How To Steal from the Louvre

In case you missed my live online talk for Yale, they’ve put it on YouTube so you can take a look. I did about 47 interviews on the Louvre heist but this talk is a good summary of it.

Watch the Talk

On the March 2026 Magnani-Rocca Art Heist

A few minutes before writing this post, I did a (very brief) BBC World interview about the theft of three paintings from a private museum outside of Parma.

Online Courses

This winter semester I taught an online seminar for Yale Alumni Assocation called “Can You Solve This Painting,” on iconography. I’m in discussions with the National Gallery UK, for which I taught a similar course in 2024 called “Secrets and Symbols” about making this into a book.

This spring semester my father and I are co-teaching a second version of our “12 Hour Film Expert” course, which just began. These Yale courses sell out immediately but I’ll post here when a new one opens up (at this point it will be for fall 2026 or winter 2027).

Meanwhile you can catch me for one-off lectures for The Smithsonian. The next one is June 8, on the iconography of saints.

Sign Up for Noah's Smithsonian Lecture

I’ll also be giving a talk on July 1 at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, probably my favorite museum in the world and the first time I’ll be speaking there.

In March I attended TEFAF Maastricht, the world’s leading Old Master art fair. Some 200 galleries bring their best pieces to display in Maastricht in a popup exhibit, works that are usually being sold from private hands to other private hands, so this is the only chance to see them, ever. Some 75,000 people attend, many of them shopping. It’s super swanky and very interesting. I went representing Art Recognition, the AI image analysis firm I advise, and spoke on a panel as part of the Art Business Conference.

NEW BOOKS

Here are my three new books, each for quite different audiences, all published by Bloomsbury. If any appeal consider ordering them (and if you like them, please publish a supportive review!)

The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the FBI, and Fleeing the Boston Mob

(written with Whit Rummel)

A few years ago there was a viral NYT article about a guy who accidentally stole a Picasso painting and had a misadventure trying to return it without either getting arrested by the FBI or “whacked” by the Boston Mob, which was also after it. The guy’s brother, who had told the story to the NYT, contacted me because he wanted to make a book out of it. And we did! There were many nice connections—the guy (Whit Rummel) grew up in Waterville, Maine which is where I went to college (go Colby!)

This is a great, American true art crime story. Lots of fun detail of what I call a “reverse heist.”

Here’s the official summary:

In 1969, during a Boston snowstorm, a crate containing Pablo Picasso's Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer vanished from Logan Airport. It should have gone to a Milwaukee gallery-but instead ended up in the closet of Bill Rummel, a young forklift operator.

What followed was a stranger-than-fiction chain of events: FBI agents on the hunt, whispers of Whitey Bulger's mob, and a daring “reverse heist” devised by Bill's father to secretly return the painting.

But the mystery didn't end there. After its return, the Picasso disappeared again-vanishing into private hands, unseen by the public for more than fifty years.

Part true crime, part memoir, The Accidental Picasso Thief uncovers the Rummel family's incredible brush with art history, crime, and secrecy-and one man's decades-long search for a lost masterpiece.

Order The Accidental Picasso Thief

Empower Your Kids: A Professor's Guide to Make Learning Fun Every Day

Some of you may remember my pandemic Kickstarter project—I self-published a book called Superpower Your Kids, a positive parenting guide. This is an updated version of it, now with a (slightly) different title. It’s also a family project (my wife designed and typeset it as well as making the illustrations and cover photo, my daughters feature in it, and my parents each wrote an essay for it).

This is a great gift for parents of your children, full of positive tips on how to make learning fun and empower your children.

Here’s the official summary:

An entertaining, imaginative guide to teaching your kids while having fun

You would do anything for your kids, right? What if you could do something meaningful for them in less than 15 minutes a day? You can. And you can do it through a combination of imparting knowledge, boosting confidence, and having fun.

In Empower Your Kids, bestselling author Noah Charney encourages parents to teach their kids something new every day-while playing. To help today's busy families, Charney shows parents how to keep these fun lessons short and adaptable with professional tricks to make them memorable. Examples are sprinkled throughout for inspiration, such as reading If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss and then designing your own zoo, taking a virtual online tour of the tomb of pharaoh Ramses VI and talking about mummies and hieroglyphics, or turning a museum visit into a treasure hunt.

Parents will find that the miniature lessons are about playing first (in an educational way), and the learning is just a powerful, positive side effect. Featuring 365 lessons throughout the book, with topics as wide ranging as dinosaurs, the Middle Ages, art, the natural world, and outer space, Empower Your Kids is an indispensable resource for families wanting to learn and have fun at the same time.

Order Empower Your Kids

There’s a Criminal Touch to Art: How Ulay Stole Hitler's Favorite Painting and Redefined Performance Art

(written in collaboration with the Ulay Foundation and the Abramovic Institute)

Before Ulay passed away, he and I were friendly (both married to Slovenian women, he was living in Ljubljana). We planned to do a book together, initially his behind-the-scenes, anecdote-filled view of art in the second half of the 20th century. We recorded more than 10 hours of interviews, but his illness overtook the project. Instead we discussed creating a book that would tell the full story of perhaps his most famous artistic action, his 1976 theft of a painting from a Berlin museum.

After a circuitous path, the book is finally out. Originally envisioned as a co-authored book with me, Ulay, and Marina Abramovic, in the end it became a book that I wrote in collaboration with the Ulay Foundation and the Abramovic Institute. It’s the definitive book on that art-theft-as-performance, called “Irritation: There’s a Criminal Touch to Art,” a performance that I studied as an undergrad in art history, so it was a treat to immerse myself in it deeply. One chapter features Ulay’s direct account of the performance (which he liked to call an aktion). Another features Marina’s. The rest covers my analysis of the performance and also its context in the history of art and the story of art theft.

Here’s the official summary:

On December 12, 1976, German conceptual artist Ulay stole Hitler's favorite painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It was art theft as conceptual artwork. He hung the painting on the wall of a working-class immigrant family's home, then phoned the museum to let them know where they could retrieve it. Told from three perspectives, this unique and groundbreaking book tells the complete story of this art theft and explores what made Ulay's iconic artistic action one of the most famous performance artworks in history. While Ulay passed away in 2020, he recorded his own first-person account of the action in conversation with art historian Noah Charney, allowing readers to engage with a never-before-seen narrative of the theft in Ulay's own words. The theft as artwork was conceived and undertaken with the help of Ulay's partner at the time, Marina Abramovic, who is among the most famous living artists in the world. Her account of the action will follow Ulay's in this book. Finally, Noah Charney will contextualize Ulay and Abramovic's artistic action within the history of art as well as highlight this fascinating incident's importance to the history of art theft.

Order There's a Criminal Touch to Art

That’s it for now, more to come in April. Thanks for your support and interest!

-Noah

But exclusive to my Substackers, here is a consolidation of my analysis and thoughts on the theft, which is very different from fine art theft, since it involves jewelry.

When I first heard about the Louvre jewelry heist, it wasn’t through the news—it was from my mom. She sent me a WhatsApp message saying, “You probably already know about this, but…” Within minutes, I had dozens of interview requests piling up. It’s the sort of thing that happens every time there’s an art or heritage theft. But this one stood out immediately, because it wasn’t really an art theft at all. It was jewelry.

That distinction matters. The theft of a painting or sculpture is a different beast entirely. Fine art has enormous non-intrinsic value—it’s worth what culture says it’s worth. Strip it down and it’s just canvas, pigment, or wood. You can’t sell a stolen Picasso or a Vermeer without the entire art world knowing exactly what it is. Jewelry, on the other hand, has intrinsic value. Even if you melt it down or recut the stones, it’s still worth a fortune. In this case, the estimated market value of the stolen pieces—crowns, necklaces, tiaras associated with Napoleon and his circle—was said to be around $100 million. But if the thieves broke the jewelry up into loose gems and gold, they could still sell it for about 10 percent of that, which is a very respectable payday for a single morning’s work.

The heist itself was daring and surprisingly low-tech. Around 9:30 a.m., two men in construction gear arrived in a stolen cherry picker. Because there was ongoing renovation in that part of the museum, no one thought twice when they extended the ladder and used a cutting disc to slice through a window. They cut through the protective glass, threatened the guards with their tools, and escaped within minutes. Two accomplices waited nearby on scooters. It was all over in roughly seven minutes.

So were these professionals? In a sense, yes—but not professional art thieves, because such a thing barely exists outside of fiction. Most so-called art thieves are ordinary criminals who think art is glamorous because they’ve seen Ocean’s Eleven or Red Notice. If they knew how difficult it actually is to profit from stolen art, they’d probably steal something else. In this case, they did: jewelry is much easier to sell. My best guess is that the perpetrators are part of an organized crime group, though probably new to stealing from museums.

When it comes to what happens next, timing tells us a lot. With paintings, if a ransom demand comes immediately, it means ransom was the plan. If it comes weeks later, they probably tried—and failed—to find a buyer. But with jewelry, there’s usually no waiting around. I’d bet that within a few hours of the theft, the pieces were broken apart, the stones recut, and the materials quietly moved out of France. That’s the rational move. A single morning’s work, ten million dollars’ worth of gems, and no hope of recovery.

The fact that they managed to escape at all is interesting, given how heavily monitored Paris is. But in a busy city, scooters can vanish into traffic, and switching vehicles is simple. Movies often get this part right—drive into a parking garage, up a ramp, into a van, and you’re gone. Surveillance systems still rely on clear facial recognition, and if you’re wearing masks and high-visibility vests, you can disappear in plain sight. That’s the real genius of this heist: doing something so obviously that nobody questions it until it’s too late. During museum hours, you can blend in with confidence. At night, it would have been impossible.

Was it an inside job? Possibly, but not necessarily. Anyone can conduct what security professionals call “hostile surveillance”—scoping out the site beforehand. If security cameras and alarms are visible, thieves know what to avoid. Ironically, the more visible the security, the easier it can be to plan around it.

One thing that stood out to me was the decision to remain unarmed. That’s partly practical—if you’re caught with weapons, your prison sentence is far longer—but it also nods to an old tradition among certain thieves who considered themselves “gentlemen” criminals. Adam Worth, the 19th-century figure who inspired Sherlock Holmes’s Professor Moriarty, forbade his men from carrying weapons. He thought it made them reckless. There’s a strange echo of that ethos here: no guns, just tools.

So what now? The best hope for recovering the jewels would have been if the authorities offered a substantial reward for their return—more than the stones would be worth once melted down. It’s been done before. In 2008, gold jewelry was stolen from the Museum of Anthropology in British Columbia. The police offered a reward higher than the melt value, and the thieves held onto the pieces long enough for the police to catch them and recover everything intact. But such offers can also backfire; thieves might simply return the objects, collect the reward, and then steal them again.

Interpol will be coordinating the investigation, but their role is mostly administrative—they collect and share data between national police forces. Real progress tends to come from informants within the criminal underworld. Most cases are solved not by brilliant detective work, but by criminals gossiping and other criminals selling them out for cash or leniency. If these thieves stay quiet and patient, I doubt they’ll be caught.

I hate to say it, but all things considered, they did pretty well. Not that I condone it, of course—but in terms of planning, timing, and execution, it was remarkably efficient. The real takeaway is for museums: they can go years without a single attempted theft, and that kind of complacency dulls vigilance. The best institutions run surprise “red team” drills, where their own staff stage mock break-ins to test the system. Perhaps this heist will be the wake-up call that keeps the next one from succeeding.

The latest news (as of Oct 27, 2025) is that two suspects have been arrested while attempting to leave the country for Algeria and Mali respectively. This means that more info may come to light that requires rethinking the above analysis, but as of now I’ll stick to it as most probable. Tomorrow I’m on TRT News in a roundtable discussion so we’ll see what new comes up. Happy Monday to all!

