'Jewels of women' : ladies, laps, and lapdogs in Renaissance culture -- Portrait of the poet as a dog : Petrarch's Epistola metrica III, 5 -- Alberti's Cavallo vivo, or The 'art' of domination -- Della Porta's face of domestication : physiognomy, gender politics, and humanism's others -- Psychoanalytic intermezzo : Freud's missed reading of Leonardo's alternative humanism -- Versions of Diana : gender and Renaissance mythography
Summary
Beasts and Beauties examines the relationship between domesticity and power by focusing on the contemporaneous development of the invention of the 'pet' and the delineation of the home as a uniquely private enclosure, where the pater familias ruled over his own secluded world of domesticated wife, children, servants, and animals