One of the best-known paintings of the Italian Renaissance, Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) is a touchstone for the ideas and questions behind the Renaissance Skin project. Seduction and eroticism, love and beauty, marriage and fidelity are all themes to be found in Titian's painting. The role of skin in conjuring eroticism, fertility, and femininity may seem obvious; the role of skin in determining the relationship between these themes and more practical issues of marriage, domesticity, and household order less so. But Venus of Urbino brings these ideas together in a number of practical and material interventions.

Skin has always been central to ideas about beauty. This was true not just in the many recipes for smoothing out complexions or those for hiding or curing freckles and blemishes, but also in the lengthy and detailed attention paid by the new artistic manuals of the Renaissance to representing it in paint. The art historian Mechthild Fend has recently shown how changes in colour, technique, and technologies facilitated and shaped medical attitudes to skin. Going forward, we will be asking questions about how aesthetic ideas of beauty, complexion, and the surface interacted with medical ideas about complexions, pores, and skin ailments.

Crucially, this painting is not just about human skin but about animal skin too. Of particular note are the two serving women in the background packing (or unpacking) the large chest (cassone). The woman standing has a fur garment draped over her left shoulder. Titian painted the same model [as Venus] with a similar fur in the contemporary painting Girl in a Fur (1536-1538). His preoccupation with representing the luxurious skin of an animal against the naked skin of a woman throws up the division between human and animal. Unlike cultural (and theological) assumptions about the differences between humans and animals, Renaissance medical theory made no such distinction. A key concern then is how Renaissance anatomists conceptualised fur, feathers, and other sorts of animal skin. Did they think of it (like hair) as a kind of bodily excrement? Indeed, did they think of it at all?

In some ways then, this is a painting that calls to mind the deepest questions about the relationship between surface and reality, and the way in which meaning is conveyed by matter. It is not just fur that Titian lingers on; the Venus of Urbino is a veritable encyclopedia of the textiles and textures of Renaissance materials - from the plush, draped velvets behind the reclining nude, her braided hair (a commonplace display of artistic virtuosity), to the silky fur of the small dog, curled at her feet. There is no doubt that the painting's meaning is enigmatic but this is precisely the point, for the tension between what skin reveals and what it conceals is one of the most prevalent aspects of its cultural representation. It is for this reason that skin is so often tied to the individual, not just in art, but also in literature, poetry, drama, metaphor, and idiom. The central thesis of our project is that the relationship between skin and the cultural idea of the human and non-human individual has a history - when we uncover it, what will we find?

HM

Image: Titian, The Venus of Urbino, 1538, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

This plate is one of the first depictions of human skin as seen, at least ostensibly, under a microscope. It is taken from the 1685 Anatomia humani corporis  by the Dutch anatomist and physician, Govard Bidloo (1649-1713). The image was drawn by Gerard de Lairesse and engraved by Pieter van Gunst. It is one of 105 engraved plates to be included in Bidloo's work. It was reproduced in William Cowper's translation, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (Oxford, 1698).

Bidloo was particularly meticulous in annotating the image, which included the cuticula (figs.1-4), the general external surface (figs.5-6), six strands of hair (figs.7-12), fat (fig. 13), and the internal 'common membrane' (figs.14-15). The fingerprint (fig.4) is the most recognisable part of the image and has sometimes been described as being the origin of forensic science. In writing about skin, Bidloo's greatest contribution was to describe skin as being composed of many strata (or layers), the number of which varied according to the areas of the body on which it was found.

Bidloo participated in an anatomical discourse that was traditionally associated with the seventeenth-century popularisation of the microscope. From the 1650s onwards, microscopists such as Robert Hooke, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Marcello Malpighi, and many others examined skin carefully and made a number of significant observations about its pigmentation and composition. Some of these new insights departed from the traditional explanations provided by classical sources or the primarily functional ones that had been offered earlier in the century by commentators such as Girolamo Mercuriale. While these texts linked skin to disease, microscopists investigated its anatomy. Writers such as Bidloo were particularly interested in the permeability and porousness of the body, with debate raging over the nature of pores, the function and location of sweat glands, perspiration, and the role of the skin in transporting fluids. The earliest microscopists included descriptions of skin in their writing, but it was not until Lairesse's drawings that these changing concepts of skin were depicted visually.

On the one hand, then, Bidloo's illustration provides remarkable evidence for the role of microscopy in discovering and cataloging new medical knowledge about skin. However, on the other hand, it also indicates the prolonged and critical role of the imagination. It is not clear whether Lairesse would have actually ever seen the microscopic samples about which Bidloo wrote. Indeed, many seventeenth-century anatomical illustrators relied heavily on the descriptions provided by anatomists for rendering their drawings. Adhering to standard anatomical conventions, particularly relating to the display of insects and animals, the samples of skin are shown tacked to the surface of the page with pins. Given the size of such microscopic fragments, this would have been impossible! While it is clear that the microscope caused many evidentiary problems which stimulated sustained scientific attention, the solution could sometimes be aesthetic. It is an important aim of the project to examine the relationship between these various impulses for new knowledge, as well as whether knowledge deemed to be an important 'discovery', such as Bidloo's fingerprint, really was influential in altering medical thinking.

HM

Image taken from Govard Bidloo, Anatomia humani corporis (1685) with contributions from Gerard de Lairesse (1640-1711), illustrator; Abraham Blooteling (1640-1690), engraver; and Pieter Stevens van Gunst (1659?-1724?), engraver. Image courtesy of US National Library of Medicine Digital Collections

Andrew Snape, serjeant farrier to Charles II, wrote the first text in English on equine anatomy, dedicating it to his royal patron. The Anatomy of an Horse was published in London in 1683. Most of the engravings in Snape’s book are copied from Carlo Ruini’s monumental Anatomia del cauallo, infermità, et suoi rimedii (1598), which itself resembles an equine version of the famous human anatomical text De humani corporis fabrica (1543) by Vesalius, with flayed horses replacing Vesalius’s skinless men.

Ruini did not address the composition of equine skin, starting instead from the muscles and then moving inwards to cover the nerves, the organs, and other parts of a horse’s body. Skin is only discussed in the chapters that deal with diseases, such as lepra and scabies, rather than in regard to anatomy. This approach is similar to other writings on the care of a horse, in which skin usually only appears in the context of skin afflictions. The exception to this would be in a discussion on the different colours of horses, often due to humoreal temperament. In contrast, Snape's discourse truly does work from the outside in, with his very first chapter on hair. Before he even approaches the common membrane of the muscles, there are a number of layers - the scarf-skin, the true skin, the fleshy pannicle, and the fat.

The hairs of a horse were not considered strictly a part of the body, being 'ingendred of a clammy and earthy Excrement of the third concoction' - a by-product of digestion. This humoreal waste is thrust up through the pores of the skin; some of it enters the roots of the hairs, but the more ‘earthly’ waste is 'driven out amongst the hair where it becomes dust; which dust is that that is brought forth with the Curry-combe when a Horse is drest'. According to Snape, despite all the grooming in the world, a horse will always be covered in new ‘dust’ the next day. In fact, copious cleaning was believed to engender even more ‘dust’, for the cleaner the horse, the more open its pores. This allowed for more waste to be excreted easily through the pores of the skin. Horses that were not groomed regularly would likely lose their hair, as their pores would be blocked, preventing the ‘dust’ from being removed.

The 'cuticle' or 'scarf-skin' was the outer layer of skin and protected the horse’s body from external injuries. So if an ill-fitting saddle rubbed against the horse, removing only the scarf-skin, the horse would have no long-lasting scars for this layer of skin could grow back easily. By contrast, if a saddle were to pull off parts of the layer of ‘true skin’, blemishes or scars would remain. This was as a result of the ‘true skin’ having a spermetical origin in the early development of the equine embryo and, as such, could not repair itself.

Due to a lack of veins, arteries, and nerves, the 'scarf-skin' was considered to be insensible in itself. Snape explained that if you were to only spur the 'scarf-skin', the horse would neither move nor bleed, both of which it would do if your spurs were to reach the layer of 'true skin'. The 'scarf-skin' was covered with pores that allowed transpiration (both sweat and 'insensible transpiration') out of the body. These pores could be obstructed by cold air after a vigorous ride, giving the horse cold water to drink, or washing its body in cold water when hot. With these pores closed, these vapours would be trapped between the two layers of skin and 'generate evill Distempers'. The true skin or cutis that lay below the 'scarf-skin' had the same pores. Like the 'scarf-skin', the true skin protected the body but it also held in the body's spirits and natural heat 'as in a Castle'. Without the true skin, these elements would depart the body in hot weather or excessive exercise, leaving 'the vital parts destitute, which would occasion the loss of your Beast'.

Underneath the true skin lay the flesh pannicle. Unlike in a human body, in which this membrane was said to be located below the fat, in horses it was said to be above the layer of fat. The pannicle was flesh-like in some parts of the body and membranous in others. Snape recommended care when flaying a horse as this pannicle could be removed easily along with the skin. It helped the muscles to move the skin 'whereby the Beast shakes off the Flies, or any other thing that offends him', defended internal parts, and prevented fat from 'being melted and spent by the continual motion of the Muscles'. If a horse had a wound that reached down to the true-skin layer, this membrane would help 'glew as it were the sides of it together again' and create a scar. Below this membrane lay the fat, which was 'like a Garment, to keep the Body warm' and protected the horse from blows or similar injuries.

The final layer before reaching a horse's muscles was a membrane that spread all over them, which is described as being 'as thick as Parchment, and very strong'.

KWM

Further Reading:

• Andrew Snape, An Anatomy of An Horse (London, 1683)
  

Image: Folio showing the muscles of a horse taken from Andrew Snape, An Anatomy of An Horse (London, 1683) from the US National Library of Medicine (see more images)

Girolamo Mercuriale was the leading physician teaching medicine in Northern Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Born in Forlì in 1520, he graduated in philosophy and medicine in Venice in 1555. He taught at the universities of Padua (1569-1587), Bologna (1587-1592), and lastly Pisa (1593-1606), where he was also physician to the family of Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Mercuriale was a prime exemplar of medical humanism, which flourished from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. Authors would combine a careful study of the medical works of classical writers with a description of the conditions that the physician had observed first-hand. The emergence in the sixteenth century of new editions of classical authors, such as those of Galen in Greek that first appeared in 1525 along with the availability of the Hippocratic Corpus in a Latin translation, proved to be highly influential. Much emphasis was placed on understanding the exact meaning of the words used by ancient authors, along with attempting to write in a stylistically ‘pure Latin’. Correct nomenclature and citing the opinions of the ancients appear throughout Mercuriale’s works, although he would provide his own explanations or observations. He would also often attempt to explain the differing opinions among the ancients, for example between Galen and Aristotle. Mercuriale did not restrict himself to classical authors - Galen, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder, and others - but included within these ‘ancient authorities’ Byzantine and Arabic authors such as Avicenna, Avenzoar, and Paul of Aegina. In addition to writing medical texts, such as Artis gymnasticae apud antiquos celeberrimae (1569), Mercuriale’s 'authorship' is also ascribed to edited works collated by students from notes taken at his lectures.

The two texts of most significant interest for the Renaissance Skin project fall under this latter category (download contents below). First published in Venice in 1572, De morbis cutaneis, et omnibus corporis humani excrementis (On Diseases of the Skin and All of the Excrements of the Human Body) was compiled by Paolo Aicardi. This text covers afflictions that affected the hair and skin of the entire body, along with humoral excrements (urine, tears, spit, etc.). De decoratione (On Adornment) was published in 1585 from lecture notes compiled by Giulio Mancini (1559-1630). It focuses on skin ailments that affect the face and the hands, and detract from beauty.