What Do Symbols Mean in Art—And Who Really Painted That?
Two new adventures into the hidden layers of art history

I’m thrilled to announce two new projects launching this autumn—both digging deep into the secrets behind the artworks we think we know. Whether you’re drawn to religious symbolism, strange iconography, or mysteries of authorship, there’s something for you here.

1. My Smithsonian Lecture Series Begins Monday
I’m honored to be launching a new six-part series with Smithsonian Associates, focused entirely on Secrets and Symbols in Art. It’s an exploration of iconography—how to read the visual language artists have used for centuries to encode meaning into their works.

The first talk, “Secrets and Symbols in Art: A Closer Look at Iconography,” airs this Monday, October 6 online. It’s a fast-paced, story-rich introduction to how symbols work in art—from the obvious to the downright obscure.

You can sign up here:
👉 https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/programs/secrets-and-symbols-in-art

Then, just in time for the holidays, I’ll be giving the second talk in the series:
“The Iconography of Christmas” on December 15—unpacking how artists have represented the Nativity, the Magi, and other holiday themes across the centuries.
👉 https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/programs/iconography-of-christmas

These are perfect for art lovers, teachers, students, and the incurably curious.

2. New Podcast: Is It? The Art Mystery Podcast
After months of research and audio editing, my new podcast is live: Is It? The Art Mystery Podcast. Each episode investigates a single artwork whose authorship or authenticity is in question. We follow the clues—from archival documents to AI image analysis—and try to solve the mystery.

The podcast is sponsored by Art Recognition, the Zurich-based AI art analysis firm I advise. Their technology is cutting-edge, and we’re using it to take a fresh look at paintings you thought were settled cases.

So far, the first five episodes are live, with a new one coming each month. We’ve tackled big names—Caravaggio, Raphael, Velazquez—and the questions are as fascinating as the artworks. Some of the answers also include breaking news for the art world. That’s why, on September 27, the podcast was mentioned in The Guardian.

The Guardian recently profiled the podcast in a feature about our investigation into The Lute Player (which turns out to be by Caravaggio—two of the three extant versions, at least!):
👉 https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/sep/27/caravaggio-the-lute-player-badminton-ai-analysis

🎧 You can listen and subscribe here on Apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen (Spotify, YouTube, etc)

Listen or Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Join me on both journeys:

• Sign up for the Smithsonian lectures to learn how to decode the meanings in art

• Subscribe to Is It? to help unravel some of art history’s most intriguing mysteries

More soon—thanks, as always, for following along.

—Noah

Live Tonight — Free Talk: “Writing Cinematically: How to Make Your Scenes Come Alive”

Are you tired of telling scenes that feel flat? Want your prose to unfold in readers’ minds like a movie? Join me tonight at 9pm Euro Central time/3pm EST for a free, live session where I’ll share cinematic techniques you can immediately apply to your writing.

You’ll Learn:

• How to “direct” a scene using shifts in perspective (close-ups, wide shots, etc.)

• Tools to control pacing and create movement in the prose

• Ways to convert abstract ideas into vivid, visual imagery

• The art of infusing sensory detail and surprise to grip readers

• Why modern audiences gravitate toward cinematic writing — and how to tap into that

Watch Live

This talk isn’t about simplifying your work — it’s about speaking the language today’s readers already use in their heads: stories that feel as alive and immersive as the movies they watch.

Unlock the Hidden Language of Art: Join Me for My First Smithsonian Talk of the Season

I’m excited to open my second season of regular Smithsonian lectures with “Secrets & Symbols in Art: An Introduction to Iconography.” It will run on Monday, October 6, 2025, at 6pm Euro Central/12 p.m. EST.

In this lecture, we’ll peer beneath the surface of Old Master paintings and rediscover a visual vocabulary hidden in plain sight. Artists once “spoke” through symbols and allegories — and understanding even a few dozen recurring motifs can open up whole new layers of meaning. It’s the first in a series of linked lectures on symbolism in art. Attend them all and let me know and I’ll send you a prize!

You’ll Learn:

• How religious, literary, and cultural symbols function across periods

• Why so many artworks seem to “speak a language”

• How interpreting iconography changes your experience of art

• A focused look at Jan van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) and the dense symbolism embedded in it

Sign Up Here for the Talk

Preview of a brand new podcast series…

New Podcast Launch — Is It? The Art Mystery Podcast

I’m thrilled to share the launch of Is It?, my new podcast that dives into one of art history’s most tantalizing questions: Is this painting really by that master?

In each episode, we call in a specialist on the artist in question to help investigate “puzzle paintings” — works that have long divided experts. We pair that with cutting‑edge AI analysis from Art Recognition, and only reveal the results in the final moments.

From Rembrandt to Van Dyck to Jan van Eyck, we’ll explore the art world’s disputed attributions, deepening not just what you see — but what you believe about authorship and authenticity.

Listen Now on Apple Podcasts

You can listen on all major podcast platforms (Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Deezer…)

Whether you’re an art nerd, a curious creator, or just love a good mystery, you’ll find something to surprise you. To date, the first two episodes are up.

Is It a Rembrandt? with Blake Gopnik

and

Is It a Van Dyck? with Nils Buttner

Another episode will drop Friday and one more on Saturday, before it will become a monthly series.

I’ll write about this podcast and some of the breaking news that we’ve discovered in the process of making it in the next Substack post. What I’m offering now is a preview, just for you, my subscribers, since the podcast has yet to be announced…almost no one has listened to it yet!

That will change this Saturday, September 27 because a major art feature in The Guardian will break news that we helped discover as part of research for this podcast. Keep an eye on The Guardian…and later that morning we’ll drop the episode that dives more deeply into that breaking news subject.

Please consider listening and subscribing. It’s free and always will be. Subscriptions and enthusiastic reviews on any platforms really help get the ball rolling with new podcasts.

That’s it for now, more to come soon. Best wishes! -Noah

Both the course and the book explore the evolving image of the father in literature, television, and culture, from Atticus Finch to Tony Soprano, from sitcom dads to Shakespearean kings. We’ll ask what makes a “good father,” how art has shaped that ideal, and how fatherhood—both biological and symbolic—plays a central role in some of our most enduring stories.

The Yale Course

The course is offered through Yale Alumni Academy, but you don’t need to be a Yale alum to join—it’s open to everyone. You can enroll yourself or gift enrollment to a father or grandfather in your life. It's a meaningful and intellectually rich way to reflect on fatherhood through the lens of storytelling. And we can hang out over the six sessions, which will also include guests, co-author Miha Mazzini and my own father, James Charney.

The course begins September 24, 2025.
Click here to enroll or learn more.

The Book

Meanwhile, my book The Art of Fatherhood is available now for preorder. It makes a great gift for any father, grandfather, or anyone interested in how art shapes the stories we live.

Preorder the book here.

I hope you’ll join me for the course, pick up the book, or share both with someone who would love them.

And as a special bonus, here is a preview of the book, exclusively for my Substackers! It is the opening chapter, which along with the closing chapter, takes the form of letters that co-author Miha and I wrote to each other. The rest of the book is traditional prose with many illustrations.

One More Thing - My Father’s Yale Course

My father, psychiatrist James Charney, with whom I taught a Yale online course in the spring semester (and with whom I’ll be teaching another next spring), has a new course available, too. By popular demand he’s prepared a new version of his Madness at the Movies course (which ties into his book of the same title), featuring all new films and diagnoses. The course and book use examples from film to help understand psychopathologies and mental illness.

Enroll in my father’s course here

Exclusive Preview of The Art of Fatherhood

Dear Noah,

Something curious has happened to me and I would like to ask your opinion. You have read my memoir, It’s Personal, and you know that I grew up with a religious grandmother who was surrounded by ghosts, souls and angels, and a mother who was Stalin in a skirt, head of a dictatorship that ruled one subject: me.

I never met my father. Growing up among women, I couldn’t copy his role. I had to create it before I had my children. I must have had some basic construct of fatherhood lurking within my subconscious and then I made it up as I went along (I remember many times the desperation I felt over my incompetence).

On what did I build my image of fatherhood? When I closed my eyes in a meditative state, the first picture that floated in front of me was Gustave Dore's engraving of God Creating Light. A magnificent old man, standing tall, arm raised high, white robe fluttering behind him like angel wings. Dore’s Bible was my formative picture book, one that my grandmother was reading constantly. The other book, Preparing for Death, didn’t have any illustrations.

Had God in this picture been dressed in uniform, that image could have formed a statue of one of the many that communism erected on the main squares of cities. God ruled my grandmother, Stalin my mother. As a child, I wanted to please both. This engraving does a nice job of joining the two worldviews.

The next image I saw in this mental slideshow was of a cowboy riding into the sunset. From the age of six, I was constantly at the cinema, and the most popular films at that time were German westerns that were made in Yugoslavia, with the hero played by a Frenchman, while the chief of the tribe was usually a Serb (don't ask!).

In conceiving this book, I started to wonder about other people’s associations. The most frequently mentioned painting was a very well-known one by the Slovene painter, Ivan Grohar, The Sower. It shows a man in a field who has thrown away his seed and is walking off into the distance. All we see is his back. In Slovenian, we use the same word for seed, as in those used to plant things, and sperm: seme (which I suppose is a universal connection, seeing as it means the same thing in English). That’s the image that Slovenes seem to associate with fathers: impregnation and departure.

Now I come to what prompted me to write to you. Yesterday I was the speaker at a literary evening in a small village by the sea and I began to tell the audience about the image of the father. I asked them to guess which image was the most common answer to my question. And almost the whole hall replied in one voice: Ivan Grohar’s The Sower. Apparently all of Slovenia agrees, even in a small seaside village.

I came home confused. I lay down on the sofa to think about it and put an American record on my gramophone. Lo and behold, in the first song, a cowboy rides off into the sunset, and the female teacher waves after him. So the Slovenian image is pretty similar to the American one, I suppose? Are these the relics of a patriarchal world or something even older, a biologically baked-in aspect of what it is to be human? I wouldn't even call someone who just planted a seed and left a “father.” Isn’t “sperm donor” more accurate? Do you not think that it would be worth looking into this subject and investigating it further? It’s risky - the path is not the most trodden. The historian John Demos said "fatherhood has a very long history, but virtually no historians."

You’re an art historian, I’m an anthropologist (with decades of working in information technology), and we are both writers.

Why don’t we do it?

Regards,

Miha

Dear Miha,

I’m all in, I love the idea. First of all, we’ve been friends for ages, and I’ve always admired your writing. But I also admire your mind. Ever since I moved full-time to Slovenia, I’ve turned to you to answer my socio-anthropological questions about this adopted homeland of mine. You are known here not only as one of Slovenia’s leading authors, but also as a social commentator. That weekly newspaper column you wrote for decades, the most popular in the country, regularly held a mirror up to Slovenes and investigated why they behave the way they do. Turns out that Slovenes behave almost exactly like all other humans, with only subtle differences (wearing slippers indoors, drinking schnapps for breakfast…) Your background as an anthropologist makes you an ideal colleague on this investigation of what fatherhood means, the story of how fathers have been presented through art and culture through the ages. I’ve never found a book like it and, as a father of two young daughters, I like the idea of diving into the subject.

I should also point out that we complement each other nicely, particularly since we’ve had such vastly different upbringings, in family and cultural terms. You are a generation older than I, raised under socialism, in Europe, and never had a father present in your life. But you are a wonderful father, now of two adult daughters, and you just became a grandfather for the first time. I’m in my mid-forties, a capitalist American, with a very loving father who has been the primary presence throughout my life, and my daughters, as I write this, are nine and ten years old. Our perspectives will merge nicely and offer a more complete view of the subject than a single author could provide.

