Harvesting Color, Rebecca Burgess

When Harvesting Color came across my desk, there was no doubt in my mind that I would write a review about this timely book.  Author Rebecca Burgess brings to light the devastating effects that dying fibers with synthetic chemicals has caused to our environment and to our health, and she urges us to rely on the natural resources around us in a mindful way. 

  

The concept of this book may be new to some of you, but even if you’re a newbie to natural dyes, I think as you read my interview with the author, you’ll get excited about wanting to try this out for yourself.  

Don’t forget to read all the way to the end to find out how you could win a free copy of Rebecca’s book!

  

Kara: Rebecca, you identify 36 plants that grow in the United States that are suitable for creating beautiful, natural dyes. How did you go about researching and testing various plants to discover such a variety of vibrant colors? 

Rebecca: The research took place in my homeland of Northern California about 10 years ago, when I realized I lived in a region listed as one of the top 25 most biodiverse in the country.  I expanded my interest beyond my region for the writing of the book—and for that process; I undertook a search for other natural dyers who had been doing what I’d been doing in different regions of the US.  I found Rose Dedman in the Southwest, Carol Leigh in the Ozark mountains, and Carol Lee in the Rocky Mountains.  All of these women carried rich and long histories with the ecosystems they lived within.

Kara: When did you become interested in natural dyes and relying on our natural resources for dying fibers? What was it in your life that led you to this path? 

Rebecca: In college, I experienced what it was like to work with synthetic yarns and synthetic dyes—all of which were not to my liking.  I did not like the smell, the texture, etc.  I was driven toward natural dyes because of their gentleness, the connection that these colors provided between myself and the natural world and the rich tones and shades that you cannot go wrong with!  Any and all combinations seem to work splendidy.

Kara: Working with natural dyes is a new concept for many knitters. What would be your best advice for someone just starting out? Do you offer special steps to begin the journey into working with natural dyes? 

Rebecca: I would start with the Master Dye Bath Recipe—it is so easy and works so well for most plant life.  If you live amongst plant life, you could harvest from your own garden, and give any plant a try.  If you have a farmer’s market nearby, you could buy a bouquet and enjoy it for a couple of days, and then experiment with heating the flowers up on the stove in some water when the blooms are just past their prime.  As long as your yarns are prepared with a mordant, the colors you create in your dye pot will bond nicely to your yarns.

Kara: Why did you feel that the time was right to write a book that encourages yarn enthusiasts to “hunt and gather” to dye their own wool? 

Rebecca: When workshops became quite full, and my time seemed stretched like a rubber band at capacity, it felt like the time to disseminate the work through a book. I do recommend that gathering materials be done in one’s garden, first and foremost, and then through relationships you build with your neighbors, community gardens, land management agencies—you build your harvesting grounds slowly and in a way that always regenerates the plants that you are pruning.  It is really important to remember you want to be able to come back the following year to your favored plants and be able to harvest them again—so treat them very kindly (unless you are using invasive plants, and in that case you don’t really want to see them the following year!).

Kara: When it comes to the seasons, it seems easy to harvest plants in the summer months, but is it also possible to find useful plants in the fall or winter? Are there plants that can be grown indoors?
Rebecca: Fall is certainly a great time to harvest—falling aspen leaves, black walnut husks and sheep sorrel seed heads are an example of this.  In the winter, I suppose you could grow all of your favored plants in a greenhouse.  They’d do quite well.  You can also dry your spring, summer and fall harvest and save it for winter use.

Kara: When it comes to the kinds of yarns you choose to dye and work with, do you prefer to work with small, local fiber companies? 

Rebecca: I prefer knowing the flock of sheep, alpaca or angora goats!   All the yarns I currently dye are from farms in my region. I love having a relationship with the land in this way—going out during shearing time and collecting the fiber I will need.  I mill my own yarns at our local wool co-op.

Kara: When it comes time to dye wool, is there a special process to preparing the yarn?

Rebecca: I highly recommend mordanting your yarns.  This is a process of soaking and heating them in a substance like iron, alum, seawater or acorn water.  The fiber needs a “middle man” that can negotiate the relationship with the dye.  The dye and fiber by themselves don’t seem to get along so well.

Kara: Do some fibers dye better than others, and is it possible for the same color to result in a different color depending on the fiber choice? Are there certain fibers that are best to stay away from completely? 

