Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520261525)

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. In this provocative and groundbreaking book, 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.

Author: Mary D. Garrard
ISBN-10: 0520261526
ISBN-13: 9780520261525
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 11/05/2010
Pages: 448
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 5.05lbs
Size: 11.40h x 8.90w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2011