53
Images of Bathing Women in Early Modern Europe
and Turkey
Patricia Simons, University of Michigan
Scholars have routinely treated early modern
tales of same-sex eroticism between Turkish women
as instances of colonisation and racial fantasy. An
influential argument claims that the early modern
tribade (lesbian) was initially marked as a ‘racial-
ised’ or Orientalised ‘other’, located by European
men in Islamic culture.1 However, the argument
depends on faulty history and a set of easy assump-
tions that homogenise and dichotomise. If, instead,
we disaggregate a series of variable signifiers, we
can discern a more nuanced, contested terrain in
which women’s agency and imagination had space
to play, in a number of different geographies.
While the tribade was often associated with
Sappho (from the island of Lesbos, off Turkey’s
coast), Europeans never exclusively connected
tribadism with women from the eastern Mediter-
ranean, let alone with Islamic women. But it has
been claimed that in the later sixteenth century,
‘the rhetoric of the tribade … focuses initially on
the racialized bodies of women outside of Europe,
and only gradually incorporates this exoticized
figure into a European social landscape’.2 However,
Sappho was the first to be named in Renaissance
Latin as a tribade, from the mid 1470s, and she
was not construed as a racialised other.3 The re-
appearance of the tribade was, rather, central to
the project of philology, male authorship and fan-
tasies of homoeroticism voiced in the homosocial
world of the academy, the schoolroom and the pub-
lishing house.
Much of the evidence for the overly metaphor-
ical association of sexual with racial marginality
comes from accounts about the baths and harems
of Turkey, a powerful empire involved in its own co-
lonial expansion. Repeated European stories about
what women did in all-female Turkish baths or a
seraglio do not mean that there was no basis for the
initial reports.4 The effect of such an argument has
been to depict European tribades as sensationally
demonised, to construct Islamic ones as fantasised,
and to view both as victims without agency.
0531 CIHA_07_CULT_5.indd 267
Certainly, Europeans brought preconcep-
tions to bear on cultural interactions, and in this
case those expectations—which varied according
to such factors as regional origin, class, education
and profession—included conventions about bath-
ing women. Diana and her chaste nymphs bathing
together in secluded ponds, for instance, had long
provided an opportunity for women as well as men
to see maidens in moments of tenderness and erotic
contact.5 Sexual contact was also represented in de-
pictions of contemporary bathing. Barthel Beham’s
print of Women Bathing, for example, offered pre-
sumptively male clients explicit views of lascivious
contact between women.6 The scenario was com-
mercially alluring enough for brother Hans Sebald
to issue a reversed copy in 1548 (see figure 1), and
an anonymous broadsheet disseminated the view
as well. Replete with a large stove, wooden walls
and benches, the room where the trio bathe was
part of a public bathhouse, an institution notori-
ously associated with brothels.
In 1560, when the Fleming Ogier de Busbecq,
ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote
from Istanbul, he noted that in the public bath-
houses, ‘the women become deeply attached to
each other, and the baths supply them with op-
portunities of meeting’. Like his fellow northerner
Beham, he located female-female eroticism among
the lesser classes:
The great mass of women use the public baths …
Among them are found many girls of exquisite beauty,
who have been brought together from different quarters
of the globe by various chances of fortune; so cases
occur of women falling in love with one another at
these baths, in much the same fashion as young men fall
in love with maidens in our own country. … This evil
affects only the common people; the richer classes bathe
at home.7
Busbecq attributed the practice not to racial
characteristics but to over-seclusion of women in
267
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 268 Cultural and Artistic Exchange in the Making of the Modern World
Figure 1 Hans Sebald Beham, after Barthel Beham
Women Bathing, 1548
8.3 × 5.7 cm
engraving
British Museum, London
© Trustees of the British Museum
Turkish society, so that single-sex public baths, in
which no eunuchs guarded husbands’ interests,
provided opportunities for illicit sexual encounters
between women. Like the German artists, the am-
bassador presumed to know what bathing women
did on their own.
By the time Busbecq wrote in 1560, at least
two other European visitors to Istanbul had come
to similar conclusions, although only one account
was in print. One report, finally published in
1568, was penned by Nicolas de Nicolay, French
spy, traveller and royal geographer, whose book
is best known for its illustrations of costumes.
Its description of Turkish women in public baths
who ‘handle & grope’ each other has been taken
as an early moment in the history of the racialised
and colonised lesbian.8 However, nearly all of his
passage was plagiarised from an earlier publication
that has not been cited by historians of female
same-sex eroticism.
Luigi Bassano’s volume on Turkish customs,
published in Rome in 1545, was written by a minor
official who was in Istanbul by 1537.9 His news
about Turkish women was very probably begin-
ning to be diffused in oral form and correspond-
ence among the kinds of men he worked with:
0531 CIHA_07_CULT_5.indd 268
officials, diplomats, courtiers, merchants, sailors
and guides. It is quite possible that he echoed local
rumour circulating among native inhabitants as
well as foreign residents in Istanbul, fed by memo-
ries of punishment recorded in some of the reports.
Such tales, or Bassano’s account, which De Nicolay
used when writing in the early 1550s, informed
images of bathing women circulating in the French
court. I argue that Jean Mignon’s etching of Women
Bathers (see figure 2), after Luca Penni’s design and
dated around 1547–55, echoes Bassano.10 It was
popular enough to warrant the issue of a reversed
copy in Venice in 1572, and another artist re-used
the tribadic couple for a print in which a voyeuris-
tic, aroused satyr enters the bathing scene.11
Bassano’s chapter on women’s public baths
noted that men were never allowed entrance. Slaves
carried towelling, a carpet, food, a ‘tall and large
but not enormous copper vase, like a chamber-pot’
containing a chemise, and other accoutrements
for the outing to the baths. Under its decorative
cloth cover, such a vaso is borne on the head of
an attendant slave in De Nicolay’s illustration of
Turkish Woman Going to the Baths.12 Within the
baths, the women
familiarly wash each other, one the woman next to her,
or a sister with another. It is common knowledge that
among the women there arises a very great love, due to
the familiarity of washing, and hair plucking. And one
frequently sees one woman enamored of another, just
like a man with a woman. And I have known Greek
and Turkish women (upon seeing a beautiful young
girl) seek occasion to bathe with her, in order to see
her naked, and handle her. And many attend the baths
beyond their neighborhood, in order to do this thing,
with all those whose custom it is to go to the baths of
their neighborhood. This and many other lewd things
arise in bathing amongst women.13
Penni’s design shows Bassano’s ‘vase placed on
the floor in front of the first chamber’ now turned
into elaborate amphorae, and the discarded che-
mise nearby. So too the image and Bassano’s text
(but not De Nicolay’s version) each gave the im-
pression of seated women arranged around the rim
of a sunken pool, slaves attending ladies, a slave
serving ‘lovely collations’ on a tray in the centre,
scattered implements for hair care or toilette,
and noteworthy gestures of female intimacy. All
the details were set in an impressive architectural
surround that reminded the Italian of the baths
of Emperor Diocletian in Rome. Several aspects
of the etching are rare in bathing images: the re-
cessed oval bath is not common, nor is the deliv-
ery of food, and even the total absence of men is
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 Images of Bathing Women in Early Modern Europe and Turkey
unusual. Taken together, this unique combination
of rare elements points to the likelihood that re-
ports like Bassano’s inform the print’s details and
very conception.
Mignon’s etching has been considered ‘so-
phisticated, elegant … “a somewhat licentious
glorification of the pleasures of the toilette”’,
merely associated with generic eroticism at the
royal chateau of Fontainebleau.14 Instead, I sug-
gest that it purports to represent Turkish bathers.
Rather than Orientalising, the baths, and what went
on therein, incited French fascination in terms of a
‘renaissance’ of classical architecture, ancient luxu-
ry and tribadic practice. Both French and Turkish
women were imagined to be tribades, akin to the
female-female ‘rubsters’ of the ancient empires of
Greece and Rome.
For sixteenth-century writers, intimacy be-
tween Turkish women was caused by social factors
like jealous husbands, overzealous privatisation of
female bodies, opportunities provided by the bath-
houses, and specific habits of bathing (such as de-
pilation) that allowed access to each other’s bodies.
Neither De Nicolay nor Penni adapts the satirical
tone against ‘only the common people’ evident in
Beham’s engraving and Busbecq’s letter. Bassano
had noted that noblewomen bathed within the
harems of their own beautiful homes, so that he
was talking about only ‘those who are middling
rich’.15 De Nicolay chose to make the lascivious
bathers more aristocratic, writing especially of the
0531 CIHA_07_CULT_5.indd 269
269
Figure 2 Jean Mignon
Women Bathing, c. 1547–55
44.5 × 62.5 cm
etching
Anonymous Fund for the Acquisition of Prints Older
than 150 Years, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art
Museum, Cambridge, MA (M236000)
Photograph Allan Macintyre
© President and Fellows of Harvard College
‘the great and notable dames’, a shift also featured
in the French etching.16 In conjunction with this
class shift, the habit and its venue became more
antique.