Rebecca: The fibers all dye differently, and the spin of the yarn also changes the effect of the color. Merino is like a sponge, whereas Wensleydale is a longer fiber, which is a tad less absorbent of the color. The tighter the twist, the more time it takes the dye to penetrate the yarn.

Kara: When it comes to the seasons of the year, can you give a few examples of the kinds of plants that are best for each season?

Rebecca: I love the soft mint green of summer black hollyhocks and the ocean-like blues of Japanese indigo.  Pokeberry’s bright pink in the early fall are incredible.  Toyon in the winter is a dream of deep red and fire-like oranges.   

Kara: In your daily life as an author and designer, what is a typical work day like for you? 

Rebecca: Typical is a funny concept for me. The routine I can sum up at the moment is defined seasonally. This morning I planted Kentucky beans, heirloom tomatoes and when I’m done typing, I’ll go weed the 3/4 of an acre of indigo.  I stopped in at home to do an interview and host a filmmaker who videoed me with my hands deep in an indigo vat, squeezing out some local wool from the coyote brush dye pot.  I keep thinking … must get back to weeding! Each season is so different.  My life is defined by color, flowers, leaves, roots, weather patterns, wool, alpaca, soils, yarns and steamy dye vats—these are the things I love.

Kara: When did you first discover knitting and spinning? What was your first love, knitting, spinning or hand dyeing? 
Rebecca: I started weaving first, then dyeing, then spinning and then knitting—weaving at 18, dyeing at 19, spinning at 22, and now I’m knitting!  I love the transportability of knitting, I think the knitting needles and I are going to become good friends this winter.

Kara: I’m amazed at the vibrant colors that are produced from plants literally all around us. Out of all the natural colors that you’ve discovered, do you have a favorite? What is the plant that produces this shade and can you share some background about it?

Rebecca: I really love coreopsis. I don’t have a singular favorite, but this is such a beautiful plant and such an easy dye to make.  It is Coreopsis Tinctorium.  All species with the ‘tint’ in the species name are dye plants.  It grows all over the country.  You just pour boiling water over the flowers and voila!  Or make sun tea out of it for your yarns.  To me, its bright orange dye and beautiful yellow flowers are such an emblem of the sun and the summer.

Coreopsis Tinctorium

Kara: Can you share some tidbits about the knitting patterns included at the end of each chapter? 

Rebecca: The patterns are for everyone.  They are for all levels of knitting and are really designed to be of use for the knitter in the season they are listed.  The Madder Root Scarf and Hood is an example of how to make use of a beautiful red root and make a garment from its dyed yarns for a cozy winter experience.

Kara: Do you have any new projects on the burner to tell us about? 

Rebecca: I am working on creating the first North American dye farm here in Northern California.  I am also fundraising and working collaboratively to create the country’s first farm-based solar mill so we can grow, mill, dye, weave and knit our region’s own fibers.  I am also working on a college level certificate for those wanting to get into the organic and regional fiber and color movement.  These are all spinoffs of the Fibershed project I started in 2010 right after I finished the book.

To find out more about Rebecca and her projects, visit:www.fibershed.wordpress.com, http://www.rebeccarburgess.com/

Here’s your chance to win a free copy of this book! (Courtesy of Artisan Books)

The Rules: Leave a comment to this post telling me how you will use the resources around you in a more responsible and mindful way through your knitting. The most inventive idea wins! 

Deadline: Send in your comments to this post by midnight June 18th. Good luck! The winner will be announced on Monday, June 20th. 

Rebecca has also generously provided a free copy of her Summer Knit: Nap Mat from her book below! 

Excerpted from Harvesting Color: How to Find Plants and Make Natural Dyes by Rebecca Burgess. (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2011. Photographs by Paige Green. 

Summer Knit: Nap Mat

This mat is a wonderfully useful size. It also makes a great small rug.

Finished Measurements: 38 inches wide, 39 inches long

Yarn: Chunky thick-n-thin 2-ply wool in eucalyptus, coyote bush, cliff rose, biden, 

hollyhock, sagebrush, indigo, ironweed, rabbitbrush, elderberry, and goldenrod; use 4 oz. (114 g) each of your favorite 3 colors and 2 oz. (57 g) each of the rest, for a total of 28 oz. (794 g). This pattern was written to use 4 oz. of eucalyptus, indigo, and coyote bush.

