Rembrandt's life and art had an almost mythic resonance in nineteenth-century France with artists, critics, and collectors alike using his artistic persona both as a benchmark and as justification for their own goals. This first in-depth study of the traditional critical reception of Rembrandt reveals the preoccupation with his perceived "authenticity," "naturalism," and "naiveté," demonstrating how the artist became an ancestral figure, a talisman with whom others aligned themselves to increase the value of their own work. And in a concluding chapter, the author looks at the playRembrandt, staged in Paris in 1898, whose production and advertising are a testament to the enduring power of the artist's myth.

What happens when Jewish authors—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another? Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become a central mechanism for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

Throughout his life, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was considered an exceptional artist by contemporary art lovers. In this highly original book, Ernst van de Wetering investigates why Rembrandt, from a very early age, was praised by high-placed connoisseurs like Constantijn Huygens. It turns out that Rembrandt, from his first endeavours in painting on, had embarked on a journey past all the 'foundations of the art of painting' which were considered essential in the seventeenth century. In his systematic exploration of these foundations, Rembrandt achieved mastery in all of them, thus becoming the 'pittore famoso' that count Cosimo the Medici visited at the end of his life. Rembrandt never stopped searching for ever better solutions to the pictorial problems he saw himself confronted with; this sometimes led to radical decisions and alterations in his way of working, which cannot simply be explained by attributing them to a 'change in style' or a 'natural development'. In a quest as rigorous and novel as Rembrandt's, Van de Wetering shows us how Rembrandt dealt with the foundations of his art and used them to try and become the best painter the world had ever seen. His book sheds new light both on Rembrandt's exceptional accomplishments and on the practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age at large.

For the artists, writers and musicians of the Symbolist Movement of the turn of the century, true art, an extension of one’s “soul” or unconscious, was often regarded as dark, mysterious and unreliable – the world of Dionysus. Such artists, writers and musicians searched for symbols to express or suggest psychological pathologies manifested in exaltation, madness, and other extreme mental states. Mental Illness in Symbolism inquires into the mysteries of the Symbolist psyche through essays on works of art, literature and music created as part or extension of the Symbolist Movement.

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.

Sheds new light on the long history of self-portraiture with fresh interpretations of famous examples and new works, ideas, and anecdotes This broad cultural history of self-portraiture brilliantly maps the history of the genre, from the earliest myths of Narcissus and the Christian tradition of “bearing witness” to the prolific self-image-making of today’s contemporary artists. Focusing on a perennially popular subject, the book tells the vivid history of works that offer insights into artists’ personal, psychological, and creative worlds. Topics include the importance of the medieval mirror craze in early self-portraiture; the confessional self-portraits of Titian and Michelangelo; the mystique of the artist’s studio, from Vermeer to Velázquez; the role of biography and geography for serial self-portraitists such as Courbet and Van Gogh; the multiple selves of modern and contemporary artists such as Cahun and Sherman; and recent developments in the era of globalization. Comprehensive and beautifully illustrated, the book features the work of a wide range of artists including Beckmann, Caravaggio, Dürer, Gentileschi, Ghiberti, Giotto, Goya, Kahlo, Kauffman, Magritte, Mantegna, Picasso, Poussin, Raphael, Rembrandt and Van Eyck. The full range of the subject is explored, including comic and caricature self-portraits, “invented” or imaginary self-portraits, and important collections of self-portraiture such as that of the Medici.

In Akim Volynsky: A Hidden Russian-Jewish Prophet Helen Tolstoy goes far beyond the accepted image of Akim Volynsky as a controversial literary critic of the 1890s who ran the first journal of Russian Symbolists, promoted philosophic idealism and proposed the first modernist reading of Dostoevsky. This book, through the study of periodicals and archive materials, offers a new view of Volynsky as a champion of Symbolist theater, supporter of Jewish playwrights, an ardent partisan of Habima theater and finally, a theoretician of Jewish theater. Throughout his life, Volynsky was a seeker of a Jewish-Christian synthesis, both religious and moral. His grand universalist view made him the first to see the true value of leading Russian writers – his contemporaries Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.