George L. Hersey

"The age of the Baroque, a time when great strides were made in science and mathematics, witnessed the construction of some of the world's most magnificent buildings. What did the work of great architects such as Bernini, Blondel, Guarini, and Wren have to do with Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, Desargues, and Newton? In Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, George Hersey explores the ways in which Baroque architecture, with its dramatic shapes and playful experimentation with classical forms, reflects the scientific thinking of the time. He introduces us to a concept of geometry that encompassed much more than the science we know today, one that included geometrics (number and shape games) as well as the art of geomancy, or magic and prophecy using shapes and numbers."--BOOK JACKET.

Humans owe an immense architectural debt to other species. The first hexagons humans saw may have been in honeycombs, the first skyscrapers termitaries (termite high-rises), and the first tents those of African weaver ants. In The Monumental Impulse, art historian George Hersey investigates many ties between the biological sciences and the building arts. Natural building materials such as wood and limestone, for example, originate in biological processes. Much architectural ornament borrows from botany and zoology. Hersey draws striking analogies between building types and animal species. He examines the relationship between physical structures and living organisms, from bridges to mosques, from molecules to mammals.

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.