Beauty was considered to be a legitimate medical aim, as a beautiful face was a healthy face and denoted a balanced humoral complexion. Of the four humoral temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic), sanguine was considered to be the ideal, with its beautiful mixture of white skin and rosy cheeks. For Mercuriale, the best type of facial skin was one that was ‘unified, equal, polished, and smooth’. De decoratione covers issues ranging from hair care, sun spots on the hands, pimples, wrinkles (see image), obesity, scars, bruises, warts, and hangnails, all of which detract from the patient’s beauty. Most chapters open with a discourse on the Greek and Latin terminology (often adding what the skin affliction is called in Italian), followed by a long discussion on how the ancient authors understood the origin and development of the affliction. Mercuriale then offers an explanation for treatment. In keeping with humoral medical theory, and unlike the wholly topical remedies which appear in recipe books, Mercuriale always recommends a holistic cure, since these afflictions to beauty were most often caused by a humoral imbalance. He might suggest a regimen of health that takes into account the patient’s food and lifestyle. Blood may be let and the body could be purged with a variety of emetics. Only once the ill humours are purged would the physician apply topical remedies to the skin itself, in the form of unguents or baths. These topical treatments derived both from the ancients and Mercuriale himself. He sometimes notes successful (and unsuccessful) remedies used by contemporaries. And so, he warns of the dangers for those women who apply alum or mercury water to remove wrinkles from their faces and chests.

De decoratione is not the only scholarly medical work on beauty written within a humanist framework. Other similar works include Gabriele Falloppio’s Opuscula tria. De decoratione (Padua, 1566) and Giovanni Tommaso Minadoi’s De humani corporis turpitudinibus cognoscendis & curandis (On understanding and curing the ugliness of the human body) (Padua, 1600). But Mercuriale's text remains the most extensive of these works, particularly in regard to defects of facial beauty. When combined with his work on skin afflictions that affect the entire body, De decoratione offers a comprehensive overview of learned medical opinion on beautifying the skin and how its ‘defects’ may be understood and cured.

Download contents for Mercuriale's key texts:

KWM

Image: Lorenzo di Credi, Head of an Old Man Facing Forward and Wearing a Cap, c. 1490-1500. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Further reading:

• A. Arcangeli and V. Nutton, eds., Girolamo Mercuriale : medicina e cultura nell'Europa del Cinquecento : atti del convegno "Girolamo Mercuriale e lo spazio scientifico e culturale del Cinquecento (Forlì, 8-11 novembre 2006) (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 2008)
  
• R.L. Sutton, A sixteenth century physician and his methods: Mercurialis on diseases of the skin, the first book on the subject. Translation from the Latin, glossary, and commentary (Kansas City, Mo.: Lowell Press, 1986)
  
• H. Mercurialis, De decoratione (Venice, 1585, and later editions)
  
• H. Mercurialis, De morbis cutaneis, et omnibus corporis humani excrementis (Venice, 1572, and later editions)

In his Pentaestheseion (1609), Giulio Cesare Casseri, professor of anatomy in Padua, claimed that touch was the most important of the senses and a model for the other four. The image on the left describes in detail the hands and feet, the skin on which Casseri identified the 'seat' of touch, the place where touch was localised in a single place on the body. Casseri distinguished between cutis and cuticula – the real skin and the most external or superficial layer, respectively. With numerous nerve endings at the cutis, Casseri showed how this was the seat of touch.

Before the systematic use of microscopes, anatomists and physicians adopted collectively a subversion of Aristotle in their descriptions of the relationships between skin and touch. For Aristotle, skin originated from the drying out of the flesh. It was a specific kind of flesh that could not evaporate, and thus it hardened and remained on the surface of the body [see entry on Cheese and Skin]. Aristotle saw the skin as formed of two layers: one external and one internal. Importantly, then, he considered the skin to be sine sensu, with the seat of sensation and touch located in the flesh under the skin. Galenic writings oscillate on this point, but Galen’s anatomical writings acknowledge that the warmness of the skin is balanced out by the coldness of the nerves that terminate there. Skin itself was capable of feeling.

This issue of the seat of touch concerned the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages and continued to spark interest for sixteenth-century anatomists. The most famous anatomists of the century, even when they addressed the skin in only marginal notes or brief chapters within their works, did nevertheless prove Aristotle wrong. For they all knew that the philosopher was not able to see that the nerves ended in the cutis. While in 1502 Alessandro Benedetti, humanist and anatomist in Padua, still claimed that the cutis was sine sensu, figures like Vesalius, Valverde, Colombo, and Falloppio described nervous structures linking the cutis to the brain. Before Casseri and his proto-microscopic images, the most explicit anatomists in relation to this issue were the Basel-based Felix Platter and Caspar Bauhin, who both described the skin as the primary seat of the sense of touch.

In the age of the microscope, it was Marcello Malpighi who demonstrated the tactile strcutures of the skin in a curiously brief and image-less 'observation' published in 1665 and entitled De externo tactu organo anatomica observation [see entry on Bidloo]. This booklet followed his discoveries of the papillae on the tongue (taste buds), which were stimulated by little food particles. It was a discovery clearly influenced, via Galileo, by a kind of revival of Epicurean-Lucretian atomism. In 1665, Malpighi examined the organ of touch par excellence, the human hand: he detached the external layer (cuticula) with a hot iron and observed a network-like surface on which he described seeing not only the sudoriferous vessels, but also countless pyramid-shaped papillae. The organs of touch, he said, were precisely these papillae.

Folio from Renée Descartes, De homine (Leiden, 1662)

Interestingly enough, Malpighi wrote that these papillae behaved like a blind man with his stick, who touched anything in his immediate surroundings before recognising the shape of the objects. In his Dioptrique (1637) Renée Descartes had used the same image of a blind man with his stick, for quite the opposite purpose. Descartes argued there that sight was the most noble of the senses, and that images of things were indeed innate in the human mind. But when he had to explain what was light – which according to him was a kind of motion or action that moved through the air and 'touched' the eye – Descartes used the analogy of the blind man who used his stick so that he almost saw the world through his hands.

For Descartes, sight explained touch. For Malpighi, touch explained sight via human skin.

PS

Further Reading:

• Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy (Baltimore, 2011)
  
• Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign, 2012)
  
• Claudio Pogliano, Senso lato. Il tatto e la cultura occidentale (Rome, 2015)
  

Main image taken from Giulio Cesare Casseri, Pentaestheseion, hoc est de quinque sensibus liber (Venice, 1609)

The first treatise on surgery to be printed in New Spain was the Summa y Recopilación de Cirugía by Alonzo López de Hinojosos. He was a romancista surgeon, a term used to denote a medical professional who was not university trained but could demonstrate that he had worked for four years in a hospital or city in the presence of an approved surgeon. This did not necessarily mean that such surgeons were unlearned, but rather that they had been examined in Spanish and not in Latin. López de Hinojosos read and quoted texts that had been written either in the vernacular, such those by Luis Lobbera de Ávila and Juan Fragoso, or translated into Spanish, such as those by the fourteenth-century French surgeon Guy de Chauliac or the early modern Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo. References are also made to the ancients, such as Galen and Celsus. It seems that López de Hinojosos may have had access to the work of the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides, which had been recently translated into Spanish. For it is likely that López de Hinojosos used Dioscorides for the section on medicines ('antidotary') that appeared in the second edition of his book.

After arriving in New Spain in the early 1570s, López de Hinojosos worked in hospitals in Mexico City, first in the Hospital de la Concepción de Nuestra Señora before spending fourteen years at the Hospital Real de San José. At the latter, he was employed both as a surgeon and as a majordomo, or administrator. It was at this hospital (also called the Hospital Real de Indios) where he wrote the first edition of his text on surgery. He was admitted to the Society of Jesus in 1585, dying in 1595.

His surgical text was conceived to reach a lay audience, people who might reside 'outside of this city, in mines, farms, villages, and remote places, who lack convenient remedies'. Similarly, other medical texts published in New Spain, such as Agustín Farfán’s Tratado Breve de Medicina (1579) and Juan de Esteynefer’s Florilegio Medicina (1712), also attempted to serve as a guide for those lacking access to medical professionals and non-learned professionals. These works combined humoral medicine with remedies using both Old and New World flora and fauna.

López de Hinojosos’s 1578 edition (c. 400 pages in octavo format) was titled Summary and compilation of surgery with a very useful and helpful art for bloodletting. It was divided into seven treatises, consisting of: on anatomy and the different parts of the body (17 chapters); on bloodletting (7 chapters); on abscesses (27 chapters); on fresh wounds (13 chapters); on the evil of the buboes [syphilis] (5 chapters); on fractures or dislocations (12 chapters); and finishing with a treatise on pestilence. This last section discusses cocoliztli, a devastating epidemic disease that took hold in Mexico City in 1576. This was the second outbreak of cocoliztli to affect New Spain in the sixteenth century. Recently, this epidemic has been identified tentatively as an enteric fever caused by a strain of salmonella enterica bacterium.

Frontispice of the second edition of the Summa y Recopilacion de Chirugia (1595). Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library

The second edition published in 1595 contains almost twice the number of contents as the first edition (c. 400 pages in quarto format), as López de Hinojosos expanded his original treatise quite substantially with new material. This edition consisted of ten books: on reumas (58 chapters, including cancer, scrofula, goiter, scabies, ringworm, carnosities, ulcers, leprosy, and alopecia); on anatomy (12 chapters, including one on skin); on bloodletting (8 chapters, covering phlebotomy, cupping, and leeches); on abscesses (14 chapters, including boils, gangrene, phlegmons, and erisipelas); on obstructions (8 chapters); on wounds (14 chapters, including burns, sores, facial wounds, and penetrative chest wounds); on fractures and dislocations (12 chapters), on tavardete and cocoliztli (10 chapters, on pestilential diseases); on difficulty in childbirth (13 chapters); on childhood diseases (9 chapters); and ending with an ‘Antidotary of all of the drugs which are in this book’.

While afflictions of the skin are covered throughout the text, López de Hinojosos gave a short theoretical precis of skin when discussing human anatomy, as it was one the few parts of the body to be dealt with in a discrete chapter (along with the head, eye, ear, nose, mouth, neck, hand, chest, diaphragm, liver, and belly). López de Hinojosos followed the division of skin into the dermis (or cutis) and the cuticle (outermost layer of skin), with the terms ‘true’ and ‘untrue’ skin. The 'true' skin resided under the ‘untrue’ skin, which was a thin layer to protect against extreme temperatures. López de Hinojosos also explains that this 'untrue' skin was a necessary intermediary layer between the 'true' skin and the object with which you have contact, to ensure the correct sensation of touch.

