In his time, the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510) was among those who couldn't accept the prevailing religious notion that everybody was going to be hairless in Heaven. In the article "The Renaissance Lets Its Hair Down" in the January 10, 2013 issue of the online
Jstor Daily, writer Matthew Wills asserts that Botticelli's resistance to that notion made him go really far in capitalizing on the intricacies and creative possibilities of hair.
IMAGE CREDIT: SANDRO BOTTICELLI’S IDEALIZED PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN (ALLEGEDLY SIMONETTA VESPUCCI) VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
This strategy “paid off since arresting locks became a prerequisite of female allure,” Wills says, but for this preoccupation Botticelli made no friends in the Church that at the time viewed hair as a spiritual threat, a "female snare...luring men and boys to lust."
However, Wills relates that religious repression eventually won out: “By the 1490s, Botticelli 'refrained from painting fabulous manes, covering hair under thick layers of cloth, or turned them into wavy streaks, as repetitive as they are long.'”
Read Matthew Wills’ article “The Renaissance Lets Its Hair Down" in the daily.jstor.org website now!
