Search

This essay makes a case for the historical importance and cultural and psychic complexity of Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres's representations of men, which have tended to be neglected in favour of the painter's much more celebrated and more thoroughly scrutinized representations of women. It focuses on an unfinished portrait of the artist's oldest and dearest friend, Jean‐Pierre‐François Gilibert. I argue that Ingres foregrounded the physical allure and fashionability of his friend in this portrait, thereby overtly specularizing and covertly eroticizing him. The portrait is read as an artefact of an early 'romantic' phase of the two men's friendship, one that had to be disavowed in order for them to achieve heterosexual adulthood in accordance with the period's growing dichotomization of homosocial and homoerotic bonds between men. I trace the processes through which Ingres initially disavowed Gilibert – and ultimately, retrospectively re‐embraced him – via the complex role that the latter's portrait played in the decades‐long evolutionary saga of its erstwhile pendant, Ingres's celebrated Self‐Portrait at the Age of Twenty‐Four. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers a remarkable group of fifteenth century Italian portraits that were based on masks cast directly from the sitter’s face, either during life or shortly after death. All of them explicate their origins in a cast. Rather than arguing that some fifteenth-century artists were simply not skilled enough to overcome the traces of death, I submit that the traces of these masks served a kind of faithfulness to documentation and replication. These portraits are informed by a highly motivated kind of realism, formulated in response to doubts about the veracity of naturalistic pictures around the middle of the fifteenth century. They are better understood, I argue, in terms of imprint or reproduction rather than in terms of invention or enlivenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides brief profiles of authors who wrote articles in the issue including Joost Keizer, Edward H. Wouk, and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, and provides abstracts for art history articles in the issue on topics including portrait painting in 15th century Italy, the painting "Allegory of the Trinity" by Frans Floris, and the depictions of Africans in French art.