KWM

Further Reading:

• Alonso López de Hinojosos, Suma y recopilacion de cirugia (Mexico, 1579), edition Academia Nacional de Medicina, Mexico City, 1977
  
• Alonso López de Hinojosos, Summa y Recopilacion de Cirugia con un arte para sangrar, y examen to barberos, compuesto por Maestre Alonso Lopez de Hinojoso (Mexico, 1595)
  
• Ernesto Cordero Galindo, 'Alonso López de Hinojosos, el prime cirujano novohispano. Estudo comparativo de su obra', El Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliographicás, vol. II, no. 1 (1997)
  
• Sherry Fields, Pestilence and headcolds: encountering illness in colonial Mexico (New York, 2008)
  

Main image: Frontispiece of the Summa y Recopilacion de Chirugia (Mexico, 1578). Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine 

The Thesaurus pauperum, a medical text designed for a non-specialist readership, circulated widely in the late medieval and early modern period. The text survives in over 70 manuscripts, with many more extant printed copies in Latin (first printed in Antwerp in 1476) and in various vernacular languages. The Italian Tesoro de poveri was first printed in 1492 in Florence, and then later in Venice. In English, it was known as The treasurie of healthe and was first published in London in 1550, while the Catalan version was called the Tresor de pobres. The work was also translated into German and Portuguese.

The author ascribed to the text is one ‘Peter of Spain’, a name associated with the noted 13th-century Aristotelian scholar of the same designation and also with Pope John XXI. In spite of this, the author still remains to be definitively identified. As was befitting of an accessible, everyday, and relatively inexpensive text, the book usually appeared in a small format, such as octavo.

Over time, the text grew in size: many medieval manuscript versions have 55 chapters; while some 16th-century printed editions have more than 100 chapters, covering everything from liver pain to tooth powder recipes. It seems that both transcribers and translators were often unable to resist adding extra chapters. We see at times that these additional chapters go far beyond the stated remit of the text to address ailments of the human body, from head to toe. For example the Spanish version ends with short chapters covering matters such as how to remove the skin from nuts, getting rid of fleas from a house (recommending the smoke from burning leeches to achieve this), or the scrofulous swellings of the lymph nodes of a horse (involving placing a man or woman's washcloth in the horse’s drinking water). These additions are usually short and lack the citation of authors that are mentioned so copiously in entries from the ‘core’ text, such as Constantine the African, Avicenna, or Gilbert the Englishman.

The Spanish version (Libro de medicina llamado Tesoro de los pobres) was printed many times in the sixteenth century in Seville, Zaragoza, and Valladolid, and was usually accompanied by a regimen of health ascribed erroneously to the famed 13th-century physician Arnau de Vilanova. It continued to be published in various editions and in various locations throughout the early modern period; examples are known from the eighteenth century, such as in Barcelona in 1750 and in Madrid in 1762. This text is of particular interest within the context of examining skin afflictions in early modern Spanish medical texts that were designed for either non-learned medical practitioners or a lay readership. These texts include Bartolomo Hidalgo de Agüero, Thesoro de la verdadera cirugía (Seville, 1610), Alonzo López de Hinojosos, Summa y Recopilación de Cirugía (Mexico, 1579), Agustín Farfán, Tratado Brebe de Chirurgia y del conocimiento y cura de algunas enfermedades (México, 1579), and Juan de Esteyneffer, Florilegio medicinal (Mexico, 1712). The Tesoro de los pobres was also cited in other medical treatises intended for a broad circulation or for readers with little access to medical expertise. The 18th-century Tratado breve de medicina by the Jesuit Sigismund Aperger was designed to be a basic medical handbook for those practising in the missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata. It is replete with material taken from the Tesoro de los pobres.

Here follows a selection of material concerned with skin in the 1644 Madrid edition of the Tesoro de los Pobres

• Ch. 1      Para sanar las postillas, ò la sarna [Curing scabs and scabies]
  
• Ch. 2     Como haras que no nazcan piojos ni liendres [Against lice and nits]
  
• Ch. 11    Para sanar la rosa de la cara, ò el empeyne, ò otra manzilla [Healing redness of the face, impetigo, or other blemish]
  
• Ch. 48   Para sanar mordedura de culebra, ò de can rabiosos [To cure snake and rabid dog bites]
  
• Ch. 49   Para sanar las viruelas, y las bexigas [To cure smallpox]
  
• Ch. 50   Para sanar la fistola, o el cancer [To cure the fistula or cancer]
  
• Ch. 52   Para sanar las landres, que es cosa mouy aborrecile [To cure buboes, which are horrible things]
  
• Ch. 53   Para sanar las berrugas [Warts]
  
• Ch. 54   Para quemadura, o de fuego, o de aquacaliente, y de su remedio [For burns from fire or hot water]
  
• Ch. 55   Para sanar la quemadura que los hombres arden entre si, y dizen que es fuego de San Anton [To cure the burning that causes men to burn among themselves, and which is called St Anthony’s fire]
• Ch. 56   Para sacar hierro, ò saeta, ò espina del cuerpo del hombre [Removing iron, arrow, or thorn]
  
• Ch. 64   Para los que se les caen los cabellos de la cabeça, y como haràs que aya muchos [For those whose hair is falling out, and how they can have a lot of hair]
  
• Ch. 65   Como haràs que no nazcan cabellos en la cabeça, di en otro lugar [How to cause hair not to grow on the head, but in another place]
  
• Ch. 76   Para los lamparones de los cavallos [For the scrofulous swellings on a horse’s lymph nodes]
  

KWM

Further Reading:

• Many digitised versions of the Thesaurus pauperum are available. The 1644 Madrid edition of the Tesoro de los pobres can be found on Google Books. Humfre Lloyde’s 1550 English translation (The treasury of healthe) is available here
  
• Miguel de Asúa, Science in the Vanished Arcadia : knowledge of nature in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata (Leiden, 2014)
  
• Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1929), vol. II
  

Image: A frontispage of the Italian version, Thesaurus pauperum. Qui in comincia illibro chiamato thesoro de poueri (1497). Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

In the vein of Alonzo López de Hinojosos’ Summa y Recopilación de Cirugía and the popular Spanish version of the Thesaurus pauperum we can also consider another very popular lay medical and surgical text, the Florilegio medicinal.

Written in 1711 and published in Mexico City in 1712, the Florilegio medicinal (Medicinal Anthology) was the work of the Moravian Jesuit lay brother Juan de Esteyneffer (Johannes Steinhöffer). Born in Iglau (present-day Jihlava in the Czech Republic) in 1664, Esteyneffer joined the Company of Jesus in 1686 and studied pharmacy in Brno. He spent most of his life tending the sick in the north-western provinces of New Spain, dedicating the Florilegio 'to the most reverend missionary fathers of the Company of Jesus, sending as missionaries to the vast provinces of Sinaloa, Sonora, Taraumares, Tepeguanes, and others in the Province of New Spain'.

Like Agustín Farfán’s Tratado breve de medicina y de todas las enfermedades (Mexico, 1579 and reprinted in 1592 with additions) and Alonzo López de Hinojosos’ surgical text (Mexico, 1578 and enlarged in 1595), the Florilegio medicinal aims to give guidance to those lacking formal medical training and who needed to practice medicine and surgery. As Esteyneffer writes, the work is 'for the good of the poor and for those who lack doctors, in particular for the remote provinces where the reverend missionary fathers of the Company of Jesus administer'. While Esteyneffer’s target audience was missionary Jesuit fathers, the publication nevertheless was intended to reach a wider readership. And so on blood-letting, Esteyneffer states that:

The descriptions of and instructions for each ailment are written in the vernacular in a clear and accessible style. When discussing warts (ch. 25, book II), no purging or particular diet is necessary since they are not malignant. The simple ones that appear to be ‘hanging to the same skin by a thread’ can be removed by tying either a thread of silk or a strand of horse hair around them and pulling them off. Those that are attached more securely, in particular those smaller ones on the face or the hands, are to be removed with the juice of the hierba golondrina (euphorbia maculata, an indigenous Mexican plant). There were a number of other remedies, including lancing a wart with a scalpel or blade and then applying a little powdered sugar. It was also possible to anoint the warts with either lizard blood, castor oil, or vinegar mixed with goat dung.

The work, which incorporates considerable indigenous knowledge on pharmacology, was very popular. It was published four times in the eighteenth century, and nine times over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is evidence that it was still in use by some traditional healers (curanderos) in the 1970s. A full chapter index of the Florilegio medicinal (with headings in the original Spanish with translations) is available to download (read index).

The first book consists of 86 chapters on a variety of ailments, ordered in the traditional manner from head to toe, starting with headaches and covering subjects as varied as incontinence, nosebleeds, and scurvy. Of particular relevance are those chapters that relate to skin afflictions: chapter 81 (smallpox and measles) and 86 (syphilis). The second book, divided into ten parts, is entitled a 'Medicinal florilegium or brief epitome of medicines and surgery, which discusses various tumours, wounds, ulcers, fractures, dislocations, and finally on bleeding, blood-letting, cupping, and leeches'. In general, it covers ailments that are more the province of surgery rather than medicine (the latter which is dealt with in the first book). The final book deals with pharmacological material.

KWM

Further Reading:

• Juan de Esteyneffer, Florilegio medicinal (printed Mexico city 1712), ed. by Maria del Carmen Anzures y Bolaños (1981, 6th edn.)
  
• Amaia Cabranes, 'Évangélisation, science et empire au tournant du siècle (fin du XVIIe-début du XVIIIe siècle). Le Florilegio medicinal (1713) du frère jésuite Juan de Esteyneffer: un vade-mecum de médecine pour les missions de la Nouvelle-Biscaye', Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Débats, mis en ligne le 06 juin 2017
  
• Amaia Cabranes, 'Savoirs croisés en contexte colonial, la gestation d’une nouvelle science. Le Florilegio medicinal (1713) du frère jésuite Juan de Esteyneffer', Mémoire(s), identité(s), marginalité(s) dans le monde occidental contemporain, 15 (2015) - available online
  
• Sherry Fields, Pestilence and headcolds: encountering illness in colonial Mexico (New York, 2008)
  
• Paula De Vos, 'The art of pharmacy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico', Ph.D thesis, University of California, Berkeley (2001)
  

Image: Florilegio medicinal por Juan de Esteyneffer (Madrid, 1729). Image courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many new and exotic natural objects arrived in Europe from distant lands. Most were barely more than tokens of the creatures and plants from which they had been sourced. Among these were the strange scaly skins of 'lizards' brought from the 'Indies'.

These were in fact the skins of pangolins, or scaly anteaters. There are eight extant species, four in Asia and four in Africa. Most people today will have never heard of a pangolin, but recent media attention has brought them to the fore, as their conservation status remains precarious: several are on the brink of extinction. Their striking scales that made them so intriguing to 17th-century naturalists are also what make them the most traded mammal on the planet. Unfortunately, they are valued in traditional Chinese and Vietnamese 'medicines'.

Unlike many other exotic natural objects in the seventeenth century, pangolin specimens were easily preserved and transported to Europe from Asia and Africa, so they were not uncommon in curiosity cabinets. Along with specimens such as narwhal teeth and bird-of-paradise skins, pangolins seem to have been part of the requisite set of 'things' making up any cabinet of status, such as those of Ulysse Aldrovandi in Bologna, Manfredo Settala's museum in Milan, and the Royal Society collection. These scaled objects lacked a specific geographical identity - they were initially just considered as exotic things from the 'Indies'. Authors likened these specimens to other inanimate objects in collections, such as ivory scales, small caskets, shells, pine cones, and even an artichoke.

These scaly, carapaced beasts posed a problem for naturalists: where should they be placed in the wider scheme of nature? The heirarchical Great Chain of Being was the traditional structure that ordered all of Creation. Fish, reptiles (scaly, cold-blooded, oviparous), and invertebrates were somewhere near the bottom, whilst mammals (furry, warm-blooded, live-bearing quadrupeds) and birds were higher in the Chain, all joined by infinite linking forms.

