"In the tradition of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Palombo has married fine art with romantic historical fiction in this lush and sensual interpretation of Medici Florence, artist Sandro Botticelli, and the muse that inspired them all." - Booklist A girl as beautiful as Simonetta Cattaneo never wants for marriage proposals in 15th Century Italy, but she jumps at the chance to marry Marco Vespucci. Marco is young, handsome and well-educated. Not to mention he is one of the powerful Medici family’s favored circle. Even before her marriage with Marco is set, Simonetta is swept up into Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici’s glittering circle of politicians, poets, artists, and philosophers. The men of Florence—most notably the rakish Giuliano de’ Medici—become enthralled with her beauty. That she is educated and an ardent reader of poetry makes her more desirable and fashionable still. But it is her acquaintance with a young painter, Sandro Botticelli, which strikes her heart most. Botticelli immediately invites Simonetta, newly proclaimed the most beautiful woman in Florence, to pose for him. As Simonetta learns to navigate her marriage, her place in Florentine society, and the politics of beauty and desire, she and Botticelli develop a passionate intimacy, one that leads to her immortalization in his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Alyssa Palombo’s The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence vividly captures the dangerous allure of the artist and muse bond with candor and unforgettable passion.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection “[Lucey] delivers the goods, disclosing the unhappy or colorful lives that Sargent sometimes hinted at but didn’t spell out.”—Boston Globe In this seductive, multilayered biography, based on original letters and diaries, Donna M. Lucey illuminates four extraordinary women painted by the iconic high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. With uncanny intuition, Sargent hinted at the mysteries and passions that unfolded in his subjects’ lives. These women inhabited a rarefied world of wealth and strict conventions—yet all of them did something unexpected, something shocking, to upend society’s rules.

"Pablo Picasso is the artistic giant of the twentieth century, and perhaps only Leonardo da Vinci rivals his fame throughout the history of art. In working life that spanned nearly eighty years, Picasso painted some of the archetypal images of modern art, including Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica. But he did more that create individual works of originality and genius. Picasso invented, and inspired others to invent, a whole new vocabulary and way of thinking about art which have shaped the progress of modernism throughout the twentieth century. Picasso's fame is indisputable but rests largely on his oil paintings. A lesser-known but crucially important part of Picasso's oeuvre is his graphic work, in particular his poster designs. From the 1940s to the 1960s Picasso produced hundreds of designs for posters, many advertising exhibitions of his work. They are interesting and important not only for their striking simplicity and bold color, but also because they sum up many of the expressionist ideas he had developed from Guernica onword. Themes and images from his paintings and ceramics such as bulls and goats, faces and the dove of peace recur and give remarkable coherence to this body of work. Picasso Posters presents a comprehensive panorama of Picasso's poster art. An illustrated introduction tells the story of Picasso's long life and career, and sets his poster work in the context of the genre's history and of his paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Sixty of Picasso's finest posters are reproduced in large-scale color plates, making Picasso Posters a sumptuous., informative, and much-needed study of this little-known aspect of the master's work."--Publisher's description

The life of artist Georgia O'Keeffe is revealed in this biographical novel — from her childhood when she decided to be an artist, through her art education in Chicago and New York, to her eventual rise to fame in the American Southwest. At the age of 12, Georgia O'Keeffe announced that she wanted to be an artist. With the support of her family, O'Keeffe attended boarding schools with strong art programs, and after graduating, went to live with an aunt and uncle in Chicago to attend the city's highly regarded Art Institute. Illness forced O'Keeffe to leave Chicago, but once she'd recovered, her family scraped together funds to send her to New York to study at the Art Students League. When her family fell on hard times, she left without the degree she needed. Discouraged, but unwilling to give up her dream, O'Keeffe found a different path. She became an art teacher in schools in Texas and South Carolina, honing her own craft as she taught her students. O'Keeffe never gave up her dream, no matter what obstacles she encountered--she knew she was meant to be an artist.

The first collective, critical historical study of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era A Revolution on Canvas argues that women artists professionalized in unprecedented numbers during the Revolutionary era, engaging with the cultural and intellectual currents of their societies and earning substantial incomes from their work despite the obstacles they encountered. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of these artists' careers, this groundbreaking book argues that exactly as political citizenship was being defined as a male privilege, women entered the public sphere as professional artists in significant numbers for the first time. Its subjects include a number of increasingly well-known painters, such as Angelica Kauffman, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, alongside copious other artists who were lauded in their own times but are little-known in ours. This book challenges several longstanding assumptions and myths about women's artistic activity during this period, ultimately presenting overwhelming evidence to contend that with their art, women engaged profoundly with the cultural, political, and economic currents of the Revolutionary era, navigating institutional inequalities that were often expressly designed to exclude members of their sex in order to forge profitable artistic identities.

Replete with complexities, abjection, beauty and joy, Women Painting Women offers new ways to imagine the portrayal of women, from Alice Neel to Jordan Casteel A thematic exploration of nearly 50 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works, Women Painting Women includes nearly 50 portraits that span the 1960s to the present. International in scope, the book recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. Painting is the focus, as traditionally it has been a privileged medium for portraiture, particularly for white male artists. The artists here use painting and women as subject matter and as vehicles for change. They range from early trailblazers such as Emma Amos and Alice Neel to emerging artists such as Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow and Apolonia Sokol. All place women--their bodies, gestures and individuality--at the forefront. The pivotal narrative in Women Painting Women is how the artists included use the conventional portrait of a woman as a catalyst to tell another story outside of male interpretations of the female body. They conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women by exploring themes of the Body, Nature Personified, Selfhood and Color as Portrait. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness and joy, the portraits in this volume make way for women artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the image of woman and how it has evolved. Artists include: Rita Ackermann, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Emma Amos, María Berrío, Louise Bonnet, Lisa Brice, Joan Brown, Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow, Kim Dingle, Marlene Dumas, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, Natalie Frank, Hope Gangloff, Eunice Golden, Jenna Gribbon, Alex Heilbron, Ania Hobson, Luchita Hurtado, Chantal Joffe, Hayv Kahraman, Maria Lassnig, Christiane Lyons, Danielle Mckinney, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Elizabeth Peyton, Paula Rego, Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, Susan Rothenberg, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Arpita Singh, Sylvia Sleigh, Apolonia Sokol, May Stevens, Claire Tabouret, Mickalene Thomas, Nicola Tyson and Lisa Yuskavage.