Jacques-Louis David: The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis (Getty Museum Studies on Art) - Softcover

Both these books are the latest offerings in series that focus on individual masterpieces. Titian's "Venus of Urbino," thought by many to be the apotheosis of High Renaissance painting, is also a founding landmark of one of Western art's major topics: the female nude. Goffen (art history, Rutgers) has collected six scholarly essays by accomplished art historians that consider the Uffizi Gallery's famous work from numerous methodological points of view. Each writer addresses the painting's principal mystery: Does this eroticized, self-caressing nude actually represent Venus or is she just a 16th-century Venetian courtesan? The resulting package is a mixed bag that will no doubt at times strike many readers as pedantic and unnecessarily recondite. Written by theorists and intended for other cognoscenti and the inhabitants of their classrooms, this title should by virtue of its subject alone be purchased by larger academic libraries. Johnson (art, Univ. of Iowa) has written a far more complete, cohesive study of a single work, albeit one of much less consequence and appeal than Titian's masterpiece. In a direct and unpretentious style refreshingly free of academic cant, Johnson thoroughly delineates the literary and aesthetic antecedents of David's neoclassic depiction of two adolescent lovers' final parting?an image derived from latter-day refigurings of Homer's Odyssey. Her analysis of the painting's imagery will be accessible to a broad spectrum of readers, and her lucid explanation of its political and biographical contexts makes what at first glance seems a pale allegorical potboiler become instead a sensitive and meaningful work of art. For academic libraries.?Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L., Cal.
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