Crafting Boundaries of the Unseeable World: Dialectics of Space in the Bhagavat Sutra Repository, by Jeehee Hong, showcases the complex ways in which boundaries between the mundane and the sacred were visualized at the dawn of the second millennium in China.

J. Vanessa Lyon’s essay, A Psalm for King James: Rubens’s Peace Embracing Plenty and the Virtues of Female Affection at Whitehall, argues that this subject provided the artist with both a notional narrative and an authoritative justification for representing female affection, even same-sex desire, in a political and morally positive light.

In Against the ‘Statue Anatomized’: The ‘Art’ of Eighteenth-Century Anatomy on Trial, Lyle Massey calls for a critical visual history of early modern anatomy that examines the connection between epistemology and image-making practices.

Currency from Opinion: Imitation Banknotes and the Materiality of Paper Currency in Britain, 1782-1847, by Amanda Lahikainen, gives the first history of a virtually unknown genre of prints, imitation banknotes, and demonstrates their complex relationships to the acceptance of paper as a medium fit to carry value.

Sean Willcock, in Composing the Spectacle: Colonial Portraiture and the Coronation Durbars of British India, 1877-1911, argues that a commemorative painting by Val Prinsep registered as a crisis of imperial governance, disrupting the sober visual strategies that had emerged in British portraiture to secure social cohesion.

The thought-provoking essay Close Looking and Conviction, by Sam Rose, offers theoretical and practical reflections on the operations involved in art-historical close looking.

Aline Guillermet’s ‘Painting like nature’: Chance and the Landscape in Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs demonstrates that these works make a critical intervention within the context of a return to figuration and the landscape genre in West German painting of the 1980s.

Kate Aspinall’s review, Creating Artists, considers a recent publication on London art schools. Hidden Trails in Art History, by Samuel Bibby, evaluates an anthology dedicated to art and artists’ magazines. A new publication by theorist Bill Brown is the subject of In the Aura of the Object: Modernity’s Re-Enchantment by Will Atkin. Charlotte de Mille looks at the relationship between art and politics in ‘A Kind of Mental Explosion’: Modernism’s Other Worlds. The correspondence of Marcel Duchamp and Robert Lebel provides the focus for Meticulously Yours by Gavin Parkinson. In Hallucinating Art History, Kamini Vellodi examines a recent English translation of a 2007 work by Eric Alliez. Leverage on a Nineteenth-Century Maverick: Henri Regnault, by Anna Green, assesses a recent monograph dedicated to this French painter. And Michael Hatt’s Perspectives on Eckersberg concentrates on a pair of publications dedicated to the Danish Golden Age artist.