Reflection and Remembrance in Jan van Eyck’s Van der Paele Virgin by Douglas Brine argues that in this painting the artist depicted himself in a highly self-conscious manner, closely linked both to his identity as a painter and to the desire, shared with his patron, for remembrance after death.

Byron Ellsworth Hamann, in his essay The Higa and the Tlachialoni: Material Cultures of Seeing in the Mediterratlantic, moves from antique Rome to early modern Iberia to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica to sixteenth-century New Spain, exploring the comparative collision of Old and New World theories of extromissive vision.

Engaging with seventeenth-century anecdotes, poems, and plays that take the portrait sitting as a motif, The Scene of the Sitting in Early Modern England by Adam Eaker provides a point of departure for new interpretations of paintings by Anthony van Dyck, Mary Beale, and Peter Lely.

In Inscribing Temporality, Containing Fashion: Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber Recontextualized, Anne Reimers proposes that this work should be understood as an intervention into discourse in Weimar about the relevance of painted portraits in an image economy increasingly dominated by photographic reproductions.

Kari Shepherdson-Scott’s essay, Art Photography, Industry, and Empire: Japanese Soft Power in America, 1933-34, examines how an exhibit at the world’s fair in Chicago aesthetically mediated Japanese Manchuria for an American audience and exercised Japanese corporate ‘soft power’.

The World without a Self: Edward Hopper and Chantal Akerman, by Margaret Iversen, makes use of Ann Banfield’s account of Virginia Woolf’s writing from an ‘unoccupied perspective’ for a reading of Hopper’s paintings and Chantal Akerman’s films, arguing that the most effective means that they found to convey this viewpoint was from a passing train or car.

Rattling Art History: The Discipline’s Uncertain Conditions by Sally Butler evaluates a new history of indigenous Australian art. Two recent publications on Asia are reviewed by John Clark in Japanese Modern and Contemporary Art: An Art-Historical Field. Gauvin Alexander Bailey turns to the seventeenth century in Blood and Glory in Baroque Seville and Naples. Experimentalist practices from France, Germany, Sweden and Norway are considered in Symbolism Reformed by Marnin Young. Ancients and Moderns by Paul Duro looks at a study of the art of imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. And Whitney Davis assesses a ‘neuroarthistorical’ account of European art in Neuro, Neuro on the Wall.