Were the scaly-backed, furry-bellied pangolins reptiles or mammals? It seemed they were somewhere in between, so naturalists depicted them as liminal beasts on the border of these two categories. In amongst descriptions of various lizards in his Historiae animalium (1554), the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner had described 'animals similar to serpents' in 'Oriental India' with four feet and very long tails. In De quadrupedibus digitatis (1645), the Bolognese collector Ulysse Aldrovandi included a woodcut of his own scaly Lacertus Indicus ('Indian lizard') specimen among the exotic lizards, describing it as a 'congener of the Iguana' (see main image).  

Similarly, the apothecary Albertus Seba's luxurious collection catalogue pictured one pangolin extruding its long 'reptilian' tongue (see left-hand image) and another in the company of several snakes (see right-hand image). Pangolins were also included among reptiles in many other catalogues and works of taxonomy. For example, in the Synopsis animalium quadrupedum (1693) by the English naturalist John Ray, the lacertus peregrinus ('foreign lizard') was classified alongside the egg-laying reptiles or 'oviparous quadrupeds', 'on account of its form'.

'Armodillus, squamatus, major’ in Albertus Seba, Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri… (1734,), pl.LIIII

'Armodillus squamatus’ and ‘Jeunt tatu’ in Albertus Seba, Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri…. (1734), pl.LIII

Others made a point of the pangolin's liminality. The eminent Comte de Buffon described how 'essential differences' distinguished the pangolin and armadillo 'from all other quadrupeds' to such a degree that they were 'an intermediate class betwixt the quadrupeds and reptiles'. Even in the late eighteenth century, the naturalist Thomas Pennant described how 'these animals approach so nearly the genus of Lizards, as to be the links in the chain of beings which connect the proper quadrupeds with the reptile clans'. The pangolin's scaliness made it a hybrid creature, linking classical forms in the Great Chain.

Though we might expect something such as the pangolin to disrupt traditional categories by challenging them, structures like the Great Chain of Being were in fact very malleable: plurality and divisibility were built into this view of nature. Every possible form was expected to exist, the products of a playful and whimsical Nature. The pangolin was just one such bizarre divine joke, a scaly, fish-like mammal-lizard. It was a fascinating monstrous relic, a token of the mutability of the natural order. Its keratinous scales have always made the pangolin a conceptually and economically valuable enigma.

Natalie Lawrence

Further Reading:

• Natalie Lawrence, 'Exotic origins: The Emblematic Biogeographies of Early Modern Scaly Mammals', Itinerario, 39:1 (2015): 17-43
• Peter Mason, Before Disenchantment: Images of Exotic Animals and Plants in the Early Modern World (London, 2009)
• Dániel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (London, 2014)
• Karl A. Enenkel, 'The Species and Beyond: Classification and the Place of Hybrids in Early Modern Zoology' in Karl A. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (eds.), Zoology in Early Modern Culture: Intersections of Science, Theology, Philology, and Political and Religious Education, (Leiden and Boston, 2014), pp.57-148

Main image: 'Lacerta Indica Iuannae congener' from Ulysse Aldrovandi, De Quadrupedibus Digitatis viviparis libri tres Et de Quadrupedibus oviparis libri duo (1645), p.674

Dr Natalie Lawrence received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research examined the natural history of exotic monsters in early modern Europe. She currently teaches biology and also writes about monsters and other natural oddities for magazines and blogs. Her personal blog is The Manticore.

'Remember, that this is a composition not by a man of letters, but rather by a Painter, who nonetheless claims to have an eye for judging things in such a way that we may handle them with sounder truth than those who are mere professors of blind speculation.'

['Si ricordi, che questa è composizione, non già di uno, che faccia professione di lettere, ma si di un Pittore, il quale però pretende aver'occhio a proposito per giudicare le cose, che possiamo maneggiare, con più fonda verità di coloro, che sono meri professori di cieche speculazioni.']

When Agostino Scilla, painter and member of the Accademia della Fucina in Messina, Sicily, wrote his Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense - Letter of Reply concerning the marine bodies that are found petrified in various terrestrial locations (La Vana speculazione disingannata dal senso - Lettera responsiva circa i corpi marini che pietrificati si trovano in vari luoghi terrestri) in 1670, the discussion around the nature and origin of fossils was not a new subject. However, it proved to be central in an increased debate about the age and morphology of the Earth, contributing to a deep and radical redefinition of scientific research.

Scilla’s treatise was printed with no imprimatur and the frontispiece gave Naples as the place of publication instead of Messina, where it had in fact been printed. The false publication place may have been an attempt to avoid prosecution for heresy, even though the author did assure his readers that he was a good Catholic, who believed in both the Universal Deluge (a significant occurrence in the debate about fossils and their origin) and everything written in the sacred Scripture.

Vain Speculation stands out from other contemporary works for its interesting subject matter and for the particular nature of the author, who was at once a painter, an expert in antiquities, and a collector. In fact, when he later moved to Rome, his cabinet of naturalia was described by Filippo Buonanni as one of the most distinguished to visit. Although Scilla seems to have been very much part of a generation of erudite humanist naturalists, he was in fact a sort of brilliant dilettante. Rather than adopt a general concept of universal knowledge, he preferred a more definitive and rigorous method of enquiry.

Plate XIV from Agostino Scilla, La Vana Speculazione disingannata dal Senso (1670)

Conceived as an epistola addressed to Giovan Francesco Buonamico - a Maltese physician, poet, and naturalist who believed that fossils were created in the ground - Vain Speculation is an attempt to demonstrate the organic nature of fossils. From scholars such as Aristotle, Francesco Stelluti, and Fr. Athanasius Kircher to church leaders, fossils were understood traditionally as a lusus naturae, a kind of joke to express nature’s creative power. Yet Scilla presents these so-called lithified things as ex-vivi; in essence, the remains of dead animals that had been transported to land by catastrophic events, such as floods, and then conserved in the layers of soil.

Scilla is neither the first to hypothesise this nor did he give the most complete and precise explanation about fossils, but he was remarkably coherent. As a member of the Fucina, he had associations with other naturalists like Ferrante Imperato, Fabio Colonna, and Paolo Boccone. He was also surely aware of Nicolaus Steno’s geology studies, even if he did not mention him in Vain Speculation. As the title suggests, Scilla uses direct observation as a method. He writes only about things that he has seen, comparing the fossils he has found with contemporary shells and sea animals by using careful observation and detection. He reveals the anatomical resemblances between lithified things and living marine creatures.

Frontispiece of the Latin edition of Agostino Scilla, La Vana Speculazione disingannata dal Senso (Rome, 1752). The same image was used on the vernacular edition; only the title was changed.

As he was a refined still-life painter, Scilla was able to create each illustrated plate we see in Vain Speculation. Turned into engravings by Pietro Santi Bartoli, they serve as an important example of how the field of scientific illustration began to change its purpose by the end of the 17th century. Far from being mere embellishments or reproductions of standardised models, Scilla’s plates are richly detailed and relate directly to the text, thus assisting the reader in visualising concepts and following the author’s line of argument. The treatise was written in vernacular and only translated into Latin in 1752, and so these plates were also important for Scilla’s standing within the international scientific community.

Maria Cristina Bastante

Further Reading:

• La Vana Speculazione disingannata dal Senso [original version available on Google Books]
  
• La Vana Speculazione disingannata dal Senso [English translation, Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge]
  
• Marco Romano, '"The vain speculation disillusioned by the sense": The Italian painter Agostino Scilla (1629-1700) called "The Discoloured", and the correct interpretation of fossils as "lithified organisms" that once lived in the sea', Historical Biology 26 (2013): 1-21
  

Main image: Plate XIX from Agostino Scilla, La Vana Speculazione disingannata dal Senso (1670)

Dr. Maria Cristina Bastante received her Ph.D from Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza'. Her dissertation was on the effects of globalisation on Contemporary Visual Arts. She is currently researching naturalia and artificialia in Mannerist and Baroque collections.

Martín Arredondo’s Obras de Albeytería (Veterinary Works) is arguably the most important work on equine medical care in 17th-century Spain. Describing himself in the book as a ‘master of shoeing, veterinary care and surgeon, a gentleman in the Old Royal Guards of Castille’ (‘maestro de Herrador, Albeytar, y Cirujano, Gentil-Hombre en las Reales Guardas Viejas de Castilla’), Arredondo published the text in successive stages.

The first part, Recopilación de Albeytería, sacada de varios autores (Veterinary compilation, from various authors) was published in Madrid in 1658. The second volume was published separately in 1661, also in Madrid, under the title Tratado segundo. Flores de Albeytería. Sacada de various autores (Second treatise. The flowers of veterinary care. From various authors). Both volumes appeared together in 1669 under the title Obras de Albeyteria. Prima, segunda, y tercera parte. Ahora nuevamente corregidas y añadidas (Veterinary works. First, second, and third part. Now newly corrected with additions). The first part of this compilation corresponds to the Recopilación, while the second part repeats much from the first part though with additional material, and the third part is an extended version of Flores de Albeytería.

The text was republished numerous times in Madrid – 1677, 1705, 1723, and 1728 – and in Zaragoza – 1704 and 1706. Many sections of the Obras de Albeytería are relevant to skin, with detailed instructions for bloodletting and the description and treatment of assorted skin ailments. The relevant chapters from Book One follow.

• Ch. 2: Trata de las colores, y blancos de los Cavallos (on horse colours and white horses)
  
• Ch. 4: Trata de las Apostema (abscesses) 
  
• Ch. 8: De la erisipela (erysipelas)
  
• Ch. 9: De los albarazos (vitilago: rough white patches on skin)
  
• Ch. 13: Trata de las mataduras de la Cruz, y lomos (sores due to friction on back and sides)
  
• Ch. 16: De los lamparones (scrofula)
  
• Ch. 24: Del carbunco (carbuncles)
  
• Ch. 25: Del lobado (red swollen tumour)
  
• Ch. 30: De la enfermedad dicha herpes (herpes)
  
• Ch. 35: De las heridas penetrantes del vientre (penetrating belly wounds)
  
• Ch. 36: De la cornada en el pecho (wound on chest caused by an animal’s horn)
  
• Ch. 42: Del tumor, ò apostema ventoso (tumours)
  
• Ch. 43: Del apostema aquoso (watery abcess)
  
• Ch. 64: Trata de el arestin (mange)
  
• Ch. 66: Trata de las grietas y respigones (fissures and open sores)
  
• Ch. 67: Trata del gavarro (inflamed and suppurating ulcer just above hoof)
  
• Ch. 68: Trata de la corba, socroba, y sobra corba (ulcer on hocks)
  
• Ch. 69: Del agrion (hard painful swelling on hocks)
  
• Ch. 70: Trata de el esparaban (tumour on hocks, causes lameness)
  
• Ch. 71: Trata de los alifafes (tumour on hocks due to overwork)
  
• Ch. 72: De la grapa (sore between hock and knee)
  
• Ch. 73: Trata de la elefancia ('elephantiasis')
  
• Ch. 86: Trata del pelo en el casco (hair on the hoof)
  
• Ch. 89: Trata, que es cirro (hard tumours on skin)
  
• Ch 90: Trata de las parotidas (ulcers behind the ears)
  
• Ch. 92: Trata de las llagas cabernosas (fistulous sores)
  
• Ch. 93: Trata de las quemaduras de fuego (burns caused by fire)
  
• Ch. 95: De la enfermedad de lepra ('leprosy')
  
• Ch. 103: Trata de la mordedura de lobos (on wolf bites)
  
• Ch. 108: De las condiciones que se han de guardar en las sangrias (conditions which must be kept when blood-letting)
  
• Ch. 109: Trata de que parte se han de hazer las sangrias (on which part should there be blood-letting)
  
• Ch. 113: Trata de la diferencia de los colores (on the different colours of horses)
  

These are followed by an antidotary (‘Antidotario de los medicamentos’) with several relevant recipes, including: 'De emplastos de sarna' (mange plasters) in chapter 6; 'De las cataplasmas' (poultices) in chapter 7; 'De los unguentos lenitivos' (softening unguents) in chapter 11. Within chapter 15 are recipes for: 'Polvos para cicatrizar' (powders to make wounds close), 'polvos causticos' and 'para carnes apulmonadas' (caustic powders). Chapter 16 presents a recipe for unguents for fissures and scabies (‘De unguentos para respigones, grietas, y arestin’). We read of drinks to fatten a horse in chapter 19 ('De los bebidos para engordar los Cavallos') and of beauty baths in chapter 21 ('De los baños estiticos'). Within the following chapter (22), there are a number of recipes of interest: for deep wounds ('para geringar llagas profundas'); to remove leeches ('para quita las sanguijuelas'); for ulcers behind the ears ('para parotidas'); for abscesses ('para las apostemas'); for wound-closing powders ('de polvos cicatrizantes'); for erysipelas ('para la erisipela'); for 'leprosy' ('para la lepra'); for when hairs fall out of the tail ('para quando se pela la cola'); to make the hair black ('para hazer el pelo negro'); for mange ('para la sarna'); and one for leeches ('para sanguijuelas').