Needles: U.S. size 19 (15.5 mm) 24-inch circular needle, or size needed to obtain gauge

Notions: Scissors, wool needle, small spray bottle of water

Gauge: 1 ½ sts per inch

Instructions:

With eucalyptus, cast on 60 sts using a long-tail cast-on. Knitted or cable cast-on works well also.

Work in garter st (knit every row) until you have about 12 inches of yarn left. Spit-splice this tail to the beginning of the skein of coyote bush and continue in garter st., changing colors in this order: cliff rose, biden, hollyhock, sagebrush, indigo, ironweed, rabbitbrush, 

elderberry, goldenrod, eucalyptus, indigo, and coyote bush. When knitting the last skein of coyote bush, remember to save enough yarn to bind off. The knitted piece should measure roughly 24 by 41 inches.

Weave in ends with the wool needle. To finish the mat, steam block the fabric to measure 38 x 39 inches.

Spit Splicing

Spit splicing is a rustic technique to join yarn, one that complements the already slubbed texture of the yarn. It requires a spray bottle of water, not necessarily saliva. Take the working yarn and fray 2 to 3 inches of the tail. Take the next color and do the same. Overlap the two colors in a way to create a continuous strand across the palm of one 

hand. Spray a small amount of water in that palm and rub both palms together rapidly. The friction created by your hands and the yarn, combined with the water, will cause the yarn to felt onto itself. Repeat until the yarn is firmly fused.

Above images and text from Splendid Sticks.  Link here.

Some Thoughts on Conversation

"We are tempted to think that our little “sips” of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places — in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.  Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, “I am thinking about you.” Or even for saying, “I love you.” But connecting in sips doesn’t work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it’s derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another’s point of view." -source is Edward Winkleman.  Read more here.

PAINT AND PAINT NAMES

"With the rise of cities, the wall's real enemy is not nature but other human beings who lead secretive lives on the opposite side, lives that are contiguous with ours but that we seldom see, that make their presence felt only by means of late-night quarrels, the distasteful smells of cooking, creaking box springs, and the constant murmur of flushing toilets. Overcrowding and urbanization have given the wall new meaning. Ever since the first loose stone was piled on top of another, crude partitions have delineated property and thus served as architectural extensions of our sense of identity, a way of saying to our enemies "mine," a deed of ownership we sign in bricks and mortar. As we are herded together by overpopulation and are forced to abandon the luxury of detached dwellings for small apartments, the architectural ramparts of our identities are besieged by the madding crowd, which would claim its share of the ever-dwindling space available in which to lead lives that have become more and more solitary the closer we live to each other. The poetry of paint names is based on a misanthropic aesthetic, one that pretends that our walls are not communal property, are not shared, that there is nothing behind them but the green sward, wide open spaces devoid of other people, vast horizons of Island Dawns, Arizona Sunsets, Big Skies, Mountain Forests, Pink Mesas, and Burning Sands. Paint provides us with a psychological barrier from our neighbors, a way of achieving a sense of self-containment and allowing our imaginations to revel in that most pressing desideratum of urban life—space, the empty clearings available for a song on the color preview palette." -an excerpt from the article Paint and Paint Names by Daniel Harris, Cabinet Magazine, Issue 7, Failure, Summer 2002. Link here to read full article.

Sampling of Benjamin Moore's "white" paint chips.  Image source is from the article Paint and Paint Names, link above.

Source is Cabinet Magazine

Silk Road, NY Times Article

"This is the crux of the matter, for most bodies found in this region have what are called Caucasoid features. And though many objects here are clearly associated with later Chinese traditions — like the delicate figurines of women making pottery (from the seventh to ninth centuries) — others come from cultural worlds that can still not be clearly identified."

Asa Ames, American Folk Art Museum

Filling in the Contours of a Surprising Golden Age

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By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: April 25, 2008

The little-known American sculptor Asa Ames worked mostly from life, carving and then painting three-dimensional wood portraits. He made either busts or full-length figures, depicting family and friends, and when he died of consumption in 1851, at 27, he left behind 12 or 13 sculptures from the last four or five years of his life. Eight of these works form a stunning little show at the American Folk Art Museum, the first ever devoted to Ames’s work. It has been organized by Stacy C. Hollander, the museum’s senior curator and director of exhibitions.