So I suggest that we divide the subject of fatherhood into categories, then consider which cultural artifacts can help us better understand how fathers have been considered through history and in a variety of cultures. We can draw on literature, art, film, television, mythology, music, and reportage. Such fields will both reflect the general views of the time they were created, and also in some cases will have influenced behavior directly. Art has that effect. Though we come from a European and American angle, we must do our best to cover as much of the globe as we can. My guess is that we will see that fatherhood, in the positive and sometimes negative senses, is quite universal to humans, no matter from where they hail.

I’m surprised that the image of a father conjured in the minds of just about every Slovene you asked was The Sower. It’s a wonderful painting, I know it well, but I’d never have associated it with fatherhood myself. This is surely an upbringing question. The American idea of a father is a kindly man with glasses, smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper in the living room while the children scamper about. That comes from Norman Rockwell paintings (the visual scribe of idyllic Americana) and a sort of “gee whiz” 1960s idea of parenting—the image I have is of the actor, Fred MacMurray, in the popular TV show “My Three Sons” which ran from 1960-1972. Now that’s a show I’ve never actually watched, as far as I know, and yet that’s the image that formed in my mind the way The Sower formed in the minds of Slovenes. It began the year another similar show, “Father Knows Best,” stopped airing (it ran from 1954-1960, but began back in 1949 as a radio show). In both shows, the premise is that the father is a passively loving figurehead of the family, the breadwinner, the font of wisdom, the Solomonic solver of problems. The family gets into various lighthearted pickles and then the father, with understanding and a half-smile, sorts everything out. The father as deus ex machina, swooping in and making it all right. The twist with “My Three Sons” is that the father is a widower who has to raise his sons alone—with some help from his father-in-law and his great-uncle, so the entire family unit is male.

These fathers are not often proactively engaged with their children, and we rarely see them physically affectionate. But the love is implicit and the father as the one in charge, a benevolent dictator, a problem-solver to set the world right—that’s the American archetype. It’s a positive one, if not a little soulless. Emotion doesn’t play a role, but there’s a general vibe of wellbeing and well-meaning.

Each culture, and in many cases each generation, will find a father image archetype reflected in the arts. Let’s start by defining what we mean by “father” and then consider which broad stroke categories such fathers can fall into. For many Catholics, the Pope or a local priest is a metaphorical father. Time is also described as a “father.” A family can have more than one father. So I suggest that we start by laying out the ground rules. This will be a cultural history of the idea of fatherhood, but it should also have a good moral. In immersing ourselves in the world of fathers, we will learn what to do (and maybe more often what not to do). So at the end of our book, we should be able to provide guidelines for what makes a good father.

If your father image was Grohar’s The Sower mine is a 1955 photo of a father named Paul Carpenter throwing his 15-month-old daughter playfully in the air outside their modest home in California. The daughter looks joyous, but the photographer snapped the shot at a great moment—the daughter is like a doll flung skyward, dangerously high it seems. The father’s eyes are locked onto his child—he is the only thing standing between her and harm. They are playing, so there’s love and attention in that, but he must be fully present. To me this is a great analogy for fatherhood.

I suggest that we embrace our different backgrounds, experiences, and authorial voices. You’re trained as an anthropologist and have a keen eye for social history. I’m an art historian. So let’s divide our book into sections where we alternate who takes the lead, based on our specialties.

Speaking of fatherhood, I’ve got to get my kids to bed. I’ll let you kick off the first chapter.

Yours,

Noah

If you’ve studied modern art at all you’ll have heard of Marina and Ulay. Marina is probably the world’s most famous living artist (it’s a close tie between her and Damien Hirst I’d guess). Her performance and body art with Ulay is taught in Art History 101 classes. I had the good fortune of knowing Ulay in his final decade. He married a Slovenian woman (as I did) and lived in Ljubljana. We spent many afternoons in his apartment chatting and I helped break some news in a Guardian article—ironically about his lawsuit against Marina over citing authorship of some of their joint works. It turned out that Marina was not put off by this and she and I became friendly correspondents—she wrote the Afterword for my book, Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art. She and I met not long ago in Ljubljana.

And here’s a photo of me with Ulay (and Slovenia’s most famous musician, Vlado Kreslin), from a million years ago.

The book we’re working on is in conjunction with The Ulay Foundation and will be published by Bloomsbury as part of the ARCA Art Crime book series I’m editing for the publisher.

The book is a monograph about Irritation: There’s a Criminal Touch to Art (1976), probably Ulay’s most famous work. It will be divided into three sections: Ulay’s own words about the event in total detail, Marina’s recollections of the event, and my analysis of it as an art historian. To read an early insider account I published in The Observer, click below.

Read the Observer

A New Feature in the Financial Times

An article of mine just ran in the FT, entitled “Why the Art Trade Should Learn to Love Forensics.” You need a subscription to read it, but a few weeks after it comes out I’ll publish here, just for you, the early “director’s cut” version of it. If you subscribe, you can read it by clicking the button.

Read the Article

Sign Up for My Next Online Lectures

My next online Yale course is sold out, but you can still sign up for one of my next three one-off lectures for The Smithsonian.

March 27 : AI and Art Authentication: The Future of Forensics

April 10: The Caravaggio Case: An Art History Whodunnit

May 29: The Complete(ish) History of Sculpture in One Lecture

You’re most welcome at any and all of them!

Best wishes and more next month.

-Noah

Learn More

To read my Plaster Magazine article about art and AI, click here.

My article on AR for The Art Newspaper, the one that introduced me to the firm, is below. It came out in the December 2024 print edition of The Art Newspaper and is not online, so this is an exclusive for you, my Substack subscribers!

I’ve just been asked to write about AI and art for The Financial Times, so this is clearly a hot topic. With works surfacing that are…ahem…overtly highly questionable (I’m looking at you, supposed “Caravaggio” and supposed “Van Gogh” that have been in the news of late) we are clearly in need of new, cutting edge advanced tools to help traditional analyses of artwork to verify authorship.

New Edition of The Art of Forgery

Speaking of which, I just filed the updated manuscript for the second edition of my The Art of Forgery. This book came out as a lavishly illustrated volume with Phaidon in 2015 and it remains the go-to text on the topic, but it has been out of print. Never fear, a new, much updated edition will be published at the end of this year by Bloomsbury. I’ve updated what needed updating and expanded it from 60,000 words to 110,000 words, including a robust new chapter on “Digital Power,” looking at digital technologies that weren’t really a thing when the first edition was written, particularly NFTs, blockchain, generative art, metaverses, and Artificial Intelligence as a tool of daily use. The above case studies will indeed feature. I’m also planning to launch a new podcast dedicated to the topic of art authentication, so stay tuned.

Lectures for the Spring

Some of you may have been among the 500 people attending my last online lecture for The Smithsonian, on The Ghent Altarpiece, which was held January 29. Well, technically Jan 30 my time—so it is at a normal hour in the US, it starts at 1230am my time (Euro central), so such lectures are conducted in my pajamas and they finish around 2am my time. Anything for the arts!

This was the first in a series of four lectures I’ll be giving for The Smithsonian this spring, followed by a full online course in the fall. You can sign up for the other lectures, and you even get credit for them towards the Smithsonian’s World Art History Certificate.

Here are the next two lectures. The one in March I’ll be giving with Carina Popovici, founder of Art Recognition, the firm I mentioned joining as an advisor.

AI and Art Authentication: The Future of Forensics - March 27

Artificial intelligence is transforming the world of art authentication. Art historian Noah Charney and Carina Popovici, co-founder of Art Recognition, an AI-driven art verification company in Switzerland, examine how machine learning is revolutionizing the process of determining artwork authenticity.

They reveal how AI analyzes brushstrokes, patterns, and pigments with precision beyond human capability, offering groundbreaking solutions to combat art forgery and identify authorship. Charney and Popovici share images from Art Recognition projects as they discuss investigations into works thought to be by Raphael, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Leonardo da Vinci.

Sign Up

The Caravaggio Case: An Art History Whodunnit - April 10

Caravaggio's Saint Matthew cycle—three paintings commissioned circa 1599 for the Contarelli Chapel in the Roman church of San Luigi dei Francesi—was the artist’s first major public work. Like many other of his paintings, these artworks come with a backstory that references other artists, including Raphael. And in this case, a mystery or two.

The series focuses on major characters in Saint Matthew’s story, but there are conflicting theories of exactly who is represented and who might be missing. For example, in The Calling of Saint Matthew, which figure depicts the saint? How can we spot the killer in The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew among the red-herring suspects Caravaggio has planted to mislead viewers? Art historian, art crime expert, and author Noah Charney deciphers a Baroque detective story centered on a complicated artist (with a murder in his history) that offers a novel way to approach and appreciate the genius behind the paintings.

Sign Up

More goodies to come, including the publishing of my next book and a very exciting new book contract… See you next month!

To kick off 2025, I wanted to invite anyone interested to an online “fireside” open house conversation about ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. This is the research group I founded back in 2006, when I was still a student, and which became the world’s first research group on art crime. It went on to establish several others firsts: the first peer-reviewed academic journal in the field, The Journal of Art Crime, which comes out twice a year since 2009; the first academic program in the field anywhere, a postgraduate summer program held annually in Amelia, Italy since 2009; and more recently the first dedicated book series on the subject, art crime, which I’m curating in collaboration with the publisher, Bloomsbury/Rowman & Littlefield.

To subscribe to The Journal of Art Crime, just email journal at artcrimeresearch dot org

Applications are now open to study this summer on the ARCA Program. It’s such a lovely experience that, even with my inbuilt bias, I can recommend it heartily to anyone interested in studying art crime. You spend 10 weeks in a beautiful Umbrian hilltop town and we bring the world’s top professors, art police, museum security experts, and more to you, each one teaching an in-depth course. In the midst of it we also run an annual conference on the study of art crime. It’s a chance to dive deeply into a fascinating subject in a lovely place.

Learn More about the ARCA Program

If you’re interested in learning more about it, or about ARCA, my colleagues Edgar Tijhuis (ARCA’s Academic Director) and Lynda Albertson (ARCA’s CEO) and I will be available online Wednesday January 8th (tomorrow) at 8pm Euro Central time. You’re welcome to join.

The link to join is is: https://lyndaalbertson-204.my.webex.com/lyndaalbertson-204.my/j.php?MTID=m49752e73c703f03bf122227382ce0fb8

Meeting number: 2867 820 7016

Meeting password: D5PwqpgEs62

In another post I’ll make a very big announcement related to ARCA’s Art Crime book series with Bloomsbury, but for now I’ll leave you with an interview I gave a few days ago about the ARCA Postgraduate Program that has yet to run, so you’re getting an advance look at the full length interview. I’ll throw in some fun photos of Amelia, where the program is held in Italy.

Best wishes and more good things to come in 2025!

Can you tell us something about your background?

I got interested in art crime long ago, when I was a postgraduate student living in London, doing an MA at The Courtauld Institute. I’d always enjoyed writing, and I’d actually gotten into a playwrighting program at Goldsmiths in London. I wasn’t a top student so I was pleasantly surprised when I was accepted at all three postgraduate programs to which I’d applied: Masters programs in art history at The Courtauld Institute and at University of Cambridge, and one in playwrighting at Goldsmiths. I’d enjoyed writing plays as an undergraduate and thought that this might be a career for me. But when I got into all three, I spoke to some professors of mine at my undergraduate, Colby College, and each one independently told me, “Look, you can teach yourself playwrighting by writing and going to a lot of plays in London—but you can’t teach yourself art history.” They also said that I’d be nuts not to go to these prestigious universities that somehow let me in, even though I was a sort of B+ level student. I decided to do just that—I’d give myself a playwrighting immersion just by seeing lots of plays, but I’d go to study art history. Cambridge allowed students to defer a year, but Courtauld didn’t. So I said “yes” to both, doing an MA first at Courtauld, then at Cambridge. There’s no good reason to have two MA degrees, but I wanted to be a student for as long as possible because I so enjoyed it. At that point, however, I didn’t know anything about art crime.

During my year in London at the Courtauld, I was influenced by three things. I’d already had quite a bit of experience behind the scenes in the art world. I’d worked two summers at Christie’s auction house, so I had a sense of the trade side. I’d worked one summer at the Yale British Arts Center, so I had a taste of museums. And now I was in academia. I’d always enjoyed writing and thought that the art world would be a good setting for a novel. I say novel because I’d managed to get myself a playwrighting agent in London, but she said, “If you actually want to make a living as a writer, you’re much better off writing a novel. Have you got one?” “No,” I replied, “but I’ll go write one.”

This was when The Da Vinci Code was published and the Pierce Brosnan remake of The Thomas Crown Affair was released. I enjoyed reading The Da Vinci Code but like anyone who knows enough about history, I found elements of it annoying—it is full of errors, as if no one bothered to fact-check it, and is misleading in the way it’s written, making millions of readers think conspiracy theories are true. I wanted to write something with a similar pace and engagement to it, but with all correct information and research. I was also hoping for similar sales, but that was always going to be a long shot! I so enjoyed The Thomas Crown Affair—it was so stylish, classy, and with only one “deus ex machina” that isn’t explained and plausible on repeat viewings, it was “honest” in its many twists. So my inspiration was basically to write something that would a) be set behind the scenes in the art world, b) based on proper research and plausibility, c) borrowing some of The Da Vinci Code’s winning format, like A/B/A/B storylines and ending chapters with cliffhangers, and d) with the style and art crime elements of The Thomas Crown Affair.

The result was my first (and only published) novel, The Art Thief. I was very lucky in that it sold for a big advance and was a best-seller in five countries, allowing me to become a full-time writer.

And how did you get involved with ARCA?

While researching for The Art Thief, I quickly realized that there was essentially no established field of the study of art crime. I quickly read all the books I could find—there were a few dozen only. There was no professor anywhere who specialized in the subject. If it hadn’t been such a tabula rasa, then I might not have gone into it. But I was excited at the idea that it was so little-plowed, making it feel that anything I did could immediately have an impact. I also liked that everyone found it interesting—it wasn’t just for academics. True crime interests everyone, while art is a more specialized audience. If you combine true crime with art you hit exactly what I most enjoyed. I started a PhD in the history of art theft at Cambridge, with an advisor who was nice and supportive but knew nothing about the subject.

While at Cambridge I organized a conference with the help of a university institution with the odd acronym CRASSH that turned out to be the first conference on art crime in the world that brought together police and the relatively few academics who had published on the subject. Representatives from the FBI, Scotland Yard, the Hong Kong Police, and the Carabinieri came. Again I got very lucky, and the conference was covered by Tom Mueller, a journalist who then published a big feature article in The New York Times Magazine (“To Sketch a Thief,” Dec 2006) about the conference and about me as having effectively founded this new field of study, all before I’d even finished my PhD. This was before social media was widespread and a feature in the Times was then worth much more than it is now, because there were fewer distractions, and it was the news source of record. Overnight I got “famous” to the extent that one can without being properly famous—it was a version of the “15 minutes of fame” but it endured among those interested in the subject longer than that. I was quickly seen as the leading expert in the field, even though I was only 26—it was more by default, because no one else had looked deeply at the subject before.

There was great enthusiasm after the conference, especially from participants, who offered to be founding trustees of ARCA. I wasn’t sure how to best use this wave of publicity but it seemed like a good plan to established a non-profit organization that would promote the study of art crime and act as a bridge between the relatively few people in the world who studied it or worked within related fields like law enforcement or museum security. There were probably a few dozen specialists worldwide at the time, and so it was easy to be in touch with all of them. It’s not like today, where there are various universities with art crime courses and even specialized professors. This was the “olden days.” So I set up ARCA, first in the US then in Italy, where I later lived.

In 2009, we were in The New York Times again as we’d set up this very unusually formatted postgraduate program, which continues to this day. Instead of having fulltime staff, we invite top teachers (from academia and professional spheres, like police) to teach concise courses (2.5 days or 5 days long) in a beautiful town in Italy and have students come for the summer. The Times piece was written in the middle of the very first summer of the program, so its tone is “this seems interesting, but we’ll see.” It still is interesting, now fifteen years on!

That same year we launched The Journal of Art Crime, the first peer-reviewed academic journal in the field, which is still published twice-yearly. And we held the first annual conference on the study of art crime, again something new, in the midst of the summer-long postgraduate program, to bring all manner of speakers to our students.

ARCA certainly played a role in establishing the field of art crime and many other programs inspired by ours have popped up. Our graduates are professors and security directors and investigators. It’s very gratifying. What began as a homemade operation—initially just me and my wife helping out—has grown and blossomed, particularly thanks to Lynda Albertson as CEO and Edgar Tijhuis as Academic Director. I honestly found the running of ARCA to be stressful and I don’t think I was very good at it, so I’m hugely grateful to them for taking the reins, being so passionate, and allowing me to become more of a figurehead and guest professor than someone handling things on a daily basis.

ARCA has since expanded into different fields—team members appear in documentaries and TV programs (for Amazon Prime, the BBC, and beyond), we’ve fronted influencer campaigns for Samsung, we’ve helped with active investigations, and recently we joined forces with the publishing giant Bloomsbury/Rowman & Littlefield, to launch the first dedicated book series on art crime.

What is the purpose of the course you are teaching this summer?

Many years back I taught whatever was needed and not covered by other visiting faculty, but in recent years I’ve taught a concise course on art forgery. This is a subject of one of my books, The Art of Forgery (2015) and I’m preparing a new edition of it to come out in late 2025 with Bloomsbury. It’s fascinating and full of kooky characters and surprising stories. I was the first to place to a criminological theoretical superstructure on what was before an anecdotal field of study—there had been books and articles telling the stories of individual forgers, but there had not been an attempt to put art forgery into a broader context and look for themes and consistencies in modus operandi. The most practical thing I came up with I called “the provenance trap,” and I teach on the five variations of it, each with a really fun case study. In each the over-focus on provenance on the part of the art world has allowed clever criminals to take advantage by laying traps based on provenance research, tricking art experts into authenticating forgeries.

What is it like in Amelia?

Amelia is an idyllic Umbrian hilltop town. We chose it to house our program because I was developing the idea for the program back when I was teaching at Yale University—I taught a seminar on art crime there even before I’d finished my PhD (which I actually finished at University of Ljubljana, in architectural history—fun fact—because I’d met my future wife, who is Slovenian, and decided to move there). Yale used to have their Italian language study abroad program in Amelia, but were about to move it to Siena. Amelia was looking for a prestigious academic program to replace the Yale program and move into the same facilities. We were just starting, so hardly prestigious, but it worked perfectly for us and for them. Amelia is small enough that some twenty students plus ten professors spending a summer there provides a significant positive economic boost and brings a liveliness to town. It’s spectacular, ancient, charming, and many of our students feel “adopted” by locals and come back annually after our program to visit. It’s within easy reach of Rome but is quite inexpensive as a place to live, which is great for our students, and it is not very touristy, which means you get a nice immersion into true Italian life. We’re not the only ones to have discovered it. The mega-best-selling author Daniel Silva (whose fictional protagonist is an assassin and art restorer) used to summer here and a scene in one of his novels is set at the gelateria just outside the town gates.

What is so special about this program?

The program was unique and groundbreaking when it first started, and it inspired other programs to use our unusual formula. Ours is the most comprehensive interdisciplinary program in art crime. It’s the godfather of them all. And it combines classroom teaching with living in a beautiful Umbrian town, plus we arrange amazing field trips—students do a security evaluation with their museum security professor at one of Rome’s major museums, and they explore raided Etruscan tombs in the countryside with the head of Italy’s Archaeological Group. Cool stuff.

Any advice for the participants that come to Amelia?

Just go for it. It will be one of the best summers of your life, academically and in terms of a wonderful, enriching abroad experience. Plus—cappuccinos!

Learn More about the ARCA Program

But first, Milan is such a lovely place to visit, so liveable and walkable. Here was my first view.

It’s an extra treat to climb to the roof of Milan’s cathedral. You get much more than “just” the view of the city. You get up close with a vast array of statuary that is so full of detail but which only God would “see” since regular folk were never meant to wander the rooftops when the cathedral was first built.

I had some free time in the mornings so I visited the Ambrosiana Library and museum, which doesn’t get as much press as the Brera but which is just as wonderful, and full of showstopper pieces.

After my talk at this conference on forgery I had to run to another room that had been set up for me, as I needed to teach my last lecture of my National Gallery course, The Secret History of Art. It turned out that the wifi wasn’t as strong as I’d hoped, so during a break I bolted for my hotel, where the wifi was smoother to finish up the class. The class was on iconography and part of my promise at the beginning of the course was that, by the end of it, my 600+ students would be able to visit any museum with a European Old Master collection and, without having prepared, be empowered to interpret the art they see there. To test this, or rather show that it was indeed the case, I took photos of random statues on Milan Cathedral and paintings in the Ambrosiana and added them to my slides. The students could name the saints, allegories, and disguised symbols, showing just how much they’d learned. If you’re interested in such a course, I’ll be teaching a different version of it for The Smithsonian in 2025, so stay tuned.

Here is my video of the Ambrosiana. It includes Leonardo manuscripts and drawings which appear wholly modern and fresh today.

The next day I was hosted by my Italian publisher, Johan & Levi, which so far has released two of my books, L’arte del falso and Il museo del’arte perduta. They arranged an event at the Luigi Rovati Foundation, which is owned by the same family that founded the publishing house. I was interviewed by Milanese art historian Fabio Vittucci who asked excellent questions that I’d never been asked before (which is a great compliment, because I usually get the same 10 or so questions on repeat). I also gave interviews to Sky and Il Giorno, before heading out for dinner. Milanese osso buco with saffron risotto is all that and a bag of chips, as they say.

I made two other tourist visits, to the Brera, Milan’s most celebrated museum, and to Milan’s two other famous churches (besides the Duomo), the Basilica of Sant’Ambrozio and San Maurizio.

The Brera was the site of a fashion video shoot, and is a highly photogenic museum. It includes some details I’d never seen: vessels featuring scents that you’re meant to open when you look at some works, a bolt of fabric that you can touch while looking at a painting in which a woman wears such a fabric, and several reliefs of paintings meant for the blind to allow them to “see” the work through touch.

The two less-visited churches of Milan are outstanding. Sant’Ambrozio has a star attraction in an ancient early Christian relief that now supports the base of a pulpit. And San Maurizio was totally unexpected, covered in frescoes and paintings, with a world class 16th century painted organ, flooded with light, and beautifully set up with music and incense to provide a multisensory experience.

Lastly, before I wish you a very happy holiday, might I suggest a Noah book as a last-minute holiday gift for a friend or loved one? There are more than 25 to choose from.

Check Out Noah's Books

I’m happy to write a dedication and sign a book plate and mail it to you anywhere in the world. I’ll cover the shipping if you’re up for posting a positive review on Amazon or wherever you bought the book (if you liked it, of course). Just send me an email and include a screenshot of the review, along with your address and preferred dedication text (or you can let me surprise you), and I’ll do the rest!

Very happy holidays and best wishes. Catch you in the new year!

Word count can be a bummer. This chapter was written as part of Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art but the manuscript was going to be longer than what was contracted, so it was cut. I recently taught a course based on my book for Yale, The HERstory of Art, and one lecture was based on this chapter. So I thought that this would be the perfect gift for my subscribers to get an exclusive look at this unpublished text. Happy holidays!

