Becker tells us that among the ancient Greeks “black was probably the
prevailing colour of the hair, though blond is frequently mentioned”;
and he adds that both men and women used dyes, and “the blond or yellow
hair was much admired.” Mr. Gladstone, in his work on Homer, remarks
that “dark hair is a note of the foreigner and of Southern
extraction.... I have been assured that, in the Greece of to-day, light
hair is still held as indicating the purest Hellenic blood.” According
to Winckelmann, “Homer does not even once mention hair of a black
colour”; and again: "Flaxen, ξανθὴ hair has always been considered the
most beautiful; and hair of this colour has been attributed to the most
beautiful of the gods, as Apollo and Bacchus, not less than to the
heroes; even Alexander had flaxen hair."
That the Romans agreed with the Greeks in giving the preference to light
hair seems probable from the extensive importations of yellow German
hair for the Roman ladies, as also from the fact that “Lucretius, when
speaking of the false flatteries addressed to women, quotes one in
illustration, namely, that a maiden with black hair is μελίχροος
(honey-coloured)—thus ascribing to her a beauty which she does not
possess.”
When the fair-haired Teuton overran the South a new motive for
preferring blond hair arose, as a writer in the London _Standard_
remarks: “Whatever the feeling of the men, we may be sure that the dark
beauties of those climes felt a natural inclination to resemble the
wives and daughters of the conqueror, and when we perceive their
likenesses again, at the revival of art in Italy, not a black tress is
to be seen. Is there a single Madonna not blond?—or ten portraits of
women by the great masters? In all the gallery of Titian, we think only
of a figure, naked to the waist, in the Uffizi, described as one of his
mistresses.... But we know that the blond tint was artificial in a
majority of cases—the deep black of eye and brow would show it if no
evidence were forthcoming. But evidence turns up at every side ... a
hundred recipes are found in memoirs, correspondence, and treatises of
the time.”
Hear another witness: “Southern Europe,” says Mr. R. G. White, “is
peopled with dark-skinned, dark-haired races, and the superior beauty of
the blond type was recognised by the painters, who always, from the
earliest days, represented angels as of that type. The Devil was painted
black so much as a matter of course that his pictured appearance gave
rise to a well-known proverb; ordinary mortals were represented as more
or less dark; celestial people were white and golden-haired: whence the
epithet ‘divinely fair.’”
And the poets were quite as partial as the artists to the light type.
Petrarch’s sonnets are addressed to a blue-eyed Laura. Krimhild of the
_Nibelungenlied_ is blue-eyed, like Fricka, the Northern Juno, and
Ingeborg of the _Frithjof’s Saga_, and the Danish princess Iolanthe, as
Dr. Magnus points out; and in the French folk-songs “the girls are
almost as invariably blond as in the songs of Heine,” as a writer in the
_Saturday Review_ (1878) remarks, adding that “there is even such an
expression as _aller en blonde_, ‘to go a-wooing,’ which proves the
universality of the belief in fair beauties.”
Concerning England, a writer in the _Quarterly Review_ declares that
Shakspere mentions black hair only twice throughout his plays; and that
in the National Gallery of that date (1853) there was not a single
female head with black hair.