Enlarge This Image

Collection of John T. Ames

A daguerreotype, the only known photograph of Ames, is full of references to his work and leisure.More Photos »

Multimedia

Slide Show

Asa Ames at the American Folk Art Museum

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Boulder History Museum

A sculpture of Susan Ames, the daughter of his brother. More Photos >

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Fenimore Art Museum

“Head of a Boy,” a sculpture by Asa Ames. More Photos >

The art, artifacts and objects produced in America during the first half of the 19th century constitute something of an artistic golden age, but a highly disorganized one that is still yielding surprises. Its legacy is short on towering stone temples or airy frescoes that stay in one place, and long on portable objects made for pleasure, use, profit or a combination of the three. These often anonymous efforts constitute an amazing tribute to the collective spirit, imagination and ingenuity of a time when creativity was widespread, initiative was bottom-up, and per capita participation was high. They also confirm the basic human need for beauty and decoration.
Enterprising self-taught painters of the period like Ammi Philips and Erastus Salisbury Field, who traveled around New England painting portraits for a living, have long been known in the folk-art world and beyond. Similarly determined sculptors are much rarer. Ames is an exception, though much about his life remains a mystery. He was born in 1823 in Evans, N.Y., a small town 20 miles south of Buffalo. His date of birth and death both come from his gravestone. And an 1850 federal census tantalizingly lists his occupation as “sculpturing.” He might have spent time at sea and been apprenticed to a carver of ships’ figureheads or trade figures. Until 25 years ago, Ames’s work, when noticed at all, was probably lumped together with such carvings. But in 1981 the American Folk Art Museum received an anonymous piece as a gift: a wood bust of a young girl whose head has a phrenology chart painted on it. Ms. Hollander ultimately attributed it to Ames. In 1982 Jack T. Ericson, an antiques dealer, culminated 12 years of research on Ames with an article in Antiques magazine. It reproduced the works that could be traced or attributed to him, including the folk art museum’s piece, which is thought to have been made at the end of Ames’s life, when he was ill and living with a doctor who practiced alternative medicine.
One of the show’s standouts was discovered only in 2003, in the basement of the Boulder History Museum in Colorado. Made in December 1849, it is a full-length portrait of Susan Ames, the daughter of his brother Henry G. Ames. Wearing a violet dress, Susan stands staunch and solemn, showing that posing was not much fun. Her eyes are intent but unfocused; she is holding still as best she can by thinking about other things. She has a small Bible or hymnal in her right hand; her left is raised.
The violet of Susan’s dress is boldly accented with a red collar, waist and hem; its gathers are round and regular, almost like the flutes on a Classical column. Her pantaloons are edged in eyelet lace whose holes have been carefully carved, as has the red upholstered footstool she stands on, right down to its brass-colored tacks. The colors and details imbue the entire sculpture with the intensity of Susan’s expression.
Ames’s artistry has a distinct personality. His work is full of signature tics, like his careful carvings of his subjects’ hair or ears. There is also a familial resemblance among the sculptures, and between them and Ames, as shown by the only known photograph of him.
Two of the best pieces in the show are sculptures of robust young men who might be Ames’s brothers or Ames himself. “Head of a Boy” is luxuriant with youth, from its thick, carefully combed hair (back from the brow, but forward on the sides) and flushed cheeks to its fine-looking jacket, tie and shirt. His dark, focused eyes and slightly pursed lips brim with ambition and hope; he seems to be practicing to look like a judge or senator. The slightly fairer subject of “Bust of a Young Man” is even more lifelike; here the pursed lips seem about to speak. He brings to mind the figures of the self-taught sculptor and photographer Morton Bartlett and Charles Ray’s mannequin sculptures.
Ames’s inspirations clearly included the portraits that itinerant painters were making during this period, but translating these wonderfully stiff, often emotionally fraught images into three dimensions gives them an added sense of life. The best of them have the artifice and complexity of 19th-century photographs, with which Ames had at least one close encounter.
The strange, beautiful and overpopulated daguerreotype that this encounter produced testifies to Ames’s ambition. He is in his Sunday best, working intently with a mallet and chisel on a bust of a man. (Its profile, near his knee, suggests a self-portrait.) Three sculptures look on from the upper right: a pudgy baby with a drape of fabric around its middle (it is in the exhibition, without the drape) and the busts of two other children, both in carved, off-the-shoulder togas in keeping with the neo-Classical style of the day.
The busts teeter on a textile-covered stand beneath which, peeking upward, is a young man, who might almost be another sculpture. The carving of a hand (also in the show) and real-looking bass viol visible behind this party of five increase the sense of elaborate stage-managing. Ames was probably ill when this photograph was made, and perhaps he knew that obscurity threatened. Packed with details about his leisure interests as well as his “sculpturing,” with his works doubling as an imagined audience, this carefully constructed image has the same intensity as Ames’s portraits. It is a detailed message in a bottle that he sent into the future, which is now.

