The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy.(Review)

The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy, by Jacqueline Made Musacchio. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999. xiv, 212 pp. $55.00 U.S.

This study of the decorative art created to commemorate childbirth in Renaissance Italy is richly illustrated in every sense of the word. Lavish images combine with documentary evidence from inventories, account books, letters, and memoirs to produce a fine-grained picture of an elaborate social ritual. Musacchio's concept of "ritual" is borrowed from the work of social and cultural historians of Renaissance Florence such as Richard Trexler and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, and the appropriation is apt. Fertility and childbirth were matters of deep importance in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Lineage was the foundation of political, social, and economic identity, so childlessness or the loss of children was a collective problem as well as a personal tragedy. The demographic collapse of the …