When Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin (1646–1699) arrived in England from France, this 'famous beauty and errant Lady' immediately 'provoked a great stir and provided a new focus of attention at court', explained the French Ambassador. 'The king of England [Charles II] appeared moved by her beauty, and although their liaison had been conducted until now with a degree of secrecy, it appears that this nascent passion will take precedence in the heart of this prince.'

Hortense Mancini (1646–1699), Duchess of Mazarin

Both men and women fell in love with Mancini, and even in the libertarian context of the Restoration court, scandal ensued. The celebrated female writer Aphra Behn (1640–1689) later declared 'how infinitely one of Your own Sex ador'd You, and that, among all the numerous Conquest, Your Grace has made over the Hearts of Men, Your Grace had not subdu'd a more intire Slave'.

For Mancini, and many other early modern women, beauty was one of the few things that gave them agency over their own lives and the possibility of social preferment. Even at the lowest rung of the ladder, looking good could secure a more advantageous marriage in a world where women's work was generally menial and poorly paid. Cosmetics, haircare, skincare and dieting were ways, therefore, not merely to shape the body, but also to seize some control in a patriarchal and misogynistic world.

Thomas Jeamson's 1665 book of cosmetic recipes, Artificiall Embellishments, subtitled How to Preserve Beauty or Procure It, made some grand promises to the fashionable seventeenth-century Lady who felt her beauty might be lacking. His book gave the secret for 'such Aromatique unguents, such beautifying oils and essences, that would you but accept their profer'd assistance, there is none of you but might equalize a Hellen: here only would be the difference, that a Paris came from Troy to Ravish her, but multitudes would make longer journeys to Admire you'.

Jeamson's fascinating text was an English version of an Italian book that had been published around a century earlier, Giovanni Marinello's Ornamenti delle donne and, like this predecessor, offers beauty tips for the fashionable lady from the top of the head right down to the toes. In conjunction with paintings, these books can give us tantalising glimpses into what it was like to be a young early modern woman determined to make the best of her appearance.

Women's bodies were always works-in-progress in the Renaissance and this is nowhere more clear than in 'Ladies at their Toilet' paintings.

The unpromising title for this genre of image – coined by eighteenth-century art collectors – has not aged well. It simply refers to women at their dressing table, or otherwise beautifying themselves – the word 'toilet' actually comes from the French toile, a gauzy material that was used to cover dressing tables and then came to stand for the implements related to hygiene and cosmetics that were kept there. Painters such as Titian (c.1488–1576) initiated this theme in early sixteenth-century Italy, then the fashion spread to France and the Netherlands.

Laura De Dianti, Young Woman at Her Toilet

Hair

As many of these paintings suggest, haircare was an essential part of a beauty routine, and hairstyles fashionable in the Renaissance and Baroque courts could take hours to achieve. By the mid-seventeenth century, black hair, like Hortense Mancini's, was all the rage.

'Yellow hair,' Jeamson explains, though fashionable 'among the antients' is now thought to indicate the 'cherishing heat of lust' so 'Black is more the fashion'. If you had the wrong colour locks you could always dye them – the book recommends a mixture of walnut shells, red wine and myrtle oil that had been sitting in a lead mortar for six days.

Fabulous ringlets were popular in the seventeenth century, as sported by a fashionable woman Caspar Netscher portrays in a portrait now in Kelvingrove. 'Twining curls are now much the mode', Jeamson explains. It is impossible to be beautiful, he declares, unless your 'gracefull locks do reach the breasts and spectators think those ivory globes of Venus are upheld by the friendly aid of their crispie twirls'.

Netscher's A Lady at Her Toilet of around 1665, now in Apsley House, shows this hairstyle in process. A fashionable well-to-do young woman sits, dog on her lap, whilst her servant winds her hair around rags. The hair has most likely been prepared with a setting agent such as gum arabic or egg white.

Just as we might use a heated brush to curl hair today, women in the Renaissance also used heated tongs or even spoons according to some sources. This is perhaps what's happening in Jacques de L'Ange's moralistic take on A Young Woman at her Toilet (1642). The devil points to the mirror as a woman curls her hair with heated tongs.

Face

Beyond dressing and setting the hair, women used a variety of products to give them the kind of clear and glowing complexion seen in this late sixteenth-century portrait, free of blemishes, moles and freckles.