To understand the dynamics of this reception,
we must locate the image within the French court,
with its important alliance between Süleyman the
Magnificent and Francis I against the Hapsburgs.
Rather than Orientalising in the later sense of
demeaning, colonising and stereotyping, French
reactions to Ottoman culture during Francis I’s
reign were in many ways positive and envious.17 To
Europeans, the Ottoman Empire seemed more or-
derly in its social structure, more pious in its devo-
tion to a single religion and the regular practice of
prayer, and more virile and victorious on the battle-
field. Visitors brought back tales of a less fractious,
more loyal ruling class living in a state of luxury.
Each ruler had ambitious programs of build-
ing and decoration, Francis I most famously at
Fontainebleau, which included an elaborate bath-
ing suite. When artists of the French court con-
tributed to the flattering construction of an idyllic,
23/6/09 11:55:13 AM
 270 Cultural and Artistic Exchange in the Making of the Modern World
escapist and elegant world, they not only turned to
the repertoire of classicism, with its rich narrative,
allegorical traditions and triumphant imperialism,
but, at times, to the more novel myth of another
court, one existing at the edges of the former
Graeco-Roman Empire.
De Nicolay’s account of Turkish baths began
by drawing a connection with luxurious, ancient
precedent: ‘In Constantinople as also in all the
other cities Mahematised in Graecia, Asia, & Africa
are a great number of very faire baths, … which ac-
cording to the imitation of the auncient Graecians &
Romaines, are constructed & builded with industry,
sumptuousnesse, & expenses almost incredible’.18
The multi-chambered layout he described, akin to
Diocletian’s baths, was followed in both Istanbul
and Fontainebleau. He inserted a new sentence
about ancient Greece: ‘Even as in times past wer
the Tribades, of the number wherof was Sapho the
Lesbian which transferred the love[,] wherwith she
pursued a 100. women or maidens[,] upon her only
friend Phaon’.19 De Nicolay thought in reassuring
and Ovidian terms about an ultimately male focus
for Sapphic women, because male Phaon overrode
Sappho’s love for women.
The kind of Turkish-bathing tribade purveyed
to French nobles was a classical, luxurious, erotic
fantasy figure who could be imagined as having
her counterpart in such spaces as Fontainebleau.
When Henry VIII’s ambassador Henry Wallop
was personally escorted by Francis I through those
bathing apartments in November 1540, he found
there ‘Madame de Estampes [the King’s mistress],
and Madame Dowbeyney, in a chambre next unto
them, where was two beddes: and in myn oppinion,
theye more mete to be in the said baynes, then to
lye with theire howsbandes’.20 Soon thereafter, the
room with a pool, adjacent to the space where the
languid ladies had rested in a happily husbandless
state, was decorated by Primaticcio with a Callisto
cycle, including a lunette in which two seemingly
female bodies kiss.21
Whether Mignon’s etching connoted the sul-
tan’s Istanbul (which De Nicolay referred to as
a ‘nouvelle Rome’22), the king’s Fontainebleau,
Sappho’s ancient Lesbos or Diocletian’s Rome—and
it is probable that the evocation aimed at blending
these sites—the artists and their audience envis-
aged specific sexual encounters between women.
Two women in the right foreground entwine their
thighs, and slung legs were understood as a visual
sign for sexual concourse.23 They embrace, and the
right hand of one woman has moved directly to her
companion’s genitals. A more straightforward, ob-
scene vignette is placed in the far-left background,
which contains what De Nicolay called ‘a small
0531 CIHA_07_CULT_5.indd 270
chamber’ in which slaves might continue to ‘wash
and rub’ a client’s entire body while she rested.24
An arched, shadowed chamber contains an old,
turbaned slave, leaning forwards and reaching out
with both arms towards what can only be the geni-
tals of a reclining woman. Female figures further
forward in the picture plane conveniently obscure
the scene so that it remains enticing yet censored
enough to avoid crudity.
