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  1. Home
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  3. The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism
  • Cited by 4
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2016
Print publication year:
2016
Online ISBN:
9781316216293
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316216293
Subjects:
Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, History, Religion, European Studies, Religion: General Interest
Information

Book description

Depicting the Creation of Woman presented a special problem for Renaissance artists. The medieval iconography of Eve rising half-formed from Adam's side was hardly compatible with their commitment to the naturalistic representation of the human figure. At the same time, the story of God constructing the first woman from a rib did not offer the kind of dignified, affective pictorial narrative that artists, patrons, and the public prized. Jack M. Greenstein takes this artistic problem as the point of departure for an iconographic study of this central theme of Christian culture. His book shows how the meaning changed along with the form when Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, and other Italian sculptors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries revised the traditional composition to accommodate a naturalistically depicted Eve. At stake, Greenstein argues, is the role of the artist and the power of image-making in reshaping Renaissance culture and religious thought.

Reviews

'This is an original and insightful addition to our understanding of iconography, as sensitive to theology in specific historic contexts as it is to theories of art history and interpretation.'

Chloe Reddaway Source: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History

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