“Asa Ames: Occupation Sculpturing” continues through Sept. 14 at the American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 265-1040, folkartmuseum.org.

Article from New York Times.

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WHEN DID SEEING BECOME BELIEVING?
by Jon Lackman | 15 November 2010 | Books, Medieval

Roland Recht’s 1999 book Believing and seeing. The art of Gothic cathedrals has finally been published in English, in a translation by the late Mary Writtall.

In the July 2010 issue of Metascience Ellen M. Shortell writes:

Studies in medieval religion, science, literature, and art, particularly in the past two decades, have focused a great deal of attention on the role of vision in later medieval thought. It is clear that by the year 1200, Richard of St. Victor’s “simple perception of matter” was no longer simple, but was recognised by many as a means to the understanding of profound truths … Recent scholarship on Gothic art and architecture has in fact been interested in related themes—the interrelationship of architectural space, colour, light, and figural imagery; the viewer’s experience of religious buildings; the visual and material properties of medieval art and their relationship to spirituality. Where most studies that aim for an integration of media have focused on specific sites, however, Recht casts his eye more broadly on the phenomenon of Gothic … [T]he book reads more as a wide-ranging compendium of observations gleaned over the course of a distinguished career than as the sustained, in-depth thesis on visual culture that the title suggests …

Recht is convincing when he argues that architects and other artists must have been conscious of the effects of their invention. He suggests that master masons began to invent new forms to fulfill their clerical patrons’ requests, thus gaining greater respect and developing a new sense of their own powers; the Gothic cathedrals could not have come into being without a community of artists who communicated with one another and began to see themselves in a new light. These ideas are extended to sculptors and painters of the fourteenth and, especially, fifteenth centuries in the final chapters of the book.

In the preface to the French edition, the author expressed the wish that this book be seen as a contribution to the history of ideas as much as to the history of visual art, and that colleagues recognise the value of cross-disciplinary approaches. The scope of the undertaking is ambitious, and observations from the well-trained eye of a distinguished scholar are often tantalizing.

In Times Higher Education, Caroline Bruzelius writes:

This book … is an ambitious, broad-ranging study of the role and function of the image within the medieval church … [Recht] brings together two subjects that are usually studied separately, architecture and sacred images, and he proposes that the latter cannot be understood or experienced without the former, in both spatial and liturgical terms … The second part of the volume focuses on the modes of viewing religious images in relation to the “theatre” of the Mass and as active forces in lay piety. Here there are many important insights, not least of which is the enhanced sacralisation of liturgical space after the promulgation of the doctrine of transubstantiation – that is to say, the real presence of Christ at the altar during the Elevation of the Host … Recht’s analysis of sacred images as mnemonic devices that engage vision as an active force in a spiritual journey is deeply compelling, and he presents new and powerful interpretations of how sacred space conditioned and participated in a larger system of signification of the image … No one knows better than Recht that church spaces were not the open spaces we see today, but instead partitioned into distinct zones, access to which was conditioned by gender, lay or clerical status, or other systems of separation and power … Visual access to the sacred may have been as much an instrument of power and authority as a communally shared experience.

In The Medieval Review, Charlotte A. Stanford lauds “this translation of a complex study by a noted European art historian”:

[Recht] employed his keen eye and pen in mingling historiography and analysis to explore the phenomenon of Gothic throughout Europe … One of Recht’s greatest strengths as a scholar in this study is his own connoisseur’s eye, especially as he discusses the manipulation of architectural space. These sections are heavy with specialized, but necessary terminology. A case in point is his discussion of the torus moldings on the arch openings of each level of the nave of Sens cathedral, required for explaining how the rich juxtaposition of light and shadow was formed at Sens … In keeping with the title, however, the book’s main thrust is to examine the cathedral as a mingled system of seeing and belief … This system revolves, Recht argues, around an increasing desire to provide eyewitness proof of the miraculous through depictions of the lives of saints and the mystery of the Host … [Cathedrals] paved the way for the development of illusionistic space in Quattrocento painting [he argues]. This concluding claim is bold and thought provoking … Nevertheless, Recht’s book must be treated with caution: it is not a general introduction either to cathedrals or ways of seeing … [It] is ultimately, despite its weaknesses, an intriguing study of Gothic accompanied by investigation of many critical questions in the discipline, written by an observant and thoughtful scholar and now made easily accessible to the English-speaking world.