The distinction made in the German images
between ages and degrees of beauty, in which the
lower class character is ugly, is accentuated in the
French images of De Nicolay’s attendant slave or
Mignon’s female masseuse. Racial divisions were
certainly envisaged, but these do not present a
dichotomy between tribadic Turks and innocent
European women. Rather, they tend to distinguish
slaves from ladies who were both Europeanised
and Turkish, some of whom were thought to
be Christian women captured or purchased by
the sultan.25 A virtual nostalgia developed about
Süleyman’s palace as the centre of peaceful leisure,
at the heart of a powerful man’s imperialist regime.
What eventuated in the seventeenth and later
centuries is another story.
For sixteenth-century material about the
sexual habits of bathing women, two axes of in-
tersection between Europeans and Ottomans offer
more explication than the anachronistic model of
Orientalising. One is class. It was relatively easy
to imagine middling and lower class women in the
public baths of, say, Germany or Turkey being sex-
ually active with each other, and a hierarchy of race,
age and religion also came into play. The other axis
is classicism. Interpenetrating with class, in that the
patina of antiquity endowed an aristocratic aura,
the European Renaissance valued certain aspects
of Ottoman culture that could be cast in terms of
contact with or continuation of the ancient past of
the Graeco-Roman world. It was understood that
Eastern baths maintained a tradition dating back
to antiquity; Penni’s design situated the bathers
in a classical hall. Tribadism itself was an ancient
practice; to hear of it in ‘Constantinople’ was to
learn about another instance of ancient survival,
augmented by the social circumstances of extreme
seclusion for women.
A mix of admiration, titillation and condem-
nation characterised European responses to re-
ports of same-sex activity in women’s baths. The
French etching is part generic erotica, part pseudo-
ethnography, and each term is brought to bear on
the other, arriving at a located fantasy, a courtly clas-
sical Mediterranean myth of Romanised Lesbos.
Far from a history of the repressed and unseen, or
of a colonial stereotype, this paper, by pointing to
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 Images of Bathing Women in Early Modern Europe and Turkey
diverse, complicated local histories, has presented
a small part of the multivalent imagining of female–
female sex in early modern Europe.
NOTES
1 Valerie Traub, ‘The Psychomorphology of the
Clitoris’, GLQ, vol. 2, 1995, pp. 81–113. Although
some of the most sweeping claims are moderated and
some historical errors silently corrected in a more
recent version, the essay of 1995 has fundamentally
determined the parameters of the claim. See ‘The
Psychomorphology of the Clitoris; Or, the Reemergence
of the Tribade in English Culture’ (ch. 5), in Valerie
Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern
England, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2002.
Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2 Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 20.
3 See Domizio Calderini, commentary to Ovid’s
Heroides, Domitii Calderini Veronensis Co[m]me[n]
tariolo i[n] Ibin Ouidii ad vi[rum] clarissimu[m]
falcone[m] sinibaldu[m] ciuem Romanu[m] aerariiq[ue]
pontificii custodem, Jacobus Rubeus, Venice, c. 1475.
4 For Arabic texts on female same-sex eroticism, see, for
example, Walter Andrews & Mehmet Kalpakli, The
Age of Beloveds, Duke University Press, Durham, NC,
2005; and Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between
Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2008.
5 Patricia Simons, ‘Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian
Renaissance Culture: Diana and Other Cases of donna
con donna’, Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 27, 1994,
pp. 81–122, reprinted in Whitney Davis (ed.), Gay
and Lesbian Studies in Art History, Haworth Press,
New York, 1994.
6 Robert A Koch (ed.), The Illustrated Bartsch 15
Formerly Volume 8 (Part 2): Early German Masters
Bathel Beham, Hans Sebald Beham, Abaris Books, New
York, 1978, pp. 23, 110; Stephen H Goddard (ed.),
The World in Miniature: Engravings by the German
Little Masters 1500–1550, Spencer Museum of Art,
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 1988, pp. 180–1,
no. 48. For a broadsheet version, see Michael Schilling,
Bildpublizistik der frühen Neuzeit, Max Niemeyer
Verlag, Tübingen, 1990, p. 211, plate 39.
7 Ogier de Busbecq, letter, 1560, cited in Charles
Thornton Forster & FH Blackburne Daniell, The
Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, vol. 1,
C Kegan Paul, London, 1881, p. 231.
