The Art Bulletin

Thomas Hardy's early novel A Laodicean (first published in 1881) focuses on the relationship between Paula Power, a spirited young woman intent on breathing new life into a ruined medieval castle, and George Somerset, a brilliant neo-Gothic architect...

FRANCIS AMES-LEWIS AND MARY ROGERS, EDS. Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. 241 pp.; 48 b/w ills. $84.95 Elizabeth Cropper's hugely influential 1976 article, "On Beautiful Women: Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular...

[Mentor:] Son of the wise Ulysses...He who has not felt his weakness and the violence of his passions is not yet wise; for he does not yet understand himself and does not know how to distrust himself.--Francois de La Mothe-Fenelon, Les Aventures de Telemaque,...

ALEXANDRE KOSTKA AND IRVING WOHLFARTH, EDS. Nietzsche and "An Architecture of Our Minds " Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999. 376 pp.; 75 b/w ills. $45 paper In the final section of Ecce Homo, entitled...

JORG TRAEGER Renaissance and Religion: Die Kunst des Glaubens im Zeitalter Raphaels Munich: Beck, 1997. 552 pp.; 17 color ills., 241 b/w. DM178.00; DM78.00 paper Richard Trexler said it three decades ago: "The pagan Renaissance is no more." One hundred...

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, altarpieces were essentially hybrid entities; most often they were privately commissioned works of art, but they stood in the public spaces of churches. During the early part of this period such giving...