The most relevant chapters from the second book of treatise one are those that cover the colours of mules ('de las colores de las mulas', chapter 8), dangerous animal punctures ('de las picaduras morsivas de animal infecto', chapter 17), gun-shot wounds ('de las heridas de arcabuz', chapter 29), and on the best time to let blood ('trata del tiemp en que conviene sangrar', chapter 39). This is then followed by a short treatise of experimental recipes ('Tratado de experiencias muy utiles y provechosas') including those for: mange plaster ('emplastro para la sarna'), wound-closing powders ('polvos cicatrizantes'), and cancerous sores ('para llagas cancerous'). Within the third part of treatise two (Flores de Albeyteria), chapter seven deals with cancer, while chapter 12 is concerned with whether a horse can fall in love with its shadow ('Trata si se puede enamorar un cavallo de su sombra'). A collection of medicinal simples in alphabetical order then follows.

The extract translated here is from the second chapter (first part) of the Obras de Albeytería. It discusses the colours, complexions, and temperaments of different horses.

Download extract:

KWM

Image: Zodiac horse with instructions for bleeding from Martín Arredondo, Obras de albeyteria: ... aora neuvamente corregidas, y anñadidas ... Y aora nuevamente añadido la verdadera sanidad del cavallo, y explicacion de sus enfermedades .... (Zaragossa, 1704). Copy held in the U.S. National Library of Medicine. View image here.

Further Reading:

• Francisco Teixidó Gómez and Jesús Teixidó Gómez, ‘Las Obras de Albeyeria de Martín Arredondo’, Asclepio LIV (2002), pp. 165-80
  
• Prima, segunda, y tercera parte Obras de Albeyteria por Martin Arredondo, su autor, maestro de Herrador, Albeytar, y Cirujano, Gentil-Hombre en las Reales Guardas Viejas de Castilla (various printings are available online, the downloadable extract above is from the 1728 Madrid edition)
  

Beards were one of the most important facial signs of upper-class masculinity in sixteenth-century Europe, and contemporary portraits show men displaying beards in a wide variety of styles and shapes. Beards were commented upon by humanists, physicians, barbers, physiognomers, and in books of secrets. Giovanni Battista Della Porta wrote in his De humana physiognomonia (1586):

Nature adorned the jaws with hair in order to build an ornament, and not just to cover them; the bearded man appears much more worthy of veneration. […] Hair is a sign of virility and strength; those who have a long beard and are full of hair are strong and brave; indeed, a chin with no hair is sign of a womanly and weak nature, and of cowardice.

Popular wisdom too had its own traditions. A woman grew a beard as consequence of her own bad habits, hence the proverb: ‘greet a bearded woman with stones’ (femina barbuta con pietre si salute). On this Della Porta noted:

Bearded women are full of life, luxurious, and men-like due to their warm complexion. The natural cause of this that heat creates hair, therefore those parts which are most hairy are the warmest. […] Abundant hair shows abundance of excrements and semen. […] Atistotle confirms that women who do not menstruate have a beard for the reasons mentioned above.

Furthermore, he gave both physiological and teleological reasons why men – and men alone – had beards:

nature made bodies according to their habits. Women do not need as many covering and protection as men do in order to fight the cold, since they always stay indoors. […] All things of cold temperament are naked and glabrous. […] Women’s bodies are glabrous for lack of heat; eunuchs are hairless for the same reason.

Learned physicians such as Gerolamo Mercuriale wrote about beards too, indulging in scientific and Galenic causal explanations. The physiology of facial hair, however, remained standard throughout the early modern period; a beard was understood to be a vaporous ‘superfluity’, something akin to sweat, which passed through the skin’s pores becoming thick once it came into contact with the external environment. The density or softness of a man’s skin was reflected in the quality of his facial hair. A beard, therefore, was a type of cutaneous excrement, linked to the body’s temperature, and as the product of a warm and dry temperament, it was typical of males in their ‘virile’ stage of life - roughly between 25 and 35.

The physiological purposes of beards were presumed to be threefold. Firstly, hair protected the body as a form of natural clothing. Secondly, that facial hair was in fact made up of excrement, which needed to be expelled from the body. Finally, facial hair was the sign of specifically male, intellectual and sexual activities. Although hair was sited at the extremities of the body, it was believed to originate from the same location as the reproductive glands. And as the brain was perceived as the biggest gland, responsible for intellectual activity, it needed a covering of hair.  Marco Antonio Olmi, physician in Padua and Mercuriale’s pupil, composed an erudite monograph titled Physiologiae barbae humanae (1600) in which he not only discribed the physical features of beards, but also coupled beards to brain waves. Linking facial hair to male intellect, Olmi argued that the primary cause of a beard was the rapid movement of ‘spirits’ in the brain, and the heat of the head was thus a sign of intense intellectual activity.

Titian, Equestrian portrait of Charles V (1548), Prado, Madrid.

But beards also had an ornamental function and conferred dignity to the male face. Male physiology may have been responsible for beards, but societal conventions and physical actuality became inextricable. Not all beards were the same however; certain styles denoted different social markers, and the multiple varieties of beard were attested to by the activities of early modern barber-surgeons. Beards served to differentiate between males, as well as separating men from boys. In 1643, the Venetian writer Gian Francesco Loredan in his Bizzarrerie Accademiche claimed that ‘those who do not have a beard could not even be called men, since they lack the best witness of their virility.’ In a time of foreign conquest and occupation, the fear of appearing too effeminate was acute, especially among Italians, and a beard served as a weapon to mask those anxieties.  

Beards even entered the culture of anatomical connections between the vegetal and human worlds [see: Tagliacozzi and Citrusmania]. Tomaso Tomai’s widely popular Idea del Giardino del Mondo (1582) – part book of secrets and part popular scientific encyclopedia – made an original comparison between human beards and grass. In this he repeated the traditional explanation of human beards as dried vapor coming out of the pores of the skin, although he needed to explain why men had them, and women and children did not. Tomai wrote that the human beard extruded from the vapors of the body as grass grew from the vapors of the earth:

just as grass does grow neither in extremely dry and sandy places, nor in too humid and watery soils, so chidlren and women do not have hair on their faces and bodies because they are so cold that the pores of their skin are closed and vapors cannot get out, or they drown within the softness and humidity of their bodies.

Here, the usual theme of the complexional difference between the sexes took a new turn, in which vegetal and human bodies obeyed the same logic.

PS

First image shows: Tiberio Malfi, Nuova prattica della decoratoria manuale e della sagnia (Naples, 1629): gallery of famous barbers with their famous beards.

Further readings:

Jean-Marie Le Gall, Un idéal masculin. Barbes et moustaches, xv-xviii siècles (Paris: Payot&Rivages, 2011).

Douglas Biow, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy: Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

In the early modern period, a process of autonomization of the skin as surface – and of surface as access point for the knowledge and treatment of the deep body – took place. Such a phenomeno can be grasped, among other things, by reading manuals for barber-surgeons written by eminent members of the guild in Italy between 1584 and 1671 (the most important ones were written by Pietro Magni, Tiberio Malfi, Tarduccio Salvi da Macerata, and Cinzio D’Amato). The view on the human body emerging from these manuals is strikingly different both from that of Galenic-style internal physician – a body crossed by the four humours – and from that of the new Renaissance anatomist – made of solid organs but conceived in terms of an architectural structure going deeper and deeper, from the skin to the muscules to the bones veins and arteries to the nerves [fig. 1]. The barbers’ body is marked by its superficial characateristics: the network of the veins to be opened for bloodletting, the softenss of the skin to be cauterized, the parts of the surface on which cupping glasses could be applied, the parts to be anointed with special unguents, and, for the most advanced, the skin to open to extract bullets as well as bladder stones. An entirely superficial topography of the body.

Here is for example the description of the veins written in the vernacular by surgeon Tarduccio Salvi da Macerata in 1650: “The vein is a conduct, or a vessel, round-shaped, coming from the liver: its substance is rather nervous, little sensible, and included into the spermatic parts […] Its function is to carry the blood which nourishes the parts of the body […] Veins have just one tunic, which is composed by three kinds of threads: the straight ones, which run along the length of the vein; the oblique ones, which run obliquely; and the circular ones, which go about in circles.” Straight threads attract the blood and other humors; oblique threads retain it, so that it does not go down or up, more than what is needed to nourish the body; circular threads expels unwanted humors and substances. And the feasibility of phlebotomy must be assess by looking at and touching the surface of the body: “when the patients’ veins are not manifest neither to sight nor to touch,” or when the veins are too small – in this latter case leeches must be applied [fig. 2].

Fig. 2: Tiberio Malfi, Il barbiere (Naples, 1626): diagram and drawing of the different kinds of veins. 

By the middle of the seventeenth century human skin as surface acquired autonomy as an object of knowledge and practice. At the same time a class of experts on this surface emerged following a path which was in large measure independent from the transformations of Galenic medicine and the rise of mechanistic medicine which are typically described as central scientific developments in this period. To be clear, no one could deny that these transformations played a part in the emergence of skin as a specific object of practical and theoretical knowledge. Rather, we must fully acknowledge the role played by emprical surgeons and barber-surgeons who became experts on skin by inverting the classical path of medical knowledge – not from the inner body to its surface as manifestation of internal humoral imbalances, but rather from the surface to the knowledge and the treatment of the inner body.

Further reading:

• Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
• Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010)

Fig. 1 / Title image: Cinzio D’Amato, Prattica nuova et utilissima di tutto quello, ch’al diligente Barbiero s’appartiene: cioè di cavar sangue, medicar ferrite, & balsamar corpi humani (Venice, 1669). 

