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Rating: 
Summary: A tour de force!
Review: 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.
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