The Tempest

In the succeeding chapters of this book I shall be undertaking a series of close analyses of particular images and groups of images of the body. In this first chapter I shall map historiographic and theoretical issues within which the nude in Western art poses itself as problematic...

Ranged around the walls of the Hall of Psyche in the Palazzo Te in Mantua, framing images of frolicking naked gods, goddesses, and nymphs, is an...

ÉDOUARD MANET GREW up on the rue des Petits-Augustins (now the rue Bonaparte), more or less across the street from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts he never attended. The address was a short walk down the quay and across the bridge from the Palais de Justice where Manet’s father worked; indeed, many judges and magistrates lived nearby. As a family of a certain social standing,...

~~Contemporary artists often help us understand how their work is made by revealing their creative process. But this was not always the case, and it can be difficult to reconstruct how a painting was made centuries ago by just looking at it. Other painters could always use their experience to speculate, but it is only with the advent of...