Venus of Urbino

More than a hundred years come between Cennini’s dismissal of women as unworthy of study to form the “perfect body” and the famous text ascribed to Raphael about generating his image of Galatea (fig. 4.1) through an “Idea.” The two texts betray contrasting attitudes toward the artistic worth of female beauty that encapsulate a...

What separates the woman with whom I have spent most of my life or my closest friend from others whose paths have crossed mine for shorter or more scattered times...

All beautiful things, the Greek philosopher Plotinus wrote in the third century A.D., produce “awe and a shock of delight, passionate longing, love and a shudder of rapture...

~In late 1862, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) noted in his studio carnet that a model he described as “Laure, très belle négresse” (“Laure, very beautiful black woman”) sat for a portrait in his rue...

John Singer Sargent’s Roman sketchbook of 1869 contains—besides a pale gray wash of the Colosseum and a drawing of the white oxen of the Campagna—studies by the sixteen-year-old artist of the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican ...