The beauty of the human body has found a daring beholder in art historian George Hersey, who for the first time brings modern Darwinian theories of sexual selection (mate competition, attractor manipulation, and the like) into the history of art. The Evolution of Allure shows how Western art has channeled mate choice, exploiting the cosmetics, clothes, muscles, organs, and ornaments that showcase the body. From the Medici Venus to Vitruvius, Leonardo, Dürer, and the phone-sex goddesses of D-Cup Superstars, Hersey's lively, erotically charged text shows that the formulas set forth by the Greek sculptor Polykleitos have established a Western canon of human gestures and proportions and may have influenced human evolution.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Yale University's George Hersey has come up with an entertaining theory that introduces Darwinian concepts of sexual selection to art history. Briefly stated, his argument goes like this: human beings have chosen their sexual mates based on artistic representations of beauty, as a result of which the human form has gradually evolved to mirror the proportions of those representations. Hersey admits up front that his hypothesis is largely unprovable, but it's still great fun to consider, particularly since he manages to cram a lot of information about everything from prehistoric sculpture to the Incredible Hulk into approximately 200 pages without resorting to an excessive amount of stuffy academic jargon. This book will give your brain muscles a workout, but one that any art lover should enjoy.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Hersey . . . estblishes compelling connections between high art and popular culture in this entertaining interdisciplinary romp."
—Choice
"A highly interesting look of the element of 'beauty' as manifested in art throughout the ages."
—Art Times
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tour de force!,
By Wildeguy "wildeguy2000" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Evolution of Allure: Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk (Paperback)
I will boldly give five stars to this book. Hersey is a lively and entertaining writer. You will not get bored with this book. He is fair and balanced in his presentation of the relationship between art and sexual selection. His study gives new meaning to the idea that life imitates art. He traces the history of art using the Darwinian theory of sexual selection as his guide. In that process of discovery he makes connections between the Bronze Age goddess and a D-Cup superstar. HMM. This is no boring study of iconology or High School biology. It is the first attempt by a recognized scholar of Renaissance Art to grapple with the idea of sexual selection in its relationship to art. In fact, Hersey brings ideas of other Renaissance scholars to bear on the topic of sexual selection. That is why I say it is a first. I only wish this book were five times as large. Hersey has fascinating ideas but he needs more people to join him in the task of looking at art through sexual selection theory. The gap that twentieth century artists carved out between biology and the arts is being filled. Gentlemen like Hersey are laying the foundations. If you have read any of his other work on architecture where he makes connections to its roots in biology, you will see that he is attempting to create a new paradigm (in the Greek sense of "showing an example"). Some people may be angered by this or feel threatened because he doesn't seem to have a care for political messages. He will appeal to those who have a palette for the ancients and for Renaissance artists. Hersey does not stop there. He brings in nineteenth century art (W.W. Story, Leighton), takes a detour into phrenology and racialist ideas (Aryanism, criminology) and concludes the book with a discussion of comic strip characters and gym rats.
If life were a Catholic High School and the nuns were Politically Correct moralists, Hersey would be the bad boy standing in the corner (read humor). In real life however, it takes people like Hersey to wake us from our dogmatic pomo slumbers. If you're an academic student of literature at a state university, and you want to get in trouble, I dare you to read this book and quote heavily. I did. I was censored. I'll do it again. Actually this book is accessible to general readers as well, but it requires some knowledge of art history and sexual selection theory. I would recommend reading this book along with Darwin's Descent and Geoffrey Miller's "The Mating Mind" or any of Dissanayake's work. H. Stuart-Jones' "Ancient Writers on Greek Sculpture", works of Vitruvius and Vasari, and a general history of "Social Darwinism" like Degler. Hersey is not biased or dogmatic in any way, but the subject matter itself is controversial (hence my joke above). "The Evolution of Allure" is not crude sociobiology or even evolutionary psychology (though Hersey references Randy Thornhill, Cronin, and Dawkins he balances these authors by including references to Gould and Hofstadter, who were very biased). No matter what you feel about Hersey's conclusions, you will be refreshed by his broad knowledge of the material. There is one drawback. On page 44, the editor of this book added an initial letter 'f' to the word art. Deliberate malice? unintentional oversight? wishful thinking?
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