In the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Paul Binski writes:

Recht’s study can now be seen as part of a trend towards the study of visuality which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, and which entailed a broader enquiry into the hierarchy of the senses and epistemology. As an hypothesis about actual historical change it raises several questions … The strength of Recht’s book is its practical engagement with art and architecture especially. It has useful, if rather distended, opening sections on the history of the modern reception and interpretation of Gothic cathedrals.

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BRUNELLESCHI’S EGG
by Jon Lackman | 1 December 2010 | Renaissance

In the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Woman’s Art Journal, the editors write:

Even with the rising presence of art by women in museums and on bookstore shelves, Woman’s Art Journal continues to find a receptive audience for its mission: recognition of women artists of the past and present. From the overwhelming number of books and submissions we receive, it’s clear that interest in research in our field is also on the rise … [T]he number of unsolicited manuscripts we’ve received in the last year has more than tripled.

Pioneering feminist Mary D. Garrard (who was celebrated alongside Norma Broude at the First Annual Feminist Art History Conference at American University) has a hefty new book out, Brunelleschi’s Egg, which examines how the Renaissance “shift in the concept of nature–from an organic worldview to the scientific–was assisted by the gender metaphor that defined nature as female … [and] was both anticipated and mediated by the visual arts.” Garrard separates artists into two camps – those who “claimed to rival and defeat female nature” and for whom “art and nature are more often seen as collaborative partners.”

The book’s title refers to a story Vasari told about Brunelleschi balancing an egg on its narrow end, as well as the venerable but seldom believed notion that Brunelleschi might have borrowed the shape of his Florentine dome from an egg:

Brunelleschi makes the egg perform for him, putting it to larger use by imitating Nature’s mysterious designs on a grand scale. The concealment of his sources, both in the apparently cryptic egg demonstration and in the hiding of the dome’s true structure behind ribs that tectonized its breast- or egglike form, may bespeak an unacknowledged competition, between the creative powers of Nature and those of the artist. At this stage, art’s special powers are not articulated directly, and Nature is still credited as their source – as we saw in Alberti’s recommendation that architects follow “Nature’s ingenuity” and her biological order in their vault designs.

The Art History Newsletter

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BRUNELLESCHI’S EGG
by Jon Lackman | 1 December 2010 | Renaissance

In the Spring/Summer 2010 issue of Woman’s Art Journal, the editors write:

Even with the rising presence of art by women in museums and on bookstore shelves, Woman’s Art Journal continues to find a receptive audience for its mission: recognition of women artists of the past and present. From the overwhelming number of books and submissions we receive, it’s clear that interest in research in our field is also on the rise … [T]he number of unsolicited manuscripts we’ve received in the last year has more than tripled.

Pioneering feminist Mary D. Garrard (who was celebrated alongside Norma Broude at the First Annual Feminist Art History Conference at American University) has a hefty new book out, Brunelleschi’s Egg, which examines how the Renaissance “shift in the concept of nature–from an organic worldview to the scientific–was assisted by the gender metaphor that defined nature as female … [and] was both anticipated and mediated by the visual arts.” Garrard separates artists into two camps – those who “claimed to rival and defeat female nature” and for whom “art and nature are more often seen as collaborative partners.”

The book’s title refers to a story Vasari told about Brunelleschi balancing an egg on its narrow end, as well as the venerable but seldom believed notion that Brunelleschi might have borrowed the shape of his Florentine dome from an egg:

Brunelleschi makes the egg perform for him, putting it to larger use by imitating Nature’s mysterious designs on a grand scale. The concealment of his sources, both in the apparently cryptic egg demonstration and in the hiding of the dome’s true structure behind ribs that tectonized its breast- or egglike form, may bespeak an unacknowledged competition, between the creative powers of Nature and those of the artist. At this stage, art’s special powers are not articulated directly, and Nature is still credited as their source – as we saw in Alberti’s recommendation that architects follow “Nature’s ingenuity” and her biological order in their vault designs.