An interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and
science of fifteenth-century Florence.
In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which
Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il
Magnifico's Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and
artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and
class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and
political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled
Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their
contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining
their engagement with scientific, philosophical, and theological
practices.
By studying hundreds of fifteenth-century documents that engage with
hair, Lugli foregrounds hair's association to death and gathers insights
about human life at a time when Renaissance thinkers redefined what it
meant to be human and to be alive. Lugli uncovers overlooked perceptions
of hair when it came to be identified as a potential vector for
liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees
hair as a trivial subject, relegated to passing fashion or the
decorative. He shows hair, instead, to be at the heart of Florentine
culture, whose inherent violence Lugli reveals by prompting questions
about the entanglement of politics and desire.
