Face‐Work: Making Hair Matter in Sixteenth‐Century Central Europe

Abstract

Bringing gender history, the history of the body and art history into a conversation with material culture studies, this article argues that the sudden fashionability of beards in Renaissance Europe has been intricately linked with a culture of material and visual experimentation. I propose shifting perspectives from a focus on the symbolism of beards towards examining how early modern ways of material engagement with the matter of hair crafted a visual attention to facial hair that made up the sociocultural significance of beards. Focusing on how people made hair matter, I suggest working with the concept of face-work. In particular, this article maps how the Reformation upheavals and the rise of new visual practices dynamised Renaissance protagonists' creative engagement with facial hair as a means for staging the self. Crafting the visual attention to renaissance beardsIn 1610, the Augsburg art dealer Philipp Hainhofer sent a drawing to Philipp II of Pomerania that portrayed the duke with an elegant beard. A close view reveals that the beard was a literally telling attribute as it was composed by pious wordings that visualised Philipp's religious sovereignty. 1 How was it possible, culturally speaking, that beards functioned as speaking attributes in the material Renaissance? To answer this question, this article brings gender history, the history of the body and art history into a conversation with material culture studies. Focusing on beards in sixteenth-century Central Europe, I reconsider the matter of hair in a society which was 'intimately involved with how things were made and what they were made from'. 2 In the Renaissance, craft expertise and the body were significant means through which to experience subjectivity in relation to material and visual cultures of making. 3 This observation invites historians to rethink the significance of hair in regard to the embodied aspects of a material and visual culture that made up the Renaissance symbolic universe. I thus propose a shift of perspective in research on the history of hair. While previous scholarship has focused on the symbolic meanings of hair, I examine how early modern ways of material engagement with the matter of hair crafted a visual attention to facial hair that made up the sociocultural significance of beards. 4 Instead of solely focusing on the symbolism of hair in sixteenth-century Central Europe, I focus on how people made hair matter. I argue that the increasing fashionability of beards in the Renaissance has been intricately linked with an age of material and visual experimentation and the