It is one thing to consider the role of women beyond the confines of the sculpture or canvas: as artists, patrons, scholars, curators. But what of women when they appear within a work of art? Depictions of women in art can, in principle, mean whatever the artist chooses, of course. But there have been female archetypes regularly used throughout the history of art. It is also reasonable to explore the role of a man within a work of art, but men are more often depicted as a historical record—a portrait of someone of importance—whereas women were most often either reduced to objects of admiration for the male gaze but interestingly were also more likely to be representative of something, allegorical personifications or symbols. This is the secret language of art. Just seeing someone (or something) in an artwork is not necessarily (and perhaps even infrequently) literal. To see a dog in the foreground of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (1434) does not necessarily mean that the Arnolfinis had a pet dog, and this is what it looked like. (They may have—history has not recorded that detail)—instead it was included because dogs traditionally represented an idea: loyalty. By seeing the dog, we are meant to understand that the Arnolfinis are and will remain loyal to one another.

This can be the same for women. A woman wearing a blindfold and carrying a sword in one hand and scales in another we all know is not meant to present an actual woman, named or otherwise. Instead, she is a personification of the idea of Justice. This is why so many courthouses feature a statue, painting, or relief of just this figure, it’s a common lexicon. So let us now consider the archetypes and roles of women when they appear in artworks, particularly those created prior to the Second World War, after which the traditions of art history were largely set aside (or rebelled against), and art rose to prominence in an atmosphere of throwing the rulebook out the window, of “anything goes.”

Portraits of Historical Women

The most literal images of women were those meant to commemorate the appearance (and possibly actions) of a real historical personage. One of the key differences between portraits of men versus those of women is that we tend to know the identity of the man portrayed with greater assurance than of the women. This is largely because portraits were commissioned, often at great expense, of “great men”—real kings, popes, cardinals, nobles, military leaders, poets, or mythical-historical figures as they were imagined (for no one necessarily knew what they looked like)—Jesus, for instance, saints, mythological characters (Perseus, Aeneas, Don Quixote). Prior to the predominance of photography (towards the end of the 19^th century), sculpture and painting were the primary ways that historical events and individuals were recorded for posterity. Some paid for their own portraits (Duke Federico de Montefeltro, portrayed in profile by Piero della Francesca, to recall portraits of ancient Roman emperors, who were shown in profile on coins and medals). Others had their likeness and deeds preserved as matters of state (for instance, the Medici military victories shown in elaborate murals in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, painted by Giorgio Vasari). Aware that perhaps only a single image of them would ever be created, some requested “airbrushed” versions, in the same way that in social media influencers use lighting and clever editing to provide a controlled portrait, Montefeltro had a gruesome scar on the right side of his face, so his choice to be painted in profile, with only the left side showing, was strategic.

In past centuries, when women rarely had means of their own because they were not allowed to inherit wealth and were prohibited from working for money, portraits of them were either commissioned by husbands (for instance, in Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Jan van Eyck, in which the commissioner, Joost Vidjt, had himself and his wife, Elizabeth Borluut, portrayed on the outside of the 12-panel altarpiece to commemorate for eternity their generosity in having paid for so glorious an artwork) or by fathers for an intended audience of a husband-to-be. Although Scholars argue of who Raphael’s Lady with a Unicorn (1505-1506) portrays, they all agree that it was an engagement portrait of an aristocratic young woman intended to be sent to her betrothed. Naturally, you’d want to make the future bride look as good as possible, which led to a generification of appearance . It is incorrect to assume that what is painted is precisely what the young woman actually looked like. It is always an idealized version. Raphael was particularly guilty of this.

The story goes that he kept sketchbooks in which he recorded the most beautiful aspects of people he saw—a woman with a lovely hairline, another with perfect lips (as per the ideal of beauty in Italy circa 1500)—and hybridized these elements into a single, ideal female figure who he included in most of his religious paintings. You can spot a woman's face painted by Raphael from across the room. In fact, his men look just like his women, just with beards added on. It was a generic amalgam that he considered ideal. When it came to portraying women for commissioned portraits, he also tweaked their appearances towards his ideal of perfect female beauty. So, one must always keep in mind that a portrait is actually of both the subject and the artist, for the subject is viewed and presented through the prism of the artist’s opinion, thought and artistic capability. It is in every sense mediated. King Henry VIII is said to have seen an engagement portrait of Anne of Cleves before he met her that aroused his interest. She looks like a true beauty in Hans Holbein’s 1539 portrait of her, which is likely the engagement portrait that Henry saw.

Apparently, the portrait of her looked far better than he thought she did in real life. They were married from 6 January to 9 July 1540, but the marriage was never consummated. The king is said to have told his advisor, Thomas Cromwell, “I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse.” He declared her his “Beloved Sister” and annulled the marriage, one of his six (and the one who lived the longest).

In the 19^th century, with the rise of Realism (led by the painter Edouard Manet), it became more common to portray people as they actually looked, making the painted depiction of the woman look recognizable to her real life appearance. This was an irregular occurrence in the past. There were some famous female models who can be spotted in numerous works. For instance, Botticelli’s muse was thought to have been Simonetta Vespucci, an aristocratic girl from the family that sired Amerigo Vespucci (after whom America is named). She was Venus in his Birth of Venus and became an allegorical personification of Spring in his Primavera (both painted in the 1470s).

Commemorative portraits would also be truer to life, though still “airbrushed” into a more idealized version to be preserved for posterity. One of the loveliest and most moving portraits ever made is Domenico Ghirlandaio’s profile Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni (1488), a painting made that much more poignant when we learn that it was commissioned by Giovanna’s loving husband shortly after her death. Ghirlandaio had painted her several years earlier from a three-quarters angle, her face turned to the viewer. The result is less flattering, less idealized than the commemorative picture in profile. The memorial portrait has recorded Giovanna as if she were a marble sculpture representing the ideal of feminine beauty in late 15^th century Italy, whereas the life portrait from a few years earlier shows her likely as she truly looked. The idealized one was in fact a love-letter to her, making her look beautiful so that people would remember her that way.

Until the 19^th century, with few exceptions, artists only portrayed women of high society. Models were used for their bodies, used to help an artist determine positioning and form but the faces of those painted were women who were either important to the artist or important to the patron of the artwork, invariably a man, who was paying for it (a wife, for example). Caravaggio toyed dangerously with this and broke convention when he created what is thought to be a highly recognizable portrait of the prostitute, Lena, who sought out clients on the corner of Rome near the church of Sant’Agostino, as the Virgin Mary on an altarpiece just inside the church of Sant’Agostino. But this was rare. Women portrayed were women of import to the elite classes that paid for the artworks.

This habit of painting only elite women began to change in the 17^th century with the introduction of genre paintings, scenes of everyday life. In these, the subject is not the figures portrayed but the scene: a village fete, a joyous drinking session at a roadside inn, a church interior. Women and men were present but as stock characters, not as the focal points. Genre paintings were pioneered by Netherlandish artists who made them on a smaller scale, and with willfully less “important” themes, to sell at a reasonable rate to a rising middle class that wanted to decorate their homes with beautiful art. This period, when the feudal system began to erode and a rising mercantile middle class had money to spend, supported a market for art that was not about the great moments in history or myth but about everyday life. To put it in modern terms, the market was “disrupted” by this new type of painting, and in turn this gave scope for different portrayals of women.

The leading proponent of this new movement, French Realist painter Eduard Manet, painted scenes from everyday life and, by doing so, conveyed a political message, highlighting in particular the hypocrisy of a French Victorian society in which prostitution was ubiquitous, but no one spoke of it. By painting prostitutes as his protagonists, he forced his audience to confront what they preferred remained buried. The work was rejected by the main salon, the showcase of contemporary art, because it was too controversial, but it was shown in the Salon des Refuses, a rival salon set up to show works refused entry to the conservative main salon.

Manet painted women from the lower ranks of society, and in doing so, caused much consternation also because he presented them as imperious, powerful, fully meeting the gaze of the (largely male) viewership. They were empowering the women portrayed, and this intimidated the male audience. His Olympia (1856) shows his favorite model, Victorine Meurent (1844-1927), fully nude and locking eyes with the viewer, imagined as a high-end courtesan.

He used her in Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), also nude and surrounded by clothed men. He was commenting on the ubiquity of prostitution in contemporary society, something everyone knew about and no one spoke of. By shining a spotlight on it, he was being very provocative. Many an art history book incorrectly labels Meurent as a prostitute herself—there is no record that she was. She was a popular model for many artists, and also was a painter herself, even showing in the Salon in 1876, just a year after she began studying portraiture—she would have her own work featured in the Salon six times and she was inducted into the Société des Artistes Francais. She is a rare example of a model who was also an artist. And another example of a woman who’s contribution to art has been buried under a male narrative.

Others followed the trail that Manet blazed. In England, several members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which included the wives of members) were muses (inspiring artists through their beauty or the love of them), models and artists, themselves. Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) was the model for Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1865-66), Fanny Cornforth was the favorite model of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Annie Miller modeled for William Holman Hunt. Siddall (nicknamed “The Sid”) studied art with Rossetti and then the famous critic, John Ruskin, became one of her patrons. Rossetti, who had an affair with Siddall, was so impressed with her painting that he wrote to his sister, Christina, who was also an artist, “You must take care not to rival The Sid.” Others included Marie Spartali Stillman, Evelyn de Morgan and Effie Gray, who was briefly married to John Ruskin before marrying Millais and appearing in several of his works as a model.

Models also changed in the late 19^th century. As Aurelie Petiot wrote in her book, The Pre-Raphaelites, “The great female models were, at the start, in the 1850s, plucked from non-artistic backgrounds because of their beauty.” Jan Marsh, who curated an exhibit entitled Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, said, “Young women in the nineteenth century were all concerned with shaping their destinies through marriages—in all classes. Participation in art was one attractive avenue, just as today aspiring actresses and fashion models hope to create more glamorous lives for themselves. They certainly knew what they were doing and why, but conventionally concealed ambition.”

Self-Portraits

In self-portraits, women artists were able to show themselves as they wished to be seen by others and preserved for posterity. There was no issue of being filtered through the artist portraying you, no weight of the male gaze (assuming the painter happened to be male) to contend with. Self-portraits allowed women control, to be both artist and subject. You can idealize your appearance or keep it real—the choice is yours. The issue of finding a model, particularly when female artists were excluded from life drawing classes (that wasn’t until 1893 at the Royal Academy of Arts, for example) giving them access to nudes, was no longer an issue, as long as you were representing yourself.^[1] One of the few books on women artists is entirely dedicated to self-portraits: Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette (2021). In it, Higgie describes an early passage about a female artist that appeared in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Famous Women (1361-1362), a text that should be considered progressive, though not exactly feminist—Boccaccio praises certain women in history but explains that they were anomalies, implying that most women were neither talented nor noteworthy. In it, he writes of several female artists, possibly mythical, including Irene, an ancient Hellenistic painter, who “merited some praises because the art of painting is mostly alien to the female mind and cannot be attained without that great intellectual concentration which women, as a rule, are very slow to acquire.” In that passage, Boccaccio’s Feminism Lite becomes rather too lite for comfort. His greatest praise is saved for a Roman woman called Marcia, who was famous both for retaining her virginity and for her paintings and ivory sculptures. Boccaccio describes in detail just one of Marcia’s creations, a self-portrait that was “painted on a panel with the aid of a mirror.”

