PATRICIA PHILLIPPY. Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 258. $52.00

Abstract

This erudite, imaginative book examines the remarkable homogeneity of denunciations of women's use of cosmetics in early modern culture, from the Reformation through the late seventeenth century, in Catholic and Protestant cultures, in popular polemics and learned treatises, across England and Europe. As Patricia Phillippy shows, anti-cosmetics discourse and a thriving “cosmetic culture” coexisted and, together, shaped the conceptual and material world of possibility within which women artists had to operate. Phillippy seeks “to demonstrate how the dynamics of the cosmetic debate illuminate women artists' self-representations and, beyond this, to align these visual works with texts by women writers that engage the cosmetic debate in similar ways and deploy similar strategies for authorial self-fashioning” (pp. 17–18). As Phillippy shows, there were material connections between painting faces and painting canvasses, as well as discursive and conceptual ones. Ceruse, or white lead, was the key ingredient in face paint and in the white pigments painters used; canvases and faces were rendered blank slates with this same (corrosive) ingredient. Furthermore, “colors for both arts of painting were sold at apothecaries' shops” (p. 31). Whereas women's creativity was sometimes denigrated through association with the deceptive, vain, and ephemeral practice of cosmetics, women might also achieve self-determination and sensual pleasure through their use of cosmetics. Nor was this the limit of their creativity.