Abstract

In many of his poems, Joannes Six van Chandelier discusses the use of cosmetics as both material and literary ornaments. He writes about the use of make-up by Spanish women, and about incense and colours in Renaissance love poetry. In this chapter, I show how, in these texts, he perceives cosmetic drugs as substances that have a transformative effect and that are thus threats to the human body, in both the medical and the religious sense. Through a development of a ‘flawed poetics’, Six demonstrates a distance to the un-Dutch, aristocratic values of expensive dyestuffs. Nevertheless, this does not prevent him – by means of the rhetorical device of praeteritio – from writing colourful poems on the occasion of a wedding and on the landscape of Oostkapelle.

Keywords: Cosmetics, literary ornaments, love poems, civet, incense, praeteritio

And if the outward splendour of the clothing worn by Kings and the greatest Princes of the World is a stain and a sin, how much more dreadful would that splendour be if our Merchants and Shopkeepers, and their Wives and Children were to go about all decked out like so much Royalty, as if they themselves were Kings and Queens?