One of the texts our project most frequently cites is Girolame Mercuriale's De morbis cutaneis, On Diseases of the Skin. De morbo cutaneis was the first printed tract on skin disease and in it Mercuriale writes that: "The Skin, all physicians apparently agree, has been placed about the bodies of animals as a protective covering for the flesh and members. Hippocrates in his book on bones seems to have said that it is a binding for the body parts, which, being individually separate, require a common bond, and this is the skin. Thus the divine Plato rightly likened the skin to a fisherman’s net, as Galen did also." In comparing skin to a fisherman's net, Mercuriale was referring to the porous quality of skin - that is, to the way in which skin functioned as a means of eliminating waste and protecting the body from harmful substances in the air. Linked to bodily functions, the idea of skin as a fisherman's net directly informed concepts of disease, but it was also a rich metaphor in itself, and it spoke to a literary practice in the medical treatment of skin which was common throughout the century: the practice of attempting to define the qualities of skin via metaphor or analogy.  

Image from Hans Von Gersdorff, Feldbuch der Wundarzney, 1517.

In 1517, for example, the German barber-surgeon Hans von Gersdorff, wrote a bestselling vernacular book "Fieldbook of surgery". Von Gersdorff's text is well known for its graphic woodcut images of amputations, prosthetics and trephination, as well as for the text's detailed description of the techniques involved in each. But notable for Renaissance Skin is the first chapter on anatomy and the description of skin with which it began. Von Gersdorff described skin as "Deshalb an der hut ansufahen ist, wann die bekumet an dem ersten unnd von uffzen als ein rynd des baums. Und ist ein deckel des leibs/ uff den faede men der sennsen und aderen zusamen gesetzt/ beschaff en die anderen glyd z beschirmen", i.e. "To begin with the skin, for considering it [or caring about it][ it is first like the bark of the tree. And it is the cover of the body, which binds the sinews and the blood together." This analogy is the earliest we have found to date of what would become a much more common motif for thinking about skin by the end of the century. In comparing skin to bark, von Gersdorff, like Mercuriale, was drawing on classical references, more specifically on an important agricultural text by the Roman writer Columella.  Der Ackerwerk, which would be translated into German and printed by the in Von Gersdorff's home town of Strasbourg some years after the initial appearance of Feldbuch. The analogy with the bark of the tree spoke to practical overlaps with agriculture, as surgeons throughout the century investigated grafting techniques, most notably the Italian Gaspare Tagliacozzi, about whom Paolo has written at more length. The comparison between skin and bark was only one instance where writers interested in skin compared it to other natural surfaces, or, alternatively, where writers interested in other natural surfaces compared it to skin. As our project has found, early modern concepts of skin extended outwards into the natural world. The visual ironies of the commonalities between bark and skin may have informed the frequently referenced artistic trope of the arrow piercing skin, as for example in Albrecht Dürer's meditation on death in the context of hunting, in the stag. 

But natural surfaces were not the only medium medical writers drew on when they debated the nature of skin; artificial surfaces could also be invoked. The correlation between architecture and anatomy was frequently referenced by writers in both fields. So, while the architectural writer Vitruvius compared the walls of a house to the bones of a body, and its paneling to skin, Vesalius, the author of De Fabrica, compared the body to a house, with the bones as the foundations, and the skin its surface. Writers using this analogy can be seen as alluding to the stability produced by skin. They assumed its integral role in maintaining the structure of the body. This metaphor is especially helpful for thinking about the cosmetic function of skin, and the way in which decoration and ornamentation were considered by early modern physicians as physiological qualities of the body. 

Juan Valverde de Amusco, Vivae imagines partium corporis humani aereis formos expressae (1579), RCSEd

In the context of our project, one final metaphor deserves particular mention - the comparison between skin and clothing. This appeared in numerous different kinds of texts, from pharmaceutical tracts to philosophical meditations on the purpose of the body. The visual element in this, in which skin could be put on and taken off, played out in many different ways, not least in the dramatic écorchés or images of flayed skin which appeared in anatomical but also in religious imagery of the time. The poetics of skin as clothing spoke to broader cultural ideas of the importance of appearance but also its essential instability. Appearances could inform, they could also deceive. The temporariness and mutability which lay behind medical descriptions of the essential nature of skin only reinforced this.  

In 1601, the Wittenberg physician Jan Jessen drew these metaphors together. In his short tract, De cuta et cutaneis affectibus, Jessen described skin in all these ways. "Finally, it is the clothing (tegument) of the entire body... for Plato a great net, for Hippocrates a chain of all the parts of the body, for it is the sheath of all the organs of the body. Namely a fortification and almost a bulwark, it evades by thickness and density". Skin as clothing, as a net, as a chain, as a sheath, as a fortification, or a bulwark - in this list, Jessen pointed out the many variations that explanations for skin had taken in the previous century, but he also linked them together, showing how each metaphor explained a different material quality of skin.

Metaphors and their role in describing skin tell us many different things, not least about the difficulty in defining skin in the sixteenth century. Unlike other bodily parts, the function of skin was not well understood (Aristotle denied it had function, while Galen was ambivalent on the matter). Writers lacked the ability to provide it with an easy, single-sentence definition. In turning to metaphor however, early modern writers revealed the multiple material qualities of skin which coded its interpretation and social function.

HM

Title image: Girolame Mercuriale, De morbis cutaneis, et omnibus corporis humani excrementis tractatus, 1572

Further Reading:

• H. Mercurialis, De morbis cutaneis, et omnibus corporis humani excrementis (Venice, 1572, and later editions)
• Hans von Gersdorff, Feldbuch der Wundarzney, Strasburg, 1517.
• Jan Jessen, De cuta et cutaneis affectibus, Wittenberg, 1601. 

A recently published article in Renaissance Studies by Bernardo Jerosch Herold makes available for the first time a translation into English of a diary entry by the famous Swiss physician and alchemist Leonhard Thurnheysser (1531-1596). In it Thurnheysser describes in great detail the skin of "BlackAfricans" - enslaved men and women he saw on the streets of Renaissance Lisbon. 

The German-speaking lands are often seen as remote from the slave-trade and the kinds of sea-faring activities which enabled them. But, as Herold's article clearly shows, the global city of Lisbon was a trading zone where ideas and people from all over the world encountered each other. Through investment and finance many German families were involved in the early slave trade, and German-speaking travellers left important accounts of their travels and their impressions of different parts of Africa, of enslaved peoples and of other parts of the world.

Thurnheysser describes the appearance of enslaved men and women at some length:

"In the country of the Ethiopians or the Arabs, the inhabitants are called Minae or Minnaej... [they] are the mightiest and most beautiful ones... They also have a most smooth, glossy and even skin, and also their bodies are the most perfect and strong, as compared to other moors... The moors, however, who come from the islands of D. Thomae or of the Capitae Viridis or the green head, or from Malagetta, or have been brought, are not that black, but rather of a dark brown colour and mainly in their faces..  Several among them had been strangely adorned as youths by cutting them on both sides of their mouth, from the forehead until their mouth, in such a way that the cicatrices or scars of such cuts join the corners of the mouth, and [that] the wounds are far away from each other, which they consider to be a great adornment...Sometimes they also cut themselves on their cheeks, near their ears, for health reasons, with three or four crosswise slashes in order to bleed from them, as it happens with us when practicing phlebotomia or bloodletting." (483-484).

For obvious reasons, Thurnheysser's account is of special interest to the Renaissance Skin team. Descriptions of black skin appear in accounts by medical practitioners throughout the early modern period. In his 1578 The Historie of Man, the English barber-surgeon John Banister wrote "Every one knoweth that the Moores have onely white teeth, but blacke skinne and nayles", (before going on to add, "but it is not a thing so common(ly known) that they and also the inhabitants of such countries are without seames in their skulls.") In 1646, the physician Thomas Browne contributed what is probably the best known writings on the subject -  the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors, which dedicated three chapters to refuting popular misconceptions about the colour of human skin. However, few of these accounts are derived from personal experience, and fewer still account for skin as a personal phenomenon. 

Rua Nova dos Mercadores (New Street of Merchants). This anonymous sixteenth century depiction illustrates the commercial hub of Renaissance Lisbon. Wikimages.

As a relatively early and highly personal reaction to a phenomenon that he has witnessed 'in the flesh', Thurnheysser is therefore significant. First, while brief, his account pays attention to regional difference and variation. Thurnheysser does not 'lump' all enslaved peoples together, but is highly cognizant of differences, not only in their origin and appearance, but also in customs and ways of life. He is quick to interpret aesthetic and medical customs, and he is as interested in markings and alterations to the skin as he is in its colour, tone or texture. In this sense, it is important to note that although skin often featured heavily in such accounts, skin colour was only one part of a larger set of questions writers such as Thurnheysser had about other people and their cultures. Thurnheysser was equally, perhaps more, interested in markings, decoration and medicinal uses of the skin. While he simply mentions variation in skin colour and tone (contrasting the smooth, glossy and even skin of the Minae to the 'not that dark' skin of the Moors), his extremely detailed account of the scarification of 'adorned' youths, suggests that he paid even closer attention to individual markings. Thurnheysser posited that some of these may have had medical purposes. We cannot know how he reached his conclusions, or whether he spoke to the young people in question, but here it is clear that Thurnheysser's own medical interests helped provide a prism through which he interpreted the marks and practices of another culture. 

Such an account of skin, and such accounting for its importance, was neither systemic, nor theoretical. It was not inherited from Hippocrates or Aristotle. It was not (unlike much of Thurnheysser's other writing about savageness or strength) a matter of received discourse, i.e. induced by the dominant tropes of cultural discourse, or held in common with the majority of other literary treatments. So what, precisely, does it mean?

This blog post is not intended to offer any definite answers; merely to point out the significance of such a personal account and the idiosyncrasy of its contents. Thurnheysser's private diary makes clear that early modern medical writers encountered skin in highly personal ways. There was no single or even dominant explanation for the colour of skin. There was no established consensus on the importance of skin colour. While it is impossible to divorce Thurnheysser's interrogation of the meaning of "moorish" skin from the context of the slave market in which he encountered it, (nor would it be desirable to do so), it remains important to stress that even in such depersonalizing contexts, skin was, for Thurnheysser at least, a site of personal expression and subjectivity, and subsequently a locus for the making of cultural meaning and medical speculation. 

Main Image: Leonhard Thurnheysser, Etching, c.16th Century. Courtesy US National Library of Medicine. 

Further Reading:

• Bernardo Jerosch Herold, "The Diary of the Swiss Leonhard Thurnheysser and Black Africans in Renaissance Lisbon", Renaissance Studies, (2017):  https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12332
• Kate Lowe, "The Global Population of Renaissance Lisbon", in, The Global City on the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon, edited by Annemarie Jordan Geschwend and Lowe, pp. 57-75. (London: Paul Holberton, 2015)
• Kate Lowe and T. F. Earle eds. Black Africans in Renaissance Europe

In just under four hundred questions, a hugely popular text that circulated in late medieval and early modern Europe under the title, tried to provide short answers to questions as varied as why do cats’ eyes shine in the dark or why do men sneeze. The text was termed in both the original Latin and in its vernacular translations as the “Problemata Aristotelis” (Problems of Aristotle). However it should not be confused with the ‘original’ ancient Problemata Aristotelis, which is a collection of around nine hundred question and answers composed in Ancient Greek by multiple sources and authors. Following the ancient model of question and answers, the popular early modern Problems of Aristolte, was composed probably around the fourteenth or fifteenth century. 

Like its classical model, it focuses on questions regarding the body and natural history, and has been titled Omnes homines (from its Latin incipit) in modern scholarship. Numerous editions circulated in Latin, English, French and German, from the late middle ages to the twentieth century. Questions were often added or removed in editions, and other texts might augment the volume. The early English translation cited below, published in Edinburgh in 1595, also included translations of an shortened version of the Problems of Alexander Aphrodisias (c. 3^rd century AD) and problems written in the same format by the Italian philosopher MarcAntonio Zimara (d. 1532).

