Women, Fertility and Maternal Art in Renaissance Florence

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 often addressed exclusively via the history of its male artists, bankers and merchants.

Women, Fertility, and Maternal Art in Renaissance Florence appeals to both students and scholars in field of art history, social history, Renaissance art and gender studies, and also the general reader who has an interest in these areas.

Costanza Gislon Dopfel is Professor of Art History at Saint Mary’s College of California. Born in Milan, Italy, she received her Doctorate from Stanford University. Her recent publications include the edited volumes Nascere (2017), Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Premodern World (2019), and Maternal Materialities: Objects, Rituals and Material Evidence of Medieval and Early Modern Childbirth (2024).