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The beauty of the human body has long fascinated art historian George Hersey. In The Evolution of Allure this interest takes a novel turn: for the first time, Hersey brings together modern Darwinian theories of sexual selection (male competition, attractor manipulation, and the like) with art history.
By channeling a general preference for normative proportions, he argues, art has shaped Western society's sexual choices and reproductive goals while also giving rise to normative body types that link physiological drives to aesthetic impulses.
From the Greek Venus Pudica (a form and pose most familiar in the Medici Venus), to any number of subsequent portraits, to the phone-sex goddesses of D-Cup Superstars, Hersey's lively, erotically charged text shows how Western art and popular culture exploit the attractors (the cosmetics, clothes, and ornament that showcase the body) with which people make themselves more alluring or "selectable" to potential mates.
He discusses the mathematical mapping of the selectable body itself and the formulas set forth by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos that have been preserved, through Vitruvius, Leonardo, Durer, and others, down to the present.
Victorian teachings wrapped these canons in Aryan racial theories about sexual selectability, and this in turn had its influence on early modern physical anthropology. Chapters on Francis Galton, Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, W. H. Sheldon's Infamous "posture pictures," and the Nazi theorist Paul Schultze-Naumburg deal with the fear of biological decadence that certain art (by Rembrandt, Rodin, Whistler) was thought to encourage.
Hersey concludes with an excursus on the current hyperdevelopment of bodily attractors, as exemplified in the likes of body builders, Batman, and the Incredible Hulk.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Sex in art, Art and society, Sex role in artShowing 2 featured editions. View all 2 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
The Evolution of Allure: Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk
February 6, 1998, The MIT Press
Paperback
in English
0262581647 9780262581646
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2
The evolution of allure: sexual selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk
1996, MIT Press
in English
0262082446 9780262082440
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-210) and index.
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