Hortense Mancini may have used skin-lightening preparations, including mercury and arsenic, that were placed on the skin at bedtime and washed off in the morning. Her flawless complexion may have been aided with white lead mixed with rose or violet oil, used as a light-scattering foundation, while the blush on her cheeks and ruby lips were likely enhanced by a red sandalwood translucent blush.

She almost certainly had a maid shape her brows with tweezers to be fashionably thin and arched – the trend also clear in this Portrait of a Lady from around 1595–1600 – and perhaps coloured them with soot mixed with animal fat.

Occasionally, as we learn from her memoirs, Hortense Mancini wore face patches (or mouches). These were tiny pieces of black silk or taffeta, sometimes shaped in the form of moons or stars that were attached to the face with sticky ointment – they may originally have been used to cover spots, but they were also purely decorative. A large patch that likely covers a scar or other blemish can be seen to the right of the sitter's forehead in a portrait of an Unknown Lady by Cornelius Johnson of about 1659.

Body

It was difficult to maintain sweet-smelling skin and a blemish-free body with no running water. For many women, keeping clean meant going to public baths – only the remarkably rich had bathrooms at home. This meant bathing was far from a private affair. We can get a fantasised glimpse into the world of the bathhouse in paintings such as Artus Wolfaerts's Esther's toilet in the harem of Ahasuerus (c.1620).

Esther's toilet in the harem of Ahasuerus

Queen Esther, standing on a platform to the left, her hair still elaborately dressed with pearls, is about to step down into the bathing area. Here women stand in or sit on the edge of a low hexagonal stone bath. A sponge, mirror and copper wash basin lie on the floor in the foreground, next to a jug and tray to the left. Ceramic and copper jugs and trays or bowls like this were commonly used to wash the hands and face until the advent of running water taps in the twentieth century.

Standing women to the right comb their hair, using the ubiquitous double-sided combs that included one side with very fine teeth designed to rid the scalp of lice. Looking out as she sits rather uncomfortably on the side of the bath, one young woman has a pedicure, as a bath attendant kneels at her feet to cut her toenails.

All the naked bodies in this image show the look that Renaissance women should ideally be aiming for – hairless, with plump limbs and stomach but small, improbably circular, breasts. This was an ideal upheld in works depicting impossibly beautiful women, such as the goddess Venus.

Venus Rising from the Sea (Venus Anadyomene)

Jeamson's dieting advice 'to keep your bodies in a mean proportion' advises remedies such as purging to lower weight for anyone who appears like 'a walking barrel' and soothing baths and oils to plump up 'breathing skeletons'. To get breasts that were 'remarkable with an outvying splendour... like a pair of stately promontories', Jeamson's readers were advised to 'bath the paps with Rosewater and vinegar' or bind them with cumin, 'if ye fear they will grow too big'.

Hair removal practices differed depending on which part of the world you were in, but it was common in France, Italy and Spain to burn off body hair with a highly alkaline paste made of arsenic and quicklime.

In Renaissance and Baroque Europe, women's appearance was constantly judged. Young women, particularly, were like the goddesses in the Judgement of Paris (here portrayed by Rubens in around 1632–35), competing with each other to win the prize of being the most beautiful in the eyes of a male onlooker.

The art of this period is often associated with beauty, but it's less recognised that meeting the beauty ideals that art promulgated meant a lot of effort and anguish for a lot of women. All this struggle aimed to shape real bodies into forms that were fundamentally imaginary – dreamt up by the male writers of beauty advice books, painters and poets.

Some women, like Hortense Mancini, managed to successfully use their beauty to have extraordinary and adventurous lives. She spent the rest of her days in England, successfully separated from her tyrannical husband (very much against his will), and presiding over a literary and artistic salon.

Living on ones looks becomes increasingly difficult as you get older, however, and Mancini's end was a sad one. As she aged, she became depressed, 'so indifferent to life, you would have thought that she didn't mind losing it', according to her close friend, Charles de Saint-Évremond. She drank herself to death in the summer of 1699 at the age of 53, partly – Saint-Évremond claimed – because she 'wanted to die the most beautiful creature in the world'.

Jill Burke, Professor of Renaissance Visual and Material Cultures in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh

This content was funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation