Brunelleschi's egg
Subtitle: nature, art, and gender in Renaissance Italy
By: Mary D. Garrard.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 429
ISBN-13: 9780520261525
Subjects: Feminism and art; Nature (Aesthetics); Philosophy of nature -- History; Renaissance -- Italy
Other titles: Nature, art, and gender in Renaissance Italy
Description: "Feminist historians of science and philosophy have shown that during the Italian Renaissance, the profound shift in the concept of nature from an organic worldview to the scientific was assisted by the gender metaphor that defined nature as female. Mary D. Garrard extends this analysis to the history of art and proposes that the larger shift was both anticipated and mediated by the visual arts. In case studies of such major figures as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Giorgione, and Titian, Garrard examines the changing relationship of art and nature in the Renaissance, and shows how they were cast by artists and theorists as gendered competitors in a steadily escalating, rhetoric. She differentiates the masculinist Florentine model in which male artists claimed to rival and defeat female nature from the Venetian in which art and nature are more often seen as collaborative partners. Giving new weight to the latter model, Garrard brings a feminist corrective to Renaissance art histories, offering an innovative counternarrative in which the suppressed feminine is given its voice."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: Great Mother Nature; title: The gendering of nature as female : from prehistory through the Middle Ages; title: Nature and art in the Quattrocento : from pupil to equal; title: Technology and the mastery of physical nature : Brunelleschi and Alberti; title: Genesis and the reproduction of life : Masaccio and Michelangelo; title: The rebirth of Venus and the feminization of beauty : Botticelli; title: A balance of power : pictorial metaphors for nature in transition; title: Nature's special child : Leonardo da Vinci; title: The goddess in Arcady : Giorgione; title: Art and nature in the Cinquecento : from competitor to master; title: Love and death in Venice : Titian; title: Art against nature : Raphael, the early Mannerists, and late Michelangelo; title: Natura bound : the later Tuscan Mannerists; title: Epilogue.