This book, a lightly revised and well-illustrated version of the author's 2015 dissertation at the Humboldt University in Berlin, examines just what its subtitle says it will: hair in the art of the early modern period. The “enticements” (Verlockungen) of the book's title are not those most readers might expect, however, but, instead, the enticements of portraying hair to artists, art theorists, art historians, and other commentators of the period. This is a study of the meaning and allure of hair for artists, not for their subjects or for society at the time. The author argues effectively that hair is linked to ideas about artistic creation in both the practical and philosophical sense: to notions of line, color, brush strokes, the role of art, the connection between virtue and virtuosity, and the balance between mimesis and fantasy. In their considerations of hair, the artists and authors examined here used ideas from earlier writers, stretching back to the ancient Greeks; these works are discussed as well.

Saviello begins with Leon Battista Alberti, who, in a paragraph about hair in De pictura (1435), drew on classical sources and more-recent lyric poetry to stress that hair was a way to show movement and variety. It could encourage the right sort of honesta voluptas, the appreciation of beauty that was one of the reasons for art, but it also suggested the dangers of love in its similarity to flames, snakes, and binding knots. Alberti and others compare natural, uncombed hair to the artlessness of the best art, that quality of sprezzatura praised by Castiglione, whose Book of the Courtier (1528) ends this chapter.

Chapter 2 analyzes the linear nature of hair primarily in the art and writings of Leonardo da Vinci, who compared hair to flowing water in words and drawings and commented that both hair and waves allowed hidden forces to be portrayed. Later artists and art theorists, such as William Hogarth, included hair in their analyses of line, praising its serpentine qualities as a means for artists to show both their skill and imagination. Chapter 3 builds on this point, exploring ways in which various Italian artists went beyond replicating the hair that they saw—which was itself a combination of the natural and the artificial—to draw, paint, and sculpt ever more fantastic hair, full of knots, braids, scrolls, and, in some cases, dragons, ammonites, and children's heads.

Chapter 4 moves north of the Alps to that master of hair Albrecht Dürer, who may have used a curling iron to get the hair shown in his most famous self-portraits, and who without a doubt saw his ability both to grow and to portray amazing hair as a sign of his virtuosity, a judgment with which later commentators agreed. Saviello notes that the humanist Joachim Camerarius, Dürer's first biographer, compared him with the ancient Greek artist Apelles, also known for his ability to portray fine lines of hair without using any special tools to do so. Chapter 5 turns from line to color, discussing debates, mostly among Italians, about the best way to capture the golden tresses, which were the ideal of Renaissance beauty—actual gold leaf? Thin black-and-white lines as highlights?—as well as its desired softness (morbidezza). Such debates were part of wider discussions about the degree to which the hand of the artist should be evident in a painting, though all agreed that hair (along with eyes) was the best way to spot a fake, as forgers had greater difficulty copying it than they did other parts of a painting.

Saviello ends with a coda, a word that, she reminds us, means a real tail, in addition to denoting more-figurative finales. In the Renaissance, it could also mean a hairy tail hung on a hook used to store and clean combs. A drawing by Dürer shows a coda hanging from a fanciful vase, along with the type of brush used to apply cosmetics and various objects from the world of theater. This fascinating drawing allows Saviello to reiterate the main arguments of the book, including the way that hair was central to artistic training, artistic theory, and ideas about art, artifice, and creativity.