Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and His Wife, detail

~~In the previous chapter, points of tension were identified in three of Lewis’s paintings. Quotations from and allusions to disparate nineteenth-century texts shifted awkwardly across their surfaces and, as each source was acknowledged, modes of perception and understanding shifted as well. In this chapter, the highly referential...

THIS chapter centers on a foundational image of avant-garde group identity. The painting is large and full of figures, an ambitious submission to the Paris Salon of 1865. The setting is strange: there are indications of an artist’s studio or some other austere bourgeois...

‘Through painting’, Alberti wrote in On Painting, ‘the faces of the dead go on living for a very long time’. But in their self-portraits early Renaissance artists, it seems, intended less to commemorate themselves for posterity than to assert in visual form their artistic and intellectual skills. The ways in which the Renaissance artist portrayed himself are therefore useful indicators of his self-image and aspirations. The context in which he sets himself, the clothes he is wearing, the …