Women in Art Icons, from Frescoes to Street Art

This energetic survey from art historian Paré (Cats in Art) spotlights artworks featuring famous female muses "from Cleopatra to Joséphine Baker." Each work is paired with a timeline, relevant quotations, and literary references, along with an analysis of the piece and how portrayals of its subject have shifted throughout history. Peter Paul Rubens's 1616 painting of the mythical Atalanta, for example, depicts her as a beauty receiving the decapitated head of a wild boar, straying from earlier portrayals of the heroine as an athlete or huntress. Elsewhere, Giorgio di Chirico's 1973 oil painting Antigone Consolatrice imagines Antigone and her father as faceless mannequins, drawing on previous artists' renderings of the pair while "planting doubt" in the viewer's mind ("Which figure is Antigone, really?"). While the topic can feel overly broad, Paré surveys a unique mix of historical, fictional, and mythological subjects, and intersperses enjoyable bits of trivia throughout (Gustave Flaubert wanted no illustrations to appear in his novel Salammbô, but artists' versions kept popping up after his 1880 death). It adds up to an illuminating and accessible portrait of women's place in art and society. Publishers Weekly