The mirror is the key tool of the self-portraitist as critical as the paintbrush or canvas. Painters traditionally kept mirrors (at first convex ones, until flat mirrors became more affordable) in their studios. This served the purpose of allowing an artist to frame a composition by looking at its reflection within the frame of the mirror, much as a film director today might hold up his fingers in the form of a square to imagine what the next shot in the film will look like. Mirrors are crucial for self-portraits, but they are a “loaded’ tool. You don’t look to others the way you see yourself in a mirror. It’s a flipped reflection you see. Then there is the secondary question of how you see yourself, which may differ dramatically from how others perceive you. A person with low self-esteem might think themselves plain when most who encounter them find them beautiful. Someone might think well of themselves but be dismissed by others.

While portraits in art tend to be double portraits: the person portrayed as well as the artist creating the portrait, inserting themselves in the work in terms of style and presentation, their opinion of the subject coloring how they paint or sculpt, a self-portrait provides a fascinating shadow double: we see the subject as they wish to portray themselves, which may not be anything like how they objectively were in life, or how others considered them.

Women as Holy Figures

From the Virgin Mary to Mary Magdalene, from Old Testament sibyls to Judith, from modern saints like Saint Teresa of Avila to a bevy of classical saints, like Catherine of Alexandria, Ursula, Lucy, Cecilia and on, in religious art women (as well as men) are almost exclusively as imagined and idealized holy figures. Since no one knew what any biblical character actually looked like, the tendency was to make them look like the audience for the artwork.^[2] This is why Jesus looks like a Caucasian European in European religious art, rather than looking as he surely did, like a man from Palestine. So much of the European population was illiterate that religious art developed a visual, non-textual schemata for identifying who was who. The Virgin Mary is traditionally shown in a cobalt blue garment, originally because this blue was made with lapis lazuli, the most expensive item to purchase by weight through the Middle Ages. Saints carried hagiographic icons, symbols related to their stories (usually to the dramatic way in which they were martyred for their Christian beliefs). Thus, one can always spot Saint Catherine of Alexandria by her accessorises, since she is shown with a spiked wheel and a sword (she was tortured using a spiked wheel, which magically broke, at which point she was beheaded with a sword), while Saint Ursula carries an arrow (she was shot by the Huns) and Saint Lucy carries her own eyes (she was…well, you can imagine).

Rarely was any effort made to make the faces of female holy figures look like models or any real people. Artists would often use models to figure out the poses for figures and study how light falls on clothing, but the faces were not used. When they were, scandal often followed, as in the example of Caravaggio and the Madonna of Loreto.

Such instances were very rare. It was deemed more appropriate to choose an idealized face for holy figures, male or female. Holy figures could sometimes be sexualized, but an excuse had to be made for it. Bernini created two ecstasy sculptures, moments in which a female holy figure had direct contact with God or an angel, resulting in an ex stasis, an out of body experience, which ecstatics like Saint Teresa of Avila described in terms we associate with corporal ecstasies: orgasms. A look at the faces and body poses in Bernini’s 1652 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and his 1674 Tomb of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni show what appear to be female orgasms as a trick on the ultra-religious Bernini’s part to help the viewer understand the holy experience of these women. The closest thing that we ordinary folk have felt that approaches the spiritual ecstasy of Teresa and Ludovica is a base, physical orgasm. This was a bold choice at the time.

Mothers

Though the Virgin Mary was venerated throughout Christianity, in the Middle Ages a cult began to develop around her to such an extent that one might consider her to have achieved a greater amount of attention, if not theological importance, than Jesus or God. There were more than twenty feast days each year in her honor, churches were built for Notre Dame (Our Lady), as in Notre Dame de Paris.

Theologians considered her to have suffered in a comparable way to Jesus during his Passion. While he suffered physically, his mother suffered emotionally from seeing her son harmed and executed. In 431, the Council of Ephesus sanctioned the cult worship of the Virgin Mary as Mother of God. This made it officially acceptable to pray to Mary and it launched the expansive dissemination of images of Mary, usually in the form of a Virgin and Child, with Mary enthroned and baby Jesus on her lap. The cult of Mary is thought to have helped elevate the status of women, but with a catch—Mary was, some believe, both a mother who birthed a child and a virgin. Though this is theoretically possible today thanks to modern technology, it was a physical impossibility at the time for any non-holy woman prior to recent advances in fertility medicine. Yet Mary was set as the ideal to which all women should adhere. While praise and respect for mothers increased thanks to the love that followers had for the Virgin Mary, her role put pressure on women of the world, who could not hope to embody the mutually conflicting roles of virgin and mother. In some ways the modern day cult of parenting and explorations of motherhood have not lessened and have possibly exacerbated pressures on women to be the perfect mother, no longer under pressure to simultaneously be a virgin, she is often castigated for her choices (if she has the privilege of choice) to work or not work after having her child.^[3]

An admiration and even cultic worship of fertility, of the incredible power of a woman to produce a child, dates back tens of thousands of years before Christianity. Ancient Cycladic figurines (made circa 2500 BC), often show abstract women identified as such due to the prominence of breasts and a pubic triangle. Ten times older than that (made circa 25,000 BC), the Venus of Willendorf is an 11 cm (4 inch) tall stone statue of a nude woman with accentuated breasts and pubic triangle—it was likely used in some fertility ritual.

18^th century French artists tugged at heartstrings by either showing the plight of mothers, or showed them as super-heroic, as Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy (1607), which shows a woman who saved her father, sentenced to starve in prison, by breastfeeding him at night through the bars of his cell.

But most of these are shown from a man’s perspective, even those of ideal mothers painted by 18^th century female artists. Kathe Kollwitz provides one of the most heart-wrenching depictions of grief from the perspective of a mother who has lost her child in Woman with a Dead Child (1903). This was made before Kollwitz had lost a child (her son Peter would die in 1914, at the start of the First World War), so instead it shows her deep sympathy, imagining what it would be like to lose a child when her son was still alive and well, aged 7. Most pieta artworks, like the famous sculpture by Michelangelo, show a more emotionally distanced view, while Kollwitz plunges us into absolute, soul-wracking grief, and the picture is all the more powerful for it.

Witches

While mothers held a special place and positive association when depicted in art, older women, meaning those beyond reproductive age, did not. It is rare to find a sympathetic picture of an old woman, but some do exist, as in An Old Woman Cooking Eggs by Diego Velazquez (1618) or Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother by James McNeil Whistler (1871, usually called Whistler’s Mother).

Art mirrored the despicable European societal attitude towards menopausal women, essentially deeming them useless and suspect when they demonstrated their utility. While some societies, including those in China and Japan, largely admired and supported elderly women, Europe did not. This was most dramatically demonstrated in witch trials. Women, particularly those who were elderly and had a knowledge of medicinal herbs that was seen as supernatural to the uneducated, have been targeted for persecution throughout history. This rose to a proper craze in 15^th century Europe, with countless women arrested, tortured and killed without concrete evidence of any wrongdoing. Fear of demons and witches was real—the so-called “crimes” of women accused of witchcraft were not. But the idea of witches infected the popular imagination. A 1486 book, the Renaissance equivalent of a best-seller, codified and extended these beliefs. Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) was written by a German priest as a handbook on demonology and the identification and hunting of witches. It was used by royal courts and in legal proceedings, but it was also read for the lurid stories and dramatic engravings. The reality of its content was emphasized by the inclusion in the book of a papal bull issued in 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII that gave authority to inquisitors to track down and punish witches. Its popularity as a subject meant that witches appeared with some frequency in art.

In most cases, witches were included in artwork as stock characters, without any sympathy for them as human women at all—they are figures of intrigue and horror, like a demon or a dragon. Albrecht Durer’s Witch Riding a Goat (1500) focuses on the naked body of an old woman as she rides a goat backwards, carrying a broomstick with which she casts a spell.

The theme of a “witches sabbath,” an unholy mass featuring various magical activities and often orgiastic sexual misadventure, appears in many 17^th paintings, like The Witches Sabbath by Frans Francken the Younger (1607) and Witches at their Incantations by Salvator Rosa (1646).

The idea of witches as broom-riders dates back to at least the Middle Ages, as they are shown in a 1451 illumination by Peronet Lamy of a poem by Martin Le Franc, entitled The Champion of Women. This epic poem, a massive 24,000 verses in length, was written in 1442 and comprises an extensive list of the good deeds of notable women throughout history, including Joan of Arc (who had been executed for heresy only a decade earlier, in 1431, after having saved France through her military efforts during the Hundred Years’ War). A series of witch trials captured the popular imagination in Valais, France from 1428-1447, and these are likely what Le Franc had in mind when he was writing. This was a very early feminist work, championing Joan before the verdict of her previous trial that led to her execution was overturned, rather too late in 1456, it must be said. But it was bold of Martin Le Franc to praise someone recently executed for heresy (the crime of which witches were accused) before she was posthumously redeemed and considered a martyr (she would be canonized in 1920).

Sympathetic renditions of witches in art only came in the 19^th century, long after the witch “hysteria” of the 16th-18th centuries had ended.

Naked Women - Classical Nudes

It may come as a surprise that the art collections of popes and cardinals contain many pictures of naked women. At the Borghese Gallery in Rome, the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, one can find a naked Leda barely holding off a swan (Zeus in disguise, as he “seduces” her), Correggio’s eroticized Danae (Zeus disguised this time as a shower of golden coins), a naked allegorical personification in Titian’s Allegory of Sacred and Profane Love, naked Daphne partly transformed into a tree to escape the amorous intentions of Apollo in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, naked Prosperine trying to wiggle free from the grip of Pluto in another marvelous sculpture by Bernini, and a naked Venus (wearing only a hat) in Lucas Cranach’s Cupid Complaining to Venus, just to name a few. And these live alongside numerous Madonna and Child paintings and other Catholic subject matter.

The coexistence of nudes with holy art, and in the collections of holy figures, was deemed acceptable if the nudes in question were meant to be either allegorical personifications (representing an idea) or characters from classical, pagan mythology. They also had to be less than realistic, idealized, meaning that body hair was a no-no. The result is a history of art packed with nude young women who appear polished, almost like marble statues that are painted (or indeed, literally as carved marble statues).

It is important to remember that these women were painted explicitly to please the gaze of the (male) viewer. Some of these nudes were considered so erotic that they were hidden behind a curtain that was drawn over the painting. It could be revealed when the owner wished, for his private delectation or to surprise and titillate his friends. It is thought that Scipione Borghese had a curtain over his painting, Sleeping Venus by Pennacchi Giriolama da Treviso.

It stretches the imagination to argue that this painting is not meant to be a showcase for the nude female form, as we (presumably male) viewers gaze in on Venus, goddess of love, as she sleeps, blanketless, her full form visible to us. That it likely illustrates a scene from an epic poem, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, is beside the point—it’s simply an excuse for the nudity.

Nudes were excused by the fact that they had been not only acceptable but praised in the classical world (ancient Athens and Rome being the exemplars of high culture for Renaissance thinkers). Naked men were of course also painted, usually as heroes or nearly naked martyrs. But ancient Athens was far more balanced in its admiration for the nude form—bisexuality was common and male patrons would as easily commission a statue of a man as they would a woman. Gods and goddesses were regularly shown nude or nearly so. The shift to a focus almost exclusively on women, when it came to nudity in art, is based on the desires of the almost exclusively male commissioners and purchasers of artwork.

While Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti famously sought accuracy of the male form by illegally dissecting corpses, to learn with scientific accuracy anatomical musculature, artists were content to depict naked women in a more casual manner. Michelangelo was so disinterested in the accuracy of his female nudes, for example the ignudi that decorate the Sistine Chapel ceiling, that he used men as his body models for them, simply adding breasts (far higher on the chest than breasts actually are) to indicate that the figures were female. Other artists distorted the nude female body for dramatic effect, as in La Grande Odalisque by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres (1814).

