Château d?Ecouen, Exhibition « The bath and the mirror ».
Body Care and Cosmetics in
the Renaissance
20 May ? 21 September 2009
Musée National
de la Renaissance
Château d'Ecouen
95440 Ecouen
01 34 38 38 50
An exhibition organised by the Réunion
des Musées Nationaux and the Musée
National de la Renaissance ? Château
d?Ecouen
The Musée National de la Renaissance puts an unusual slant on one of the art historian?s
favourite themes ? beauty ? by associating paintings or engravings with objets d?art and
everyday items to restore the full aesthetic and social dimension of the Renaissance toilette
routine.
Contrary to what is generally believed, cleanliness and personal hygiene were appreciated during
the Renaissance. Bathing gradually became an excuse for a new form of sociability among the
elite, eloquently demonstrated by the bathroom in the Château d?Ecouen, exceptionally open to
the public for the exhibition.
Natural as it may seem, beauty is nonetheless fabricated. Beauty care complements bodily hygiene
with a set of traditional practices enriched by new products, brought to Europe along the
international trade routes. Modern cosmetology was, in the sixteenth century, no more than a
hotchpotch of empirical recipes for ointments, lotions and powders, sometimes containing
dangerous substances.
The exhibition will devote a section to the sources of this ?cosmetic? knowledge, spread by a
host of tiny books, published with women in mind, which have now become extremely rare.
Frequent images of women bathing influenced the fashion for a new pictorial genre in the
Renaissance: the ?nude portrait?. The Lady at Her Toilet, the enigmatic masterpiece from
the Musée des Beaux-arts in Dijon, shown naked in the familiar surroundings of her bedroom, is
typified by radiant beauty, inspired by antique canons, and a body which is both sacred and
sensual. The ceremonial of the toilet required a large number of accessories and recipients:
mirrors, powder boxes, combs, ornaments for hair and clothing, pomanders and musk-balls,
marten?s heads, ointment slabs and perfume bottles? The most surprising are those recently unearthed during the excavation of the Grand Louvre; the most spectacular come from the great
public and private collections, the fruit of fascinating research.
Together they give the Renaissance beauty care routine its full aesthetic and social dimension,
which is often forgotten today.