Flemish Manuscript Painting in Context: Recent Research (review)
closer contemporaries, such as his teacher Lastman, in a chapter that looks at theories of artistic competition and rivalry, and at the practice of imitation in the education of the artist. Theory and practice also both figure in a chapter on the female nude and the artist. Here Sluijter asserts that although a notion of the artist as an Apelles, inspired by his desire and love for his model to produce beautiful art, had currency in Rembrandt’s Holland, of equal force were broad cultural concerns about the erotic charge inherent in images of the female nude. Hence, he argues, despite the privileging of the effects of art done from life, deploying fully undraped female models in the studio was a rare practice. The reception of pictures of female nudes is treated in a chapter in which Sluijter lays out this cultural landscape as ranging from moralizing disapproval to sophisticated and often playful enjoyment of the pleasures of images of the nude. Operating within these artistic and social conventions, Rembrandt “seems constantly to have explored the boundaries of what was possible” (315). Precisely how Rembrandt effected these explorations is given probing analysis in the case studies. Indeed, among the most rewarding aspects of this book are the acts of sustained viewing that compel one to look with care, over Sluijter’s shoulder, as it were. Happily, this book’s very high production values and generous format effectively support the forms of visual attention that its text invites: in addition to 366 black-and-white images, it includes sixty-two color plates, most of which are full-page format. Sluijter’s thorough iconographic and formal analyses underscore how each image is the end result of a myriad of choices and acts of selection and deliberation. As Sluijter rightly notes, Rembrandt’s painted nudes repeatedly thematize the perils of sight and the depiction of beauty. But they also, perhaps most notably in the 1654 Bathsheba, engage questions about adultery as a crime, the force of law, and the extent of institutional authority. Although these exclusions tend to naturalize the nude as an essentially private genre distinct from such institutional and political concerns, this book offers a rich reading of Rembrandt’s ambitious artistic investments in the nude as a figure of “intertwined moral and erotic concerns” (367). LISA ROSENTHAL University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign