The Column – Human Styles
There is a moment, in 1533, when a fourteen-year-old girl boards a ship in Florence and brings with her, in addition to ladies and trunks, a smell. Caterina de’ Medici marries the future king of France, and in her entourage travels a trusted perfumer: Renato Bianco, who the French, with their grace in renaming everything, call René le Florentin.
His story is almost all legend, and this, rather than taking away its value, adds to it. It is said that he was a foundling who grew up among the friars of Santa Maria Novella, entrusted to an old alchemist who passed him the secrets of herbal distillation. When the master dies, he is the only one who knows about them. It’s already clear from here what kind of guy he is: one of those who inherits a room full of stills and makes it their destiny.
In Paris he finds a refined nobility in everything except smells. We wash very little and rely a lot on fabrics and tanned leather, which have their own eloquence. Perfume, even before seducing, serves to make coexistence bearable. He fixes it. He opened a shop on the Pont Saint Michel and soon the best society frequented him with devotion, even leaving his underwear for him to perfume. The court makes him a celebrity. A convent boy who became arbiter of the taste of a kingdom: France owes him part of its first court perfumery culture.
Of all his formulas, one survives, the Acqua della Regina, citrusy and with a dominant Calabrian bergamot. Catherine takes it with her to France as a wedding gift for her groom, and with it conquers the court. The Officina di Santa Maria Novella, where it all began, still produces it today in the wake of that tradition. Only one fragrance has come down to us, and moreover the one linked to the most powerful woman of the time: René has a sense of selection.
Then there is the other half, the one that court rumors love most. They say he is a master of the dark arts, and the queen, they whisper, needs those too. The perfumed and poisoned gloves which, it is said, killed Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henry IV, enter into legend. Doctors of the time spoke of natural death, and historians favored illness; but the rumor, born among his enemies, is too good to die, and will even cross Dumas’s novels.
And that is precisely the delicate and fascinating point. We will never know if the same hand that gives the queen her bergamot prepares something less gentle in the next room.
Not a face remains of him, not a certain date, almost nothing that can be touched. What remains is a citrus water that still today someone pours on a handkerchief, unaware that they are wearing the secret of a foundling and the long shadow of a queen. The rest was dispersed into the air, where perfumes always end up.
