Perfume in Renaissance France
Château du Clos Lucé: Léonard de Vinci et les parfums à la Renaissance
Serendipity. No sooner was our last article posted about François Coty, the father of modern perfumery, by a happy coincidence we were invited to the Vernissage of yet another superb exhibition at Château Clos Lucé* in Amboise which is all about – perfume.
No wonder the exhibition is superb. The designer works on projects for Cartier and Dior.
The care and attention to detail is dumbfounding.
The Château itself was, of course, Leonardo da Vinci’s home, so, naturally, some of his experiments and recipes for making perfume are there.
In the beginning, chemists created fragrances so small wonder they were not put directly on to the skin which the wonderfully eccentric Queen Margot of Navarre learned to her cost. She ended up with a red raw face product testing them. In the main, women wore pomanders around the waist, scented clothes and gloves.
Catherine de Medicis is credited with introducing perfume into the French Court.
Not so.
In 1516, a boat on the Loire brought a gift of perfume from Venice for Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I.
Francis had his own perfumer, François d’ Escobart.
When news broke in Florence that Catherine, the fourteen year old Medici heiress, was about to marry into the French royal family, Renato Bianco, raised by alchemist monks, created a bergamot-infused perfume, Acqua della Regina, especially for her.
When she arrived in France, Renato was with her. He was appointed her personal perfumer. When she was Queen of France, his laboratory was connected to her private apartments by a secret passage, so that no fragrances created exclusively for her could be stolen.
Restyling himself as René Le Florentin, he opened a perfume studio in Paris, which was a resounding success. For a long time, he had no competitors until Italian perfumers flocked to Paris to capitalise on the craze for bespoke fragrances. Thus did Paris become the epicentre of perfumery.
But back to the Expo.
It was interesting to read that violets were and are still highly prized in perfumery, but as extracting the essence is so difficult the iris rhizome is used instead. Even that, to develop its scent, has to dry for several years after harvesting.
Reading the information on musk, it was hard not to bite back a smile remembering the indefatigable Daniel Defoe**. Always on the run from his many creditors, always thinking up ways to earn a fast buck, always with an eye on the main chance, he opened a civet*** farm to collect musk oil from the poor animal’s anal glands. It was extracted by a painful scraping from a pouch under the tail.
Musk, then, was a luxury perfume called Civet, but like his other ventures (except for Robinson Crusoe) it failed. The animals didn’t adapt to heated cages. He closed the farm, deeper in debt than before.
His furious mother in law who bank rolled the project sued him but how can you sue a bankrupt?
Musk was also extracted from the sheath gland of the musk deer (now forbidden). Ambergris, also used to make perfume, is taken from the intestine of the sperm whale. Castoreum comes from the genitals of the castor beaver but as its extraction requires killing the animal it is now, also, thankfully, banned. All these are still used in contemporary perfumery but cheaper, synthetic equivalents are beginning to compete.
The highlight of the Exhibition was seeing and smelling a reproduction of the black amber bead necklace Cecilia Gallerani is wearing in Leonardo da Vinci’s superb portrait of her.
The lovely Cecilia graces our sitting room wall. We gaze on her every day.
* Léonard de Vinci et les parfums à la Renaissance.
** Read more about Daniel Defoe’s escapades in Pamela’s book Essential Islington: From Boadicea to Blair
*** Civets are known as cats but are not. Cats belong to the cat family, felidae, civets belong in the viverrid family.
Post by Pamela (BA History of Art). Photography by Mark.
Leonardo da Vinci:
The Amboise Connection
Château du Clos Lucé
Léonard de Vinci et les parfums à la Renaissance
Essential Islington:
from boadicea to blair