8 Nicolas de Nicolay, Les Navigations peregrinations
et voyages faicts en la Turquie, published as Dans
l’Empire de Soliman le Magnifique, ed. Marie-Christine
Gomez-Géraud & Stéphane Yérasimos, CNRS, Paris,
1989, p. 138; The Navigations, Peregrinations and
Voyages, Made into Turkie, Thomas Dawson, London,
1585, p. 60 recto.
9 Luigi Bassano, I costumi, et i modi particolari de la vita
de Turchi, facsimile, ed. Franz Babinger, Max Hueber,
Munich, 1963 (1545), hereafter quoted from pp. 5
recto – 6 recto.
10 For discussion of the etching, see Henri Zerner, The
School of Fontainebleau: Etchings and Engravings,
Harry N Abrams, New York, 1969, no. JM 46; Suzanne
Boorsch, entry in The French Renaissance in Prints
from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, exhibition
0531 CIHA_07_CULT_5.indd 271
271
catalogue, Grunwald Centre for the Graphic Arts,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1994, pp. 273–5,
no. 59. For a possible date in the 1550s, see Suzanne
Boorsch, ‘The Prints of the School of Fontainebleau’,
in The French Renaissance in Prints, p. 90. For a date
between 1547 and 1550, see Henri Zerner, Renaissance
Art in France: The Invention of Classicism, trans.
Deke Dusinberre, Scott Wilson & Rachel Zerner,
Flammarion, Paris, 2003, figure 232. The Fogg Art
Museum supplies c. 1550–55 on its photograph.
11 For the engraved copy in reverse issued by the
publisher, print dealer and printmaker Niccolò Nelli,
dated and signed by Marco de Bianchi, see Giorgio
Lise, L’Incisione Erotica del Rinascimento, Carlo Emilio
Bestetti, Milan, 1975, p. 103. For the other French
print, and a drawing, each after Mignon’s etching, see
David Acton, in The French Renaissance in Prints,
pp. 334–5, no. 91; and Emmanuelle Brugerolles &
David Guillet, The Renaissance in France: Drawings
from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Harvard
University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, 1995,
pp. 138–9. For a painting of idealised bathers and
women at their toilette, attributed to Lambert Sustris
and dated to the early 1550s, while he was in Venice,
which depends upon the etching in such details as an
embracing female couple bonded through their mutual
gaze into a mirror, the delivery of delectables on a tray
and a recessed pool in which one woman attends to
her hair, see Die Gemäldegalerie des Kunsthistorischen
Museums in Wien: Verzeichnis der Gemälde, Edition
Christian Brandstätter, Vienna, 1991, plate 50.
12 De Nicolay, Dans l’Empire de Soliman, p. 139; The
Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, p. 61 recto.
13 Bassano, I costumi, p. 5 recto.
14 Boorsch, entry in The French Renaissance in Prints,
p. 273, partly citing Zerner, L’Ecole de Fontainebleau,
exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais, Paris, 1972, p. 320;
similarly, Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold:
Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2005, p. 10.
15 Bassano, I costumi, p. 5 verso.
16 De Nicolay, Dans l’Empire de Soliman, p. 137; The
Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, p. 59 verso.
17 See, for example, Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk
in French History, Thought and Literature (1520–1660),
Boivin et Cie, Paris, 1938; and De Lamar Jensen,
‘The Ottoman Turks in Sixteenth-Century French
Diplomacy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 16, 1985,
pp. 451–70.
18 De Nicolay, Dans l’Empire de Soliman, pp. 135–6;
The Navigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, p. 58
recto–verso.
19 De Nicholay, The Navigations, Peregrinations and
Voyages, p. 60 recto; Dans l’Empire de Soliman, p. 138.
20 Henry Wallop, 1540, cited in W McAllister Johnson,
‘On Some Neglected Usages of Renaissance Diplo-
matic Correspondence’, Gazette des Beaux Arts,
vol. 79, 1972, pp. 53–4.
21 For Pierre Milan’s engraving after Primaticcio’s lost
work, see Zerner, The School of Fontainebleau, no. PM 4.
22 De Nicolay, Dans l’Empire de Soliman, p. 123.
23 Leo Steinberg, ‘The Metaphors of Love and Birth in
Michelangelo’s Pietàs’, in Theodore Bowie & Cornelia
V Christenson (eds), Studies in Erotic Art, Basic Books,
New York, 1970, pp. 241–6.
24 De Nicolay, Dans l’Empire de Soliman, p. 140.
25 ibid., p. 129.
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