This painting was commissioned by Queen Caroline Murat of Naples, Napoleon’s sister, a reminder that women, too, admired the nude female form. Scholars have noted that Ingres distorted the anatomy of his subject, adding too many vertebrae and posing his nude, her arched back and buttocks facing the viewers as she twists her head around to make eye contact, in a manner impossible in a real person. This has been called misogynistic, turning a woman into putty to be molded as the male artist desires to cater to the male gaze. Perhaps, but the commissioner, in this unusual case, was a woman.

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Naked Women - Realistic Nudes

While idealized, hairless female nudes were acceptable through most of the European art historical tradition, realistic nudes were not. Pubic hair was the great divider. Jan van Eyck daringly painted upper tufts in his Adam and Even in Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432), and this was considered far too realistic, particularly within a holy context.

Depilation was common in the ancient world, in Egypt, Greece and beyond, among both men and women. There was an upper-class association with smooth, hairless skin. Sharpened seashells, flint and beeswax were used to remove hair. The Renaissance European fascination with the classical world, ancient Athens above all, meant that those classical traditions of beauty were revived among Renaissance aestheticians. Charles Darwin’s 19^th century theory of evolution would later associate body hair with “primitive ancestry and less developed forms,” but the precedent had been set millennia earlier that humans should have as little body hair as possible.

Depiction of female pubic hair then became the divider between idealized, acceptable naked forms and those deemed unacceptable, amoral, indecorous images. It was not so much that pubic hair shifted a painting into the realm of pornography. It was rather that it was seen as crass, base. Thus, there are very few female nudes in the history of fine art with body hair until the 20^th century.

Erotica

Where realistic female nudes shifted into erotica is difficult to say, for so much has to do with intentionality. The ancient Hellenistic marble Crouching Venus is hardly what one would consider erotica today. But ancient sources describe it as arousing viewers to the point that some masturbated while looking upon it. Was it carved by the original sculptor with the goal of sexual arousal? We do not know.

Women did not need to be portrayed in the nude to be used as erotic subjects. During the Rococo period (in 18^th century France), artists like Fragonard painted playful scenes of clothed (or mostly clothed) women whose sexuality was the true subject of the work. The Swing (1767) shows a fully clothed woman, in bright pink frilly costume and white stockings, in mid-swing in a forest glade, surrounded by trees and statues of putti, baby angels traditionally accompanying Venus. She is being pushed on the swing by one clothed gentleman while another reclines on the forest floor beneath her, catching a glimpse up her dress. He does not see her naked body, but in an era when women were elaborated clothed in many layers, “a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” to quote Cole Porter’s song, “Anything Goes”—it was written in 1934, when naked skin was still reserved for intimate moments as much as it was two centuries prior. In his The Bolt (1778), a woman clothed in her nightgown collapses into the embrace of a pajama-clad man, who catches her with one arm while sliding shut the bolt to lock her bedroom door with his other. It is not clear whether she is fainting from desire for a lover or in fear at an intruder, but the erotic–though sinister–charge is palpable either way.

Japanese and Indian art often included overt images of sexual congress. The Japanese term bijin-ga means “pictures of beautiful women” and these were often highly erotic, sometimes showing penetration. In Lovers, a 1789 woodblock print from a series called Poems of the Pillow by Kitigawa Utamaro, a woman wears a gown but we see her naked buttocks as she kisses a man, her nude leg wrapped around him.

In a darker sense, women were also eroticized when shown to be helpless, at the mercy of men. In The Proposition, a 1631 painting by Dutch artist Judith Leyster, a woman bent over needlework, her face illuminated in gentle candlelight, is propositioned by a man who looms over her. Both are clothed, but one can read a whole narrative into the moment—will she acquiesce? If he offers her money, is her need be such that she will submit to his will? As disturbing as this sounds now, it was not uncommon at the time, when women were almost always economically dependent on men.

A similar theme appears in a painting made two centuries later, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) by Eduard Manet. A woman bartender at a nightclub is shown facing forwards, but there is an enormous, wall-sized mirror behind her, reflecting the auditorium and the audience there enjoying a performance. We see the woman’s back, too, and the reflection of a man. One might assume that he is simply ordering a drink, but the forlorn expression on the woman’s face suggests that he is in fact propositioning her. Her visage conveys a whole subtext: this is a tiresome habit, men soliciting her, but she needs the money and does not feel that she can say no. It is a critique on the economic asymmetry of the time, sympathetic to women and an appeal to men not to take advantage or be presumptuous and act entitled.

Other examples of erotic nudes are far more obvious in their intention. Ancient Roman cities are full of mosaics and frescoes and statues of overt sexuality: phalluses and humans and satyrs with their nymphs engaged in (often elaborate) sexual acts. Giulio Romano painted a series of frescoes to decorate apartments in the papal residence in Rome entitled The Positions (sometimes called “The Sixteen Pleasures”): paintings of various sexual positions. These paintings are lost, but a printmaker called Marcantonio Raimondi made engravings based on them, which he printed, along with texts by Pietro Aretino. These have been described as the world’s first printed pornography. Romano considered them beautiful. They would likely have been deemed acceptable because they illustrated classical pagan myths: the couples in them were gods, goddesses, and the mortal objects of their affection.

Accusations of amorality crept in when the subjects were contemporary real people (as opposed to literary or mythical figures). Among the most influential artists to create overtly erotic paintings was Gustave Courbet. His 1866 Sleep shows a pair of naked women cuddling in bed, asleep but uncovered, presumably after a bout of lovemaking.

Items they were once wearing (hair clips, beads) and their blanket have been cast aside, leading us to understand that they were in a hurry to undress. As a Alexandra Tuschka noted, a scholar who combined psychology with art history,

“What was novel was that the artist dispensed with any legitimization for the obvious, lesbian erotic scene. We are not dealing here with a mythological or biblical scene, nor with a history painting, which would have lent the work a sublime glamor. For example, the pictorial theme of Diana and Calliste would have justified a lesbian love scene. Only the later addition of Sloth and Voluptuousness suggests we are dealing with two personifications. However, here neither seems clearly more voluptuous or sluggish than the other. But this epithet lends a moral intention to the work by alluding to the supposed depicted depravity.”

Nudity in itself, even of a couple in bed, was not necessarily erotic. Lucian Freud’s 1975 painting, Annie and Alice, shows two women, one pregnant, both naked and spooning in bed. But the painting style (chunky blocks of paint) and the appearance of the women are pointedly un-erotic, inverting expectations of a painting that, at first glance, might recall Sleep.

The red-haired woman in Sleep was Courbet’s muse and mistress, Irishwoman Joanna Hiffernan. Courbet had painted real people, in a realistic painting, in an overtly erotic manner intended to arouse as well as intrigue as a work of art. Art that arouses and is interesting as art need not be mutually exclusive. But this was early days for such brash boundary crashing. Contemporaries regarded this work, and indeed others he produced, as crass. But the painting was bought by the Ottoman Turkish ambassador to Paris, Khalil Bey, who owned a number of brilliant paintings that happened to feature naked women, and could therefore be considered erotica, as well, including The Turkish Bath by Ingres, which shows more than a dozen naked women lounging upon one another—a spectacle of flesh that Ingres painted as an octogenarian.

Courbet pushed the envelope even further in his iconic Origin of the World. It is a full frontal, legs spread, highly realistic view of the female anatomy, replete with pubic hair. It was commissioned in 1866 by the same Khalil Bey. The model here was Bey’s mistress, Constance Queniaux, a dancer with the Paris Opera. Courbet is deliberately using the female body as a confrontational tool. Instead of teasing the male viewer, being coy about it, he thrusts the female anatomy front and center. History has recorded the name of the mistress, but Courbet has veiled her identity by covering her with a sheet and cutting off the painting below the shoulder-line of the woman. She is known only by her pudendum. This could be read as misogynistic, but perhaps it is also sticking a middle finger up at men in Courbet’s time who maintained a mask of (Victorian) propriety while slinking around brothels. It was also commissioned by a man as a record of his lover, who posed for the painting, and it was originally meant for private viewing only. That it now hangs prominently in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, for millions of tourists to (often awkwardly) admire was not part of the original plan. Origin of the World is the second most-popular postcard sold at the Musee d’Orsay gift shop. It was created as an intimate work for one man and his guests. French writer Maxime du Camp was one of a select group who Bey invited to see the painting. He called it “the last word in realism.”

In an intriguing twist, in 2013 a Courbet specialist, Jean-Jacques Fernier, authenticated another painting by Courbet of the head and shoulders of a naked woman. The grooves made by the wooden framework and the lines of the canvas in this face and shoulders painting match the naked lower half featured in Origin of the World. It seems that this painting began with Constance’s face visible, but the canvas was cut at some point, severing the head from the body (and making the body a more universal presence, suddenly anonymous and literally faceless). History has not preserved the story behind this, but it raises the question of whether the presence of the face renders the painting less misogynistic or more. Or whether it is misogynistic at all, if Courbet intended to use it to shine a spotlight on the hypocritical approach to sexuality of so many of the men of his time? Could a painting of the female anatomy, distinct from the face of its owner, become a symbol of an idea, despite being “the last word in realism?” Is the work an act of misogyny or admiration? Objectification or empowerment? It is not clear and each viewer can decide for themselves.

Allegories

Allegorical personifications—images of a person meant to represent an idea—were more often female than male. It came down to linguistics. In Latin (and in all Romance languages—those descended from Latin), nouns are gendered, with most words ending in -a feminine and words ending in -us masculine. The Latin word for a concept that would be depicted, iustitia (Justice, giustizia in Italian) for instance, would provide the gender of the personification. Iustitia is a feminine word in Latin, therefore its embodiment in the form of a human should be female. However, men could also sometimes be allegories, depending on the grammar. Time, for instance, is traditionally shown as an old man with a long beard, wings and an hourglass. Time is shown as a man because the Latin word, tempus, is masculine.

The traditional ways in which allegories and symbols were depicted in art grew organically over time, with the invention of past generations carried on by those who learned from them. But the approach was codified in a 1603 book called Iconologia by Cesare Ripa. It functioned as a visual dictionary, with exemplary engravings of the traditional way to depict allegories. Artists from this time forward would refer to this when conceiving of their own artworks. So the tradition of Justice as a blindfolded woman with a sword in one hand and scales in the other, already canonical in the 17^th century, was further cemented as the proper way to depict the concept with the publication of this artistic handbook. Today, we have forgotten the tradition of “reading” symbols in art that was once universally taught among the educated classes and also evident to much of the working class. Ripa was neither an artist nor a scholar. He was actually a butler and “meat carver” for the household of a Roman cardinal, and he compiled what Martayan Lan has called “the most influential handbook of symbolic imagery of the early modern period” during what Ripa described as his “leisure time.” That’s relevant because it shows that this language of symbols was legible to a butler as much as it was to a professor.

It can sometimes be tricky to distinguish a person in an artwork as an allegorical personification from a character involved in the action. Allegorical figures usually have staple attributes (like the blindfold, sword and scales) and appear to be removed from the action around them. They are not actively present but are merely indicating an idea about the action around them. So, while the woman at the front of Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix (1830) could well be considered a fighter in the midst of the fray, and she appears to be physically present within the painted world of the other figures. She is stepping on the ground, a supplicant in a red bandana and blue shirt looks up at her, and she looks back over her shoulder at the crowd of fellow freedom fighters. However, logic and a bit of historical knowledge suggest that she is not actually a historical woman leading a battle charge. She is an allegory.