Unsurprisingly, there are many references to skin and hair in Omnes homines, and here is a small selection:  

(5) Question. Why haue women longer hayre then men?

Answer. Because women are moyster than men, and more flegmatick, and therefore there is more matter of hayre in them, and by a consequence, the length also of their hayre doth follow. And further more this matter is more increased in women then in men, from the interior parts, and especially in the time of their monthlie tearmes and flowres, because the matter doth then ascend, Wherby the humor Which breedeth the hayre doth encrease. And   Albertus doth say, that if the hayre of a woman in the time of her flowers be put into doung,    a venemous serpent is engendered of it. The second answer is, because women want beards, and so the matter of the beard doth goe into the matter of hayre.

[7] Question. Why haue some men curled hayre and some smoothe?

Answer. The answer is, that the cause of the curling of the hayre is great abundance of heate, so that if there be much heate in a man then his hayre doth curle, and grow vpward. And a signe of this is proued true, because that sometimes a man doth enter into a bath smoothe hayred, and afterward by the bath becommeth curled. And therefore the keepers of bathes haue often curled hayre, and also the Aethiopians and cholericke men. But the cause of the smoothnes, is the abundance of moyst humors, Which tend downeward, and a proofe of this is, because that women for the most part haue smoothe hayre, because they haue much humiditie in them and small heate.

[12] Question. Why are women smoothe and fayre in respect of men?

Answer. The answer is according vnto Aristotle De Generatione Animalium because that in women all humiditie and superfluitie, Which are the matter and cause of the bayre of the bodie is expelled with their monthly tearmes, the Which superfluitie remaineth in men, and through vapors doth passe into hayre. And a signe of this is, because women haue seldome any running at the nose, or impostume, or ulcer, because such matter is expelled also. And we see some olde women begin to haue a beard in their olde age, that is after fortie or fiftie yeares of age, When their flowers haue ceased, as Aristotle doth teach De animalibus liber 9.

[368] Question. Why are such as sleepe much euill disposed, and haue an ill colour?

Because that in sleep much moysture is gathered together, Which cannot be consumed, Which is expelled in waking: and so it doth couet to goe out through the superficiall parts of the bodie, and especially it coueteth to the face, & so is cause of a bad colourias it appeareth in such as are fleugmatike Who desire more sleepe then others.

Animals are not neglected either, as this question asks after asking numerous queries on why people go grey:

[15] Question. Why doe Wolues grow grislie?

Answer. The better to vnderstand this question, note the difference betwixt graynes and grislynes, because that graynes is caused through the defect of a naturall heate, but grislienes through deuouring and eating, as Aristotle witnesseth, 7. de animalibus The Wolfe being a very deuouring beast, and a great eater, he letteth it downe gluttonoasly without chewing, and that at once enough for three dayes: of Which meate grosse vapours are engendered in the Wolfes body, & by a consequence grislienes Secondly, graynes and grislines do differ, because graynes is onely in the head, and grislines ouer all the bodie.

The answers are not novel, and are based on standard humoreal theory. However they are helpful in understanding how early modern readers not trained in contemporary medical discourse, might understand how the body functioned and how puzzling might be understood. And I hope it might encourage blog readers to explore this wonderful text and read on why your hair stands up on end or how to tell whether a person is a wrong’un by looking at their nails...

Image: The Problems of Aristotle, with other Philosophers and Physicians, 1670, Wellcome Library

Further reading:

• Ann Blair, 1999. “Authorship in the Popular ‘Problemata Aristotelis.’” Early Science and Medicine 4: 189–227. https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/29669455
• Ann Blair, ‘The Problemata as a Natural Philosophical Genre’ in Anthony Grafton and Nancy G. Siraisi, Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass. 1999):  pp. 171-204
• Michele Goyens  & Pieter De Leemans, ed.,  Aristotle's "Problemata" in Different Times and Tongues (Leuven University Press: Leuven, 2007)

Edition cited:

The problemes of Aristotle with other philosophers and phisitions. Wherein are contayned diuers questions, with their answers, touching the estate of mans bodie, printed by Robert Waldgrave, Edinburgh, 1595 (available on Early English Books Online https://eebo.chadwyck.com/home)

In The Slaughtered Pig (1662), Caspar Netscher depicted a hybrid domestic scene that gravitates between kitchen interior, laboratory, workshop, and still life painting. The space in the foreground of the panel is entirely occupied by the stretched skin of the freshly flayed animal. The pig’s head has been quartered and set aside, and its guts have been appropriately cleaned and put inside the earthenware jug behind it, by its feet. The skin hangs wide open on a wooden ladder, like the surface of the stretched-out canvas on a wooden easel. The artist offers a detailed, surgical view (in the sense of both operation and inquisition) of the animal’s interior: fluid brushstrokes in various shades of white and lighter tones of red delineate the extended body of the pig, mimicking the elasticity of the skin covering its drawn out tissues and muscles. At the center of both the image and the animal’s corpse, we find the pig’s kidneys, depicted as two perfectly round, symmetrical and full spheres.

Although the hands and the labour behind the preparation of the animal’s body have been erased, there is yet one human element that remains visible. Behind the flayed body of the pig and its chopped-off head, a kid takes the empty bladder of the pig with both of his hands; he holds its neck firmly with his right hand, and places the other gently upon the thin and transparent surface of the bladder’s tissue. He brings the bubble-shaped organ to his mouth, and blows. As he pumps, he fills in the insides of both the organic pouch and his cheeks, whose surface too becomes round, full, and flushed.

Skin does not only possess tactile and visual properties, but it can also be apprehended through taste. In that sense, the skin of Netscher’s slaughtered pig possessed multiple sensory affordances and possible afterlives: it could be flayed, gutted, stretched, hanged, boiled, cooked, licked, sucked, chewed, digested, dissected, painted, displayed, and seen.

In his series of letters to the Royal Society, the seventeenth century Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek described a world made up of an infinite number of globular particles in continuous interaction, as if in one shared and extended skin. Contrary to general belief, he did not only rely on vision and the microscope—a visual tool, nor did he only account for the visible aspects of the world, in order to make sense of the world. For the early modern man, anything that could be sensed, could be known.

Leeuwenhoek reflects on the sense of taste as object and method of inquiry. When he accounts for taste, he does so based on the physical effect caused by the touch of the particles that make up one substance against the surface of the skin of the tongue. For instance, the sharp angles of the pricks on the surface of a pepper corn press hard into the globules of the tongue, causing its pungent flavour.

On the other hand, Leeuwenhoek performed a number of gustatory practices as valid means for investigation. In a letter from 1674, he described the process of cutting up the brain of a cow with a knife, and then he indicates: ‘I apply my mouth, and there suck as strongly as I can.’ The Dutch scientist might have obtained the head of the cow from his local butcher, laid it open, and observed it within the walls of his own kitchen in Delft. In fact, domestic dissection and using one’s mouth as a tool for experimentation was a common early modern scientific practice. For instance, after his arrival in Amsterdam in 1629, René Descartes narrates: ‘I went nearly every day to the house of a butcher, to see him kill animals, and brought from there to my lodgings the parts that I wished to anatomize more at leisure.’ William Harvey, Regnier de Graaf, and Marcello Malpighi tasted, compared, and assessed the flavour of various human and animal organs and secretions. After having sucked the matter from the cow’s head, Leeuwenhoek put it under the microscope, and saw it was made of bubbles, just as the teeth of a cow, saliva, canvas, wood, sugar, salt, beaten glass. In that sense, the mouth and the reflecting surface of the microscope, became the second skin worn by the naked eye, making subject to perception what would otherwise have remained invisible.

The place of taste, however, went beyond the walls of the kitchen and the laboratory. In his Libro dell’arte (1437), the Italian Renaissance artist and writer Cennino Cennini instructed the reader, an apprentice on the art of painting, to grease a stone with bacon fat or lard, in order to make reliefs for wall or panel painting. And when the Flemish artist and writer Karel van Mander described the work painted from life by Brueghel the Elder, he tells: ‘he swallowed all those mountains and rocks which, upon returning home, he spat them out again onto canvas and panels.’ This might suggest that representations of reality were not conceived purely in visual terms via the exercise of mental faculties. Instead, they were built with the things and interactions that make the world itself.

When Netscher introduced the bubble-blowing character in the painting, he was not only showing his painterly skill to depict reflecting surfaces, nor was he only laying a visual argument for the fragility of life, according to the traditional moral interpretation of the Homo Bulla, or of organic matter in a stage of decomposition. The artist is making visible the very fabric of the world—one that can also be tasted. When the viewer (a butcher, a handmaid, a scientist, a maker) stands in front of Netscher’s painting, is the glaze covering the inflated bladder or the ocular-looking pair of kidneys of the pig, lubricating something more than the surface of the wood and the eyes of the viewer? Are they not only seeing, but also tasting?

Guest blog by Laura Enriquez

Further reading

• Anita Guerrini, ‘The Ghastly Kitchen,’ History of Science 54, 1 (March 2016): 71-96.
• Denis Ribouillault, ‘Regurgitating Nature: On a Celebrated Anecdote by Karel van Mander about Pieter Bruegel the Elder,’ Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8, 1 (Winter 2016).

Primary sources

• Cennino Cennini, The Craftman’s Handbook, tr. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. Dover 1934.
• Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek, Alle de brieven. Deel 1: 1673-1676. Digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren, 2013.

Image: Caspar Netscher, Slaughtered Pig, 1662 (oil on panel, 36.7 x 30cm). Otto Naumann Ltd., New York.

During their attempt to establish a Spanish foothold in the Philippines in 1565, the expedition led by Miguel de Legazpi learned the surprising news of “a Christian named Juanes, who had been living with the locals for more than twenty years”. This Juanes turned out to be a native of Mexico brought to the Philippines as a cabin boy on the previous voyage of Ruy López de Villalobos (1542–4). He was then captured by the locals and joined their community. The strongest testimony to his shocking transformation came from his own body, now proudly adorned with innumerable tattoos. The Spanish pleas to rejoin them left Juanes cold. His skin markings tied him to his adopted community and separated him from his former countrymen.

As this anecdote reveals, upon their arrival in the Philippines the Spanish entered a world of marked skin. Filipino communities had long been engaged in a range of skin practices such as tattooing and cauterisation, as well as various kinds of body piercing, including ear adornments and penis pins. Underneath these markings, there were bodies of various complexions, ranging from light to dark. This complex topography has lately come under the scrutiny of our project. One of the rare sources that provides visual representations of these encounters is the so-called Boxer Codex, a Spanish collection of descriptions and images of various ethnic groups of the Philippines and southeast Asia more broadly.

The Codex was assembled in Manila at the end of the sixteenth century. Its origins remain shrouded in mystery: the commissioner, compiler, illustrator and most authors of its individual accounts are all unknown. The purpose of the volume was probably to document people of southeast Asia and present intelligence on their appearance, nature and customs as gathered by Spanish observers. Whatever the intentions of its creators, the work was never completed, copied or published. It found its way to Spain sometime at the turn of the sixteenth century, where it was bound, and it subsequently disappeared for some three hundred years. It did not re-emerge until the early twentieth century in Britain, then in possession of the Earls of Ilchester. In 1947, it was purchased by the spy turned historian and collector Charles Ralph Boxer, whose name the Codex now bears. It is currently held in the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Figure 2: The Aeta people (Boxer Codex: 14r).

