Women, Fertility and Maternal Art in Renaissance Florence examines maternity-centered art to reveal women-s crucial function in saving Florence from a depopulation catastrophe.
Nativity and Madonna and Child images that graced many households and chapels in Florentine society formed a program of visual indoctrination, championing a -birth epic- that glorified the social duty of reproduction but dismissed its high risk. As images emphasizing women-s reproductive value multiplied throughout the century, the accounts of their deaths in childbirth and the records of their elaborate public funerals present these mothers as new examples of self-sacrifice and martyrdom.
This book re-centers the history of the Renaissance around women and their bodies - both as subjects of artistic representation and as critical but ignored contributors to Florentine society. It proposes a more inclusive vision of an era that is still too oft