She also isn’t dressed for the occasion, with her dress having been positioned down below her breasts, exposing them. She is, in fact, meant to represent the concept of Liberty (the Latin being libertas, a feminine gendered word). This has ancient origins—Libertas was the ancient Roman goddess of Liberty or Freedom, and she had a temple dedicated to her in Rome. The concept of “lady liberty” and indeed the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are descended from this tradition. Libertas, the goddess, was traditionally shown wearing a pileus, a special hat given to slaves in ancient Rome when they were set free—and Liberty in the Delacroix painting wears a hat reminiscent of it. By taking this goddess as the concept of Liberty and placing in her hand a French flag, Delacroix conveys the idea that it is a divine right to fight for one’s freedom, and the militia rallied behind her are fighting to free France. Delacroix has shown her as visibly present, seen by at least one of the figures in the painting, but not among the actual participants in the historical moment depicted. Liberty was present conceptually.

There are also women in art who are not direct allegorical personifications but whose positioning or behavior is symbolic of an idea or theme.

Johannes Vermeer was a great master of this. The women in his paintings are likely portraits of those in his circle and they are usually the driving engine of some subtle plot that we, the viewers, are meant to untangle and interpret. There are encoded hidden messages, the picture acting as a visual puzzle, but the beauty of the pictures is the first reason for us to engage with them. Girl with a Pearl Earring may have inspired a novel, but we must use a novelist’s imagination to impose a narrative onto the scene, which otherwise shows only a girl looking over her shoulder against a black background. We are invited to “read” into the girl’s expression, but we’re given very little in terms of clues. Contrast this to Woman Holding a Balance (1664), in which Vermeer provides an array of clues as to what the heroine is thinking.

The woman holds a scale, standing beside a jewelry box. The scale is depicted as moving, code for a decision being made. In case we weren’t sure what the decision was, Vermeer has also provided a painting of the Last Judgment on the wall behind the woman–suggesting the theme lurking in the background, about how you live your life and where you will spend your afterlife. The woman is intended by him to be a vessel through which we viewers should examine our own relationship with worldly pleasures (riches, jewelry) and spiritual fulfillment that comes in the afterlife.

Women’s bodies have long been battlegrounds, fought over and policed by men. We see this with the 2022 overturning of Roe vs Wade, making abortion illegal in the United States, and with laws limiting what women can do, and how they should behave, in some fundamentalist cultures. Women are often subject to the impossible expectation of being both virginal and saintly mothers, as well as willing, erotic lovers. All of this is projected by men onto women, a wholly unfair and destructive superstructure that has been in place for millennia in most of the world’s cultures.

Art has, unfortunately, played a role in maintaining this dynamic, by presenting women as either saints or objects of lust. When they are neither, they have often been symbols, which in its own way objectifies them. Portraits remain one of the few ways in which women can escape becoming symbols. One wonders how the story of women portrayed in artworks might have changed had women been the primary audience for the art–the commissioners, patrons and collectors? In a later chapter, we’ll look at women as patrons and collectors, but what women wanted from art seems to have always coincided with what the rest of the (mostly male) art market was after.

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^[1] https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/from-life-history-of-life-drawing-annette-wickham

^[2] Representation of brown and Black bodies is still something that the artworld is wrestling with today, out of scope of this book but an important topic.

^[3] Of course not all mothers are women, as fact easily stated today but not part of the discourse historically.

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What Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential did for the world of chefs and restaurants, Making It does for the art world.

Making It is a gonzo memoir of an established artist crossed with objective advice, tips and tricks fleshed out by a best-selling art historian and Pulitzer finalist writer on art. It peels back the shroud and reveals the highs and struggles in the life and career of a working artist.

Specifically aimed at aspiring artists and art students, it will be of interest to anyone who wants to know what it is like to have an artist’s-eye-view of the art world, asking the tough and often glossed-over questions that rising artists inevitably have, not only about the creative process, but about navigating the turbulent waters of the social, professional, academic, critical, museum and trade elements of a career as a visual artist.

How best to deal with the abundance of alcohol, drugs and sex while wire-walking your own artistic dilemmas? How can an artist launch his or her career and help it flourish? What’s it like to achieve every artist’s dream, including showing at the Venice Biennale? What does it really mean to "make it" and how can you maintain your groove once you’ve arrived?

All these questions and more are answered in this combination tell-all memoir and how-to manual for rising artists and anyone wanting a behind-the-scenes tour of what it’s like to be an artist.

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Discover anew the herstory of art that Publishers Weekly calls "illuminating" and Foreword Reviews calls "spirited" for an enlightening art history read.

How many female artists can you name? Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marina Abramovic? How about female artists who lived prior to the Modern era? Maybe Artemisia Gentileschi and then… even a regular museum-goer might run out of steam. What about female curators, critics, patrons, collectors, muses, models and art influencers?

This book provides a 360 degree look at the role, influence, and empowerment of women through art—including women artists, but going beyond those who have taken up a brush or a chisel. In 1971, Linda Nochlin published a famous essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” This book responds to it by showing that not only have there been scores of great women artists throughout history, but that great women have shaped the story of art. The result is a book that sheds light on the art world in a very new way, finally celebrating the great women artists and influencers who deserve to be much better known. The entire history of art can be told as a herstory of art.

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"Historian Charney tracks the eventful life of the Mona Lisa in this rollicking account.... The result is both a thrilling tale of true crime and a rigorous work of art history." — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

From the artwork to its theft and role in popular culture, the critically-acclaimed book The Thefts of the Mona Lisa (Foreword Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Starred Review, Booklist, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews) provides the complete story of this work of art, as written by a bestselling, Pulitzer finalist author.

Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, called the Mona Lisa, is without doubt the world’s most famous painting. It achieved its fame not only because it is a remarkable example of Renaissance portraiture, created by an acclaimed artistic and scientific genius, but because of its criminal history. The Mona Lisa (also called La Gioconda or La Joconde) was stolen on 21 August 1911 by an Italian, Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia was under the mistaken impression that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Italy during the Napoleonic era, and he wished to take back for Italy one of his country’s greatest treasures. His successful theft of the painting from the Louvre, the farcical manhunt that followed, and Peruggia’s subsequent trial in Florence were highly publicized, sparking the attention of the international media, and catapulting an already admired painting into stratospheric heights of fame. This book reveals the art and criminal history of the Mona Lisa.

Charney examines the criminal biography of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with a focus on separating fact from fiction in the story of what is not only the most famous art heist in history, but which is the single most famous theft of all time. In the process he delves into Leonardo’s creation of the Mona Lisa, discusses why it is so famous, and investigates two other events in its history of theft and renown. First, it examines the so-called “affaire des statuettes,” in which Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were arrested under suspicion of involvement in the theft of the Mona Lisa. Second, there has long been a question as to whether the Nazis stole the Mona Lisa during the Second World War—a question that this book seeks to resolve.

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True tales of lost art, built around case studies of famous works, their creators, and stories of disappearance and recovery

From the bestselling author of The Art of Forgery comes this dynamic narrative that tells the fascinating stories of artworks stolen, looted, or destroyed in war, accidentally demolished or discarded, lost at sea or in natural disasters, or attacked by iconoclasts or vandals; works that were intentionally temporal, knowingly destroyed by the artists themselves or their patrons, covered over with paint or plaster, or recycled for their materials. An exciting read that spans the centuries and the continents.

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"It’s an in-depth look at varied time periods and artists, which readers interested in gossip, drama, or art history will enjoy." Library Journal, Starred Review

Scandal, shock and rivalry all have negative connotations, don’t they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin.

But these potentially disastrous “negatives” can and have spurred the world of fine art to new heights. A look at the history of art tells us that rivalries have, in fact, not only benefited the course of art, from ancient times to the present, but have also helped shape our narrative of art, lending it a sense of drama that it might otherwise lack, and therefore drawing the interest of a public who might not be drawn to the objects alone. There would be no Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo had rival Raphael not tricked the pope into assigning him the commission, certain that Michelangelo, who had never before worked with frescoes, would botch the job and become a laughing stock.

Scandal and shock have proven to be powerful weapons when harnessed and wielded willfully and well. That scandal is good for exposure has been so obviously the case that many artists have courted it intentionally, which we will define as shock: intentionally overturning expectations of the majority in a way that traditionalist find dismaying or upsetting, but which a certain minority avant-garde find exciting. From Damien Hirst presenting the public with a shark embalmed in formaldehyde and entombed in a glass case to Marcel Duchamp trying to convince the art community that a urinal is a great sculpture shock has been a key promotional tool.

The Devil in the Gallery is a guided tour of the history of art through it scandals, rivalries, and shocking acts, each of which resulted in a positive step forward for art in general and, in most cases, for the careers of the artists in question. In addition to telling dozens of stories, lavishly illustrated in full color, of such dramatic moments and arguing how they not only affected the history of art but affected it for the better, we will also examine the proactive role of the recipients of these intentionally dramatic actions: The art historians, the critics and even you, the general public.

The Devil likes to lurk in dark corners of the art world, morphing into many forms.

Let us shed light upon him.

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The Art of Forgery: The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers explores the stories, dramas and human intrigues surrounding the world's most famous forgeries - investigating the motivations of the artists and criminals who have faked great works of art, and in doing so conned the public and the art establishment alike.

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The disappearance of a priceless Caravaggio in Rome and the famous 'White on White' by Russian painter Kasimir Malevich in Paris heralds the start of a series of seemingly unconnected art crimes across Europe. Fitting the pieces together as they follow a trail of bluffs and double-bluffs, bizarre clues and intellectual puzzles, Inspector Jean-Jacques Bizot in Paris and Harry Wickenden of Scotland Yard come to realize that what at first appears a spate of random thefts is all part of a single master plan, and that they are being led ever deeper into a baffling conspiracy.

This fiendishly clever debut thriller takes us behind the scenes of the elite fine art world of auction houses, academia and museums to offer a fascinating view of art history, witty, fast-paced dialogue and an ever-surprising plot that twists its way from Rome to Paris to London and back again.

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Art theft has risen from an occasional event involving the trophies of the wealthy and elite, into a multi-billion-dollar annual criminal industry, run almost entirely by organized crime groups, and a significant funding source for terrorism. It has been listed among the highest-grossing criminal trades worldwide. When ARCA (the Association for Research into Crimes against Art) began, the media and the general public knew very little about art crime. Thanks in part to its efforts, the world is better-informed than ever, but there is still much to surprise and engage, and the stories of art crime never fail to intrigue.

The book is organized into five parts:

• Fraud and Forgery

• Law, Policing, and Policy

• Art, Crime, and Popular Culture

• Theft and Security, and

• War, Conflict, and Art.

This book is the latest on art crime by the founder of ARCA, Dr. Noah Charney, widely considered the world's leading authority on the history of art crime. His work on the subject has been included in his best-selling, Pulitzer-nominated books and articles for major publications, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Observer, Salon and many others.

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"Brimming with examples from across the artistic spectrum, this is the perfect primer to hook future art enthusiasts." Publishers Weekly

Interested in art but feel under-informed? Curious but afraid you might not “get” it? Already a fan and wishing to immerse yourself in a fun, engaging, informative and informed read that will refresh and top up your Art History 101 and Introduction to Art courses from college?

The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know about Art in a Dozen Masterpieces avoids the common approach of throwing hundreds of images at a reader and expecting them to learn from and memorize them all.

Instead, the book will guide its readers through a brief series of masterpieces of Western art—from cave paintings to sharks in formaldehyde. This book twelve chapters teach readers about art, the art trade, and art history in a thorough (though concise) fashion.

Each chapter is linked to one notable masterpiece, with references to others, giving readers a fixed, digestible number of objects that they will get to know in depth, and which they can use as a lens to understand the thousands of other, related objects that they might encounter in the future.

Museums can be daunting, and art presents a strange new language, one that certainly intrigues but is often intimidating and foreign. This book, written by one of the world’s best-known art historians uses entertaining stories to break down intimidating barriers and invites readers of all ages for a one-stop immersion into art.