Italy.
61
Prince William V of Bavaria ordered full-size portraits of several family members. The large paintings attracted a great deal of attention when they were displayed by William’s uncle at Schloss Ambras, his summer palace. Copies of these works, along with new portraits and sketches produced during the late 1500s and early 1600s, were disseminated throughout Europe and reprinted in scholarly books. Just as Ribera’s portrait presented Magdalena Ventura as a refined, motherly woman, the portrayals of the
Gonzales women emphasized their sophistication and ladylike deportment. These women were seen as neither saints nor monsters but as extraordinary people, profligately gifted by nature.

The Renaissance beard movement was built on the prestige of the natural and the ways in which manly honor was affirmed by natural hair, but Renaissance men were able to reconcile that commitment with a belief in the extraordinary. These images of bearded women were an act of reconciliation, showing women who had acquired qualities of manliness without actually becoming men. The successful reign of Elizabeth in England would not have been possible without an acceptance of this idea. Nonetheless, many contemporaries were repulsed by bearded women and female rulers, seeing them as monsters rather than wonders. The most ardent champions of the Renaissance beard movement held this view, committed as they were to the notion that beards were reliable proof of male superiority. Pierio Valeriano declared in 1531, “It hath been ever a monstrous thing, to see a woman with a beard.”
62
More than century later, the English physician and natural philosopher John Bulwer also declared a woman with whiskers “a monster.”
63
Johannes Barbatium insisted that women might grow hairs but could never produce a true beard, for they did, they would not be women but hermaphrodites, or some similar sort of “monstrous nature.”
64

The Italian scientist of beards, Marco Olmo, took a more nuanced approach. He did not deny that bearded women were true women, nor did he label them monsters. At the same time, he expressed no awareness of, or interest in, actual cases of hairy women, including the Gonzales sisters, one of whom had been examined by a colleague at the University of Bologna just a few years before he published his work on beards. In working out his theory, Olmo relied more on ancient sources than on experiments or observations. On the subject of bearded women, he followed Hippocratic texts in describing their condition as an illness related to the interruption of the menstrual cycle. If a woman continued to have sex with her husband but did not maintain the usual menstrual flow, her blood would become overly rich in seminal spirits; this accumulation of male essence could cause hair to grow like a man’s. Perhaps Olmo was aware that the Gonzales sisters would contradict his tidy theory. They had plenty of hair on their bodies long before sexual maturity, and contact with men could hardly explain their condition.
He would have to admit that he did not really know why some women grew beards.

The existence of hairy women was not, in any case, enough to dampen the enthusiasm of the beard renaissance. For more than a century, from the early 1500s to the early 1600s, a nearly unanimous chorus of praise for beards sounded from churchmen, poets, and scientists. Spurred by confident humanism, educated European men turned their attention to human nature and the human body. They found in their bodies and beards validation of their standing as men endowed by nature with virtues of strength and wisdom worthy of social respect.