At least five members of the family of Petrus Gonzales, who lived at the French court and then at various Italian courts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were afflicted with a genetic abnormality that causes the body to be covered with hair.
Physicians and scientists studied the hairy Gonzales children and their hairy father, and artists painted their portraits. Building on my book on the Gonzales sisters, The Marvelous Hairy Girls : The Gonzales Sisters and their Worlds, this paper examines the ways in which people living at the time understood and contextualized the male and female members of the Gonzales family.
To a very few, they were simply humans with unwanted hair. Among other visitors at the elegant home was Isabella Pallavicina, whose noble title was Marchesa of Soragna, a city near Bologna. With the marchesa was Antonietta Gonzales, the young daughter of Petrus Gonzales. Like her father and like most of her sisters and brothers, Antonietta Gonzales suffered from a genetic abnormality now known as hypertrichosis universalis , which meant much of her body was covered with hair.
Aldrovandi studied the little girl carefully, and later noted that,. The hairs on her forehead were longer and rougher in comparison with those which covered her cheeks, although these are softer to touch than the rest of her body, and she was hairy on the foremost part of her back, and bristling with yellow hair up to the beginning of her loins.
Two hairy girls are shown there , described there as age eight and age twelve. An unknown artist at the court of William V of Bavaria painted life-size portraits of Petrus, his non-hairy wife, and their two hairy children, a girl of about seven and a boy of about three. Ferdinand ordered copies of the paintings—and of hundreds of other portraits in his collection—made in miniature, storing them in several trunks. This double identity made them intriguing, both in their own day and today.
