Hair: Female Signifier of Sin

Medieval images of sinful women depict this fixation of hair as a marker of female deviancy. Dating around the 13th century, one scene from the stained glass at Canterbury Cathedral depicts the figure of Mad Matilda of Cologne. In a detail located to the left of the central square, Matilda is shown in utter disarray as two men beat her with clubs [fig. 13]. Accused of infanticide, Matilda is marked as sinful in part due to the wild, unkept hair that haloes around her body, which writhes in a serpentine S curve away from the clubs.

In the early centuries of Christianity, believers identified the figures of Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha in John’s Gospel, and the ‘sinner’ in the Gospel of Luke named as Mary who anointed Jesus and wiped her tears off his feet with her hair, with the figure of Mary Magdalene. (4) Thus the visual persona of Mary Magdalene in the Middle Ages included many depictions of the woman with long free-flowing hair. Mary Magdalene is often present in scenes of the Crucifixion, where she is shown at the feet of Christ or visibly expressing her grief. For example, in a detail of Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni’s The Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene, witnessing Jesus’s death, raises her hands up to heaven and yells in anguish [fig. 15]. She has long, curled blonde hair that hangs to her waist. It seems here that the emphasis is on Mary’s love for Jesus, as she is in the process of expressing despair during the moment of his death. (5) As such, her long hair then serves as reference to her anointing of his feet as Mary in John’s Gospel and ‘sinner’ in Luke, where she was overcome with emotion and used her hair to wipe her tears off the body of Christ.

In line with medical beliefs that the character of the body is representative of moral quality, long disheveled hair was a marker of an immoral, loose woman. (6) “Good” women were in control of their virtue (sexuality) and so they controlled their hair, which was a public signifier for her sensual capability. It can also be a signifier for women who live outside the margins of male-controlled society, such as the Wild Woman, or even the Magdalene after the Resurrection. (7) According to The Golden Legend (c. 1260), after Jesus’s resurrection, Mary travelled to France and lived alone as a contemplative hermit for thirty years. While in isolation, she grew her hair long to preserve her modesty. In the Winterfeld Diptych (c. 1430), by an anonymous artist, Mary Magdalene is shown surrounded by angels, ascending into the sky [fig. 14]. The Magdalene is clothed in tawny brown hair, covering her entire body and flowing from her head. Although her long hair is meant to protect her modesty, Martha Easton noted that images of the hermit Magdalene have very little visual difference to the iconography of the sexually promiscuous Wild Woman. (8) Mary’s status as a hermit marks her as another type of woman who lives absent from men’s control, her long hair also becoming a marker of untamed wild-ness.

Hair was such a prominent feature of Taddeo’s women because they represent and communicate cautionary tales of “bad” women. When combined with the depiction of their nude writhing bodies, the long reddish blonde hair of Taddeo’s women denotes a connection between their femininity and their sexual sinful natures.

These women are defined by their hair; it marks their femininity and the sexuality associated with that designation. The woman viewing these tortured figures would view them through the lens of their own experience. From a young age, they heard the admonitions from religious and familial leaders that controlled hair is a marker of a “good” woman. Seeing these sinful women so visually defined by their hair would assign them a label of “sinful.” (9) The regulation of sexual punishment centered around the hair of sinful women in the fresco echoed the real-life regulation women endured every day.

In addition to having long, loose hair, Taddeo’s women also appear to have reddish blonde hair. The mixing of blond with red proffered two sets of negative significations: blonde with the erotics of poetic artifice and red with additional ideas of wildness and sin. Many Early Modern poets created the formulation of their own poetic beauties from Petrarch’s stylistic descriptions of Laura. (10) Over time, a portrait of the poetic beloved emerged from the ornamental vernacular tradition of Petrarch: long blonde hair, high forehead, delicate features, and a pale but lightly flushed complexion. (11) It is this aesthetic ideal that enthralled the poet and drew him in. The power of a woman’s beauty held in it the ability to create love and desire. Painters depicted real, mythological, and biblical women as these blonde poetic beauties, attempting to portray a figure’s inner beauty through outward visual attributes outlined by the poets.(12) Indeed these ideals proved to be extremely widespread, as fifteenth-century preachers became increasingly critical of women paying too much attention to appearance, as they sought to emulate this popular poetic ideal. (13)

Polemon of Laodicea, a second century Greek philosopher whose treatise on physiognomy survives in a fourteenth century Arabic translation, assigned certain characteristics to people having red or reddish colored hair:

“As for red hair that turns towards whiteness…it indicates a lack of understanding and knowledge and an evil way of life, so be very sure about this…As for ugly red hair, I do not praise it, nor do I praise its owner. You will often see hair that is redder than these, and their character resembles that of animals. In them is a lack of [modesty] and a love of covetousness.” (14)

Polemon was not alone in his distrust of red-haired people. In Physiognomics, attributed to Aristotle, the author, in his comparison of bodily characteristics to animal qualities, wrote “the reddish [haired] are of bad character; witness the foxes.” (15) Polemon’s tirade inferred moral characteristics based on the color of one’s hair. His negative feelings about red hair were due to a perceived character fault that was inherent in redheads: that they are incapable of control and thus are overtly greedy or desirous. (16) In Taddeo’s “Gluttony,” two women, alongside noblemen and a friar, sit at a dinner table, restrained by snakes and forced by demons to stare at food that they are unable to eat [fig. 17]. The reddish blonde hair of the woman on the left hangs long and loose. It frames her bare breasts, drawing attention to her sinful nakedness. In “Lust,” a woman on the left grimaces as her breast is groped by a dog-like demon who has his leg and arms wrapped around her [fig. 10]. Another woman, marked “adulteress” by a label above her head, is in the process of being whipped by a demon. Both women appear to have long reddish blonde hair and are punished in contrapasso. A sexual sin begets sexual punishment, exemplified by the women getting groped and whipped. Taddeo transcribed warnings about sexual punishment and sinful nature within “Lust” by conflating and applying the established sexual undertones inherent in contrapasso and red hair imagery onto the bodies of his punished women.

The reddish-blond hair of these female figures only served to increase the negative associations that viewers were meant to feel when viewing the fresco. Loose red-blond hair held negative connotations that symbolized a lustful person drawn to an evil, overtly desirous nature. Taddeo thus ensured that a message of sexual caution would be delivered to his viewers by emphasizing the sinful and lustful nature of the punished women through the depiction of these attributes.