The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds
In 1547, a gift arrived at the Paris court of Henry II and Catherine de Medici: a ten-year-old boy named Petrus Gonzales, from Tenerife, whose genetic condition left him covered with hair (in the words of one witness) “of a light blond color and very delicate and fine, like the fur of a sable, and it smells good.” Gonzales was added to a royal entourage of “oddities” and brought up as a courtier. He eventually married, and five of his seven children (including the three hirsute daughters of the title) inherited the condition. The family became popular with painters, scientists, and lovers of curiosities throughout Europe. Wiesner-Hanks uses her subjects to explore Renaissance notions of the marvellous and the miraculous, but a scarcity of sources leaves a void at the center of her portrait: we learn much of what the Gonzales family might have meant to others but little of what they made of their own experiences.Copyright ©2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker