Pierre Julien: Sculptor to Queen Marie-Antoinette is a scholarly study of the artist (1731?1804) who rose from humble beginnings, the son of an illiterate carpenter, to become professor at the Paris Académie and director of the sculptural decoration at Marie-Antoinette's dairy at Rambouillet (1785?87), a surprise gift from Louis XVI. A moderate during the Revolution, Julien became one of the original members of the Institut National (1795). He executed life-size marble statues, part of the Great Men series, small works in terra cotta, and mythological figures such as Ganymede, Narcissus, and Cupid. His masterpieces are Amalthea, or Girl with Goat, the centerpiece at Rambouillet, and two statues in the Louvre: the Dying Gladiator, his reception-piece to the Académie, and Jean de La Fontaine, a statue of the author of Fables. The first major study of Pierre Julien in a hundred years, Pierre Julien: Sculptor to Queen Marie-Antoinette celebrates the 200th anniversary of the sculptor's death and coincides with the exhibition in Le Puy, France (Spring 2004). This volume is indispensable to art historians and anyone interested in the colorful period in French history between the age of Louis XV and the rise of Napoleon.

Representing Belief provides a detailed discussion and analysis of the forms and meanings in religious art of nineteenth-century France. This genre, usually assigned minimal importance by writers on the period, turns out to occupy a central place in the cultural history of the era, touching the core of the century's conflict between tradition and modernity, science and faith, ultramontanism and naturalism. Although it was generally assumed that this kind of art was of little importance in the evolution of modern painting, Driskel demonstrates that in reality it played a crucial role. Many of the artists discussed are firmly installed in the present canon (Delacroix, Ingres, Manet, Gauguin), while others (Flandrin, Orsel, Gleyre, Cazin) were major figures in their own time, though largely forgotten today. Writing from an interdisciplinary perspective and employing concepts derived from structuralist and poststructuralist theory, Driskel moves beyond simple formalism to restore a category of once-important works to a meaningful context, thereby offering others a model by which to discuss and interpret these paintings. Carefully charting the genealogies of hieraticism and naturalism, he demonstrates that a dramatic shift occurred in the 1860s and 1870s as naturalism gained acceptance among ultramontanes and the hieratic mode began to attract the interest of adherents to the belief system of modernism. Representing Belief is the first book to situate this art in its social and historical contexts and to approach it from this point of view.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. This issue features essays on a Parthian stag rhyton and new epigraphic and technical discoveries; gendered devotion and owner portraits in illuminated manuscripts from northern France around 1300; a technical analysis of heraldic devices in a missal from Renaissance Bologna; a new social and collective practice of drawing among French architect pensionnaires of the 1820s and 1830s at Pompeii; artist Malvina Hoffman’s representations of race during her travels to Southeastern Europe as part of her work with the American Yugo-Slav Relief; Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta’s painting Reverie—The Letter and the small-world sensation as a methodology for global art history; arguments that disprove the attribution of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s sculpture Head with Horns to artist Paul Gauguin; Head with Horns and Gauguin’s creative appropriation of objects; and the unpublished first draft of critic Clement Greenberg’s essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon."

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2013-January 5, 2014.