The illustrations featured in the Codex yield glimpses of Spanish colonial visions and the hierarchies put into place with the aim to define, classify and control ‘other’ people. In this context, skin emerges as a canvas onto which markers of human difference were inscribed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main feature mobilised to that end was skin colour. In the Codex, the ‘pacified’ and Christianised Visayan and Tagalog people are portrayed as lighter in skin colour than the mountain-dwelling Aeta, Zambales and Cagayan communities, who resisted Castilian sovereignty. Early colonial accounts regularly drew such contrasts between the dark-skinned raiders from the highlands and the light-skinned communities in coastal areas, who were deemed more peaceful, moral and civil. In such accounts, light skin colour was typically coupled with ‘other’ approving adjectives in order to emphasise its superior nature. These skin colour hierarchies were of course highly subjective: the same people could be portrayed as darker or lighter depending on the motivations of the author. For instance, the Jesuit missionary Pedro Chirino claimed in his Relacion (1604) that the inhabitants of the island Bohol were “of lighter complexion [and] generally more gracious than other Visayans”, as well as of greater spirit and valour, and have soon “abandoned all of their immoral practices, alongside their idolatry”.

Figure 3: Zambales hunters (Boxer Codex: 19v).

The humoral understanding of the human body, adopted by the Spanish, posited that skin colour could be altered by external influences, such as the climate. Therefore, it is hard to make clear associations with modern racial hierarchies, which are built upon the idea of stable, hereditary traits. However, scholars such as Cord Whitaker have recently shown that the prejudices attached to the currently racialised characteristic of skin colour predate its modern racialisation. By the Late Middle Ages, bias against blackness and towards whiteness had become deeply ingrained in European religious thought and poetic imagery. In line with these ideas, it seems that for the Spanish, skin colour yielded important clues about the prospects of their colonial enterprise. It provided information about the underlying humanity and character of Philippine inhabitants and about their potential for civilisation and conversion. Perhaps dark bodies may also have alluded to the dangers associated inhospitable climate, whilst the presence of light-complexioned people offered hopes for the establishment of a healthy colony.

Figure 4: Visayan princely couple (Boxer Codex: 25v).

In the Codex, the link between skin colour and civility is further complemented by the use of clothing and other features that possessed established associations with civilisation and morality, or the lack thereof. The practically naked bodies of the Aeta and Zambales people are wrapped merely in loincloth, whose plain white colour sharply contrasts with the exposed dark skin of its bearers (Figures 2, 3). In comparison, the bodies of Visayan and Tagalog nobility are covered in colourful fabrics embroidered with gold (Figures 4, 5). Although both Visayan and Tagalog serfs proudly display their naked skin, the contrast with their lavishly dressed leaders serves to indicate a sophisticated social system of an orderly, civil society. To leave no one in doubt, Visayan and Tagalog élites carry insignia of status in the form of golden swords and jewellery. In contrast, in the hands of darker-skinned communities, swords become lethal weapons. One of the images depicts a bleeding buffalo, its skin cut wide open by one of the Zambal hunters in search of their delicacy: raw, unwashed buffalo intestines (Figure 3). Rather than wielding primitive and undecorated weapons, the Christianised Visayans and Tagalogs use their hands to make pious gestures, symbolic of their morality. Their orderly hair, cut short in Castilian fashion, likewise reflects the internal order of their communities and civility.

Figure 5: Tagalog princely couple (Boxer Codex: 56r).

Skin colour was used to mark differences not only between indigenous communities, but also between the sexes. Both in the Boxer Codex and in Spanish written accounts more broadly, females were portrayed as lighter in skin tone than their male counterparts from the same ethnic groups (Figure 5). As early modern European cultures associated fair complexion with beauty, the light female skin – prudishly covered in embroidered fabric – can be understood as part of the colonisers’ highly sexualised portrayal of Philippine women. Indeed, European accounts were saturated with sexual attraction to local females, who were “very beautiful and almost as white as our women” in the words of Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of the Magellan expedition. Such favourable comparisons of Philippine women to their European counterparts reflected and legitimised the colonisers’ carnal desires.

The Boxer Codex is well-known for containing one of the few surviving early modern depictions of Philippine tattoo (Figure 1). This peculiar practice was especially prevalent in the Visayas: a group of diverse islands, whose inhabitants were thus unified in Spanish minds into a single ethnic group named Pintados, the ‘Painted’ or ‘Tattooed Ones’. Spanish sources universally portrayed the Visayan tattoo as a predominantly male affair closely associated with status: obtaining one required committing a heroic deed, and only the most valiant and prominent men earned the right to have full-body tattoos. These views, however, were not carried over into their visualisation. The Codex depicts Visayan noblemen as fully clothed and without skin markings, whilst the naked bodies of commoners are adorned with full-body tattoos. This discrepancy between written and visual sources may indicate something deeper about the perceived inverse association between status and civility on the one hand, and the display of tattoos and nakedness on the other. There was no place for unmarked Europeans in a world of honourably marked skin and no room for tattooed Visayan bodies in a world of Christian purity and Spanish colonial order. The difference between the two cultures was permanently inscribed upon their skin.

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Title image Figure 1: Visayan inhabitants displaying their tattoos (Boxer Codex: 23v).

Primary sources cited

• The Boxer Codex, Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington. Available in digitised form online: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/omeka/lilly/items/show/93. For a modern English edition, see: G. B. Souza and J. S. Turley (ed., trans.), The Boxer Codex, Brill, 2016.
• Pedro Chirino (1604), Relacion de las Islas Filipinas, Rome.
• Antonio Pigafetta (written 1524–5), Il primo viaggio intorno al globo, in A. Da Mosto (ed.), Il primo viaggio intorno al globo di Antonio Pigafetta e le sue regole sull’arte del navigare, Rome, 1894.

Further reading

• K. Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France, Routledge, 2020.
• C. Koslowsky, ‘Knowing Skin in Early Modern Europe, c. 1450–1750’, History Compass 12/10 (2014), 794–806. 

In 1557, the French Huguenot Jean de Léry (1536–1613) was sent as a missionary to France Antarctique, a colony newly established in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro as part of the project to create the first Protestant mission in the New World. Based on his experiences, which included two months spent among the indigenous Tupinambá people, de Léry later published a ‘History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil’ (Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre de Brésil, 1578). In his account, he provided detailed descriptions of Brazilian nature and indigenous culture and customs, including practices of skin marking. The publication also featured several woodcuts depicting the Tupinambá people. De Léry’s work garnered wide attention across Europe, and several editions in various languages had appeared by the end of the sixteenth century. This included a Czech translation, produced in 1590. The two translators, Pavel Slovák (d.1604) and Matěj Cyrus (1566–1618), were both members of the Unity of the Brethren, a Czech Reformation Church, which probably instigated the entire undertaking. How were Brazilian realities translated in the landlocked Czech lands? And why did a Czech Protestant community seek to translate de Léry’s account in the first place?

The origins of the Czech translation may be attributed to the close relations between the Brethren and the Calvinists. Despite the effort required to render de Léry’s account into Czech, the translation was never published and survives only as a single, illustrated copy, held in the Fürstenberg Library at Křivoklát castle. In fact, as Slovák and Cyrus reveal in their preface, they “did not intend to publish this book”. It therefore seems likely that the work was to serve merely the internal needs of the Unity. In the late sixteenth century, the Counter-Reformation, spearheaded by the Jesuits, was making significant gains in the Czech lands, and ushered in dark times for the Protestants. The Unity perhaps saw in the Americas the opportunity to escape from the increasingly Catholic-dominated realms and to build a new Christendom among the indigenous people of the New World, unspoiled by European civilisation.

Indeed, following the Protestant defeat at White Mountain (1620), the Unity of the Brethren was banned in the Czech lands, and its members were forced to either convert or go into exile. Some decided to travel as missionaries to the Americas, where they may have drawn on the lessons learned from de Léry’s translation. Although the text’s circulation probably remained relatively restricted, the translation indicates that interest in the colonisation of new worlds extended beyond the usual naval powers and into the heart of Europe. Whilst the translation was produced for the needs of the Unity, the surviving manuscript bears marks of Catholic readership too. Several pages describing a Calvinist mass have been torn out, whilst some folios have been inscribed with demeaning marginalia, such as: “All of you Lutherans and Hussites, kiss our ass; all of you in hell with Luther and Huss, beast one like the other.”

The translation of de Léry’s prose into Czech was a challenging task. Words for many of the matters described were not readily available in sixteenth-century Czech language. As Slovák and Cyrus explained in their preface, they decided to leave foreign terms in their original reading “for fear of rendering their meaning more obscure” by trying to translate them. These included specialist terms, such as zona torrida and acus nautica (‘compass’), as well as novelties like toucan and tapir, which appeared in Czech probably for the very first time. Some animals received more creative treatment, such as the ‘sea turtle’ which became a “marine snail”.

Image depicting the Tupinambá people,Pavel Slovák and Matěj Cyrus, Historie o plavení se do Ameriky, kteráž i Brasilia slove (1590).

One of the most interesting aspects of the manuscript’s translation history is the translators’ effort to describe the skin colour and markings of the Tupinambá people, which were portrayed in detail by de Léry. To approximate to his readers the appearance and purpose of the tattooed motifs which were used to decorate the bodies of Tupinambá warriors, de Léry compared the designs to dress. This analogy finds parallels in other European accounts of tattooing, as shown by Juliet Fleming, Katherine Dauge-Roth and others. In their Czech translation Slovák and Cyrus, turned to Italian fashion and likened leg tattoos to galioty, an early Czech word for breeches rooted in the Italian caligote. An early modern Czech reader may therefore have imagined the Tupinambá as walking around dressed in fashionable trousers!

De Léry also devoted attention to the indigenes’ skin tone. In his words, it was “not quite black”, which Slovák and Cyrus turned to osmahlý, literally meaning “lightly fried or burned”. This word was generally used to describe the effects of heat, whether in terms of cooking food or the scorching sun. The translation hints at the underlying understanding of differences in skin colour as a consequence of variations in the climate, as posited by humoral theory. The textual portrayal of Tupinambá skin, however, was not carried over into the illustrations accompanying the Czech translation. The surviving manuscript was furnished with rather amateurishly produced figures, which had been copied over from de Léry’s original. These images were coloured, and later censored by a rather prudish reader for nudity. Rather than being dark and tattooed, the Tupinambá appear here with fair hair and pale skin. The reasons for this portrayal are unclear. Perhaps the white unblemished skin was meant to reflect the ‘natural state’ of the indigenes, who were to carry and embody the Reformationist hopes of returning to the pristine state of the Creation and the early Church. As much as the translation, the illustrations of Tupinambá skin would have reflected the Brethren’s desire to establish a new foundation for Christendom in the New World.

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Primary sources used

• Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre de Brésil (La Rochelle, 1578).
• Pavel Slovák and Matěj Cyrus, Historie o plavení se do Ameriky, kteráž i Brasilia slove (1590).

Further reading

• F. Lestringant, Jean de Léry ou l’invention du sauvage: Essai sur l’Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Bresil, Champion, 2005.
• J. Fleming, ‘The Renaissance Tattoo’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31 (1997), 34–52.
• K. Dauge-Roth, Signing the Body: Marks on Skin in Early Modern France, Routledge, 2020

Title image: Woodcut depicting the Tupinambá people, Jean de Léry, Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre de Brésil (La Rochelle, 1578).