Holly Flora’s essay, Fashioning the Passion: The Poor Clares and the Clothing of Christ, offers a reading of the motif of Christ’s clothing that suggests several interpretive and experiential possibilities for a Clarissan reader.

Toward a Cultural Ecology of Architectural Glass in Early Modern Northern Europe, by Morgan Ng, traces the aesthetic effects occasioned by the new relationship between early modern glazed spaces and their surrounding environments, introducing the concept of synthetic vernacularism to describe the dynamic geographical factors that shaped the local use of this industrial material in northern Europe.

In ‘No Picture more Charming’: The Family Portrait in Eighteenth-Century France, Emma Barker argues that the changes that the family portrait underwent during the eighteenth century are bound up with the shift of political authority away from the absolute monarch towards the public sphere.

Through an examination of contemporary literature, Nathan J. Timpano’s essay, ‘His Wretched Hand’: Aubrey Beardsley, the Grotesque Body, and Viennese Modern Art, investigates the extent to which Beardsley’s repertoire of erotic and grotesque figures was in dialogue with similarly ‘grotesque’ images created by the Austrian artists Gustav Klimt and Julius Klinger.

Flip, Linger, Glide: Coles Phillips and the Movements of Magazine Pictures, by Jennifer A. Greenhill, considers how much mass-market illustration has to tell us about the early-twentieth century’s understanding of perceptual practices and their operations in a commercial marketplace, while also revealing the importance of advertising theory to the popular periodicals’ self-presentation during the magazine boom of the period.

Ann Stephen’s essay, The Oceanic Primitivism of Len Lye’s Animation Tusalava (1929), traces this film’s sources, and proposes a Freudian reading in light of an annotated sketchbook of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913).

Authorless Pictures: Uses of Photography in Christian Boltanski’s Early Work (1969-1975), by Olga Smith, considers Christian Boltanski’s engagement with photography in the 1970s, a time when its circulation was still largely confined to the realms of amateur practice.

Patricia Allmer’s review, Drawing’s Prepositions, addresses recent work on this medium and gender. Not Virtual, by Michael Corris, considers a monograph on experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek. Rina Arya revisits the parameters of the catalogue raisonné in Looking Back at Bacon: Reviewing the Oeuvre. The latest scholarship on Peruvian murals is evaluated by Michael Schreffler in Andean Sojourns. Albert Godycki turns in Gossart’s Netherlandish Courage to early modern Europe and its relationship with antiquity. Crispin Branfoot’s review, Architecture and Cultural Translation on India’s Deccan Frontier, looks to collaborative research on South Asia. A substantial collection of essays is assessed by T. A. Heslop in When Artistry, Materiality and Culture Meet. Nadine Schibille’s Spectacles of Beauty examines a major publication on Byzantine mosaics.