Jessica Maratsos’s essay, Pictorial Theology and the Paragone in Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel, reconsiders this monument in conjunction with a closer reading of the artist’s views on painting’s relationship with sculpture, revealing the theological epistemology that underlies what has been previously considered a purely aesthetic debate.

Ornament in the Kitchen Garden: The Pea as Motif for Goldsmithing in the France of Louis XIII, by Marika Takanishi Knowles, examines the ornamental design called the cosse de pois as a rich medium for exploring analogies between artistic and organic means of generating bodies.

In Palettes as Signatures and Encoded Identities in Early-Modern Self-Portraits, Philip Sohm shows that painters expected viewers to interpret their depicted palettes as both self-expression and as meta-commentaries on the self-portrait that contains them.

Using a multi-disciplinary, science-informed, empirical approach, George Hook’s essay, Brushes with Infidelity: Truth to Nature in Three Composite Landscapes by Eugene von Guérard, investigates the sketches and sites for three idealized scenes in which topographical, geographical, geological and ecological elements from disparate landscapes are combined.

‘Complications and Attacks on the Beauty of Unity’: Le Corbusier and Louis Soutter, by Krzysztof Fijalkowski, examines the ways in which Soutter’s dense figurative and decorative marginal drawings on books by Le Corbusier emphasize the ambivalent tensions and exchanges between the two men and their apparently contradictory but equally complex world views.

Elizabeth Ferrell’s essay, Artist’s Model/Model Artist: Wallace Berman’s Photographs of Jay DeFeo, argues for a model of art-making which bridges autonomous creation and collective production to counter simplistic notions of artistic individualism prevalent in Cold War America.

In Opticality and Ventriloquism in Juan Muñoz’s The Wasteland (1986), Mark Stuart-Smith proposes a view of medium in Muñoz’s work as fundamentally anti-formalist and ventriloquial, and ventriloquism itself as an expanded model of medium.

Visual culture and media aesthetics are considered in Sarah Hegenbart’s review, Towards a Sweet Science of Images? Giles Fielke’s Neither Black Nor White addresses a recent history of darkness as a form of modernity. To Obsolesce, by Mark Crinson, evaluates an architectural history of expendability. Vid Simoniti reviews a new monograph dedicated to the collective Art & Language in Why Wasn’t I Consulted About the Picnic? An account of Clement VIII’s patronage is assessed in From the Counter Reformation to the Birth of the Baroque by Dorigen Caldwell. In World Pictures, Stephanie Porras examines current approaches to renaissance ethnography. Amna Malik focuses on black diasporic art practices since the 1980s in Turning Around the Pictorial Turn in Art History. And Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain, by Alexander Nemerov, looks at a recent publication on American artist Arthur Dove.