Author portraits are the most common type of figural illustration in Greek manuscripts. The vast majority of them depict the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Being readily comparable to one another, such images illustrate the stylistic development of Byzantine painting. In addition, they often contain details which throw light on elements of Byzantine material culture such as writing utensils, lamps, domestic furniture, etc. This corpus offers catalogue descriptions of all evangelist portraits that survived from the Middle Byzantine period, i.e. from the mid-ninth to mid-thirteenth century. Items are arranged in roughly chronological order and are grouped according to common compositional types: readers will thus be able to trace iconographic similarities by going through a series of adjacent entries and to distinguish period styles by browsing through larger blocks of entries. The book thus provides, in effect, a selective survey of middle-Byzantine painting. A surprisingly large number of Byzantine evangelists portraits remain unpublished: seventy-five of the miniatures reproduced in this volume have never appeared in print before.

As we approach the bicentennial, in 2017, of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, there is considerable debate and confusion as to what he may, or may not have, contributed to American life and culture. Almost every American has heard of Thoreau, but only a few are aware that he was deeply engaged with most of the important issues of his day, from slavery to "Manifest Destiny" and the rights of the individual in a democratic society. Many of these issues are still affecting us today, as we move toward the second quarter of the twenty-first century. By studying how various American artists have chosen to portray Thoreau over the years since the publication of Walden in 1854, we can gain a clear understanding of how he has been interpreted (or misinterpreted) throughout the years since his death in 1862. But along the way, we might also find something useful, for our times, in the insights that Thoreau gained as he wrestled with the most urgent problems being experienced by American society in his day.

About Red Social Red Social by Alejandro Garcia-Lemos and Cynthia Boiter is a visual and literary art book that evolved from a 2012 art exhibition of work by Garcia-Lemos at the Goodall Gallery at Columbia College in Columbia, SC. The title of the book and exhibition, Red Social, translates to Social Network in Garcia-Lemos's native Spanish. As he approached this body of work, which is made up of 24 unique portraits, Garcia-Lemos who is a native of Bogota, Colombia, focused on relationship-building and the community of fellow artists and arts lovers he had become enmeshed in in his new home of Columbia, SC. The sitters for each portrait, almost all of whom were close members of his newly formed community, were asked to bring symbolic icons for their sitting and many went so far as to collaborate on their specific portraits. (Several fellow-artists made actual artistic contributions to their portraits.) "The creative space that opened during these sessions provided an atmosphere of candor which mimicked that of the therapist," the artist says. "I came to realize the importance of a comfort level between the artist and subject and I chose people who have been supportive of me and are truly friends and family." Once the series was complete and had been exhibited, Garcia-Lemos hoped to continue in the collaborative spirit so he approached local writer and editor, Cynthia Boiter. It was his idea to have Boiter create short fictional stories about the characters in the portraits-whether she was personally familiar with the characters or not-based on nothing but the title of the portrait and the various icons represented. Boiter says that, "Many of the friends about whom I wrote had to become strangers before they could become subjects about whose inner lives-their worries, fantasies, and insecurities-I could write. But as unconnected as these stories are to the portrait models who inspired them, they are still real stories, I'm sure, that belong to someone else out there." The result is a fascinating reverse-process of illustration. Based upon Garcia-Lemos's paintings, Boiter uses fiction to illustrate the portrait subjects. Each piece of short fiction-few are over 250 words in length-tells the tale of a unique individual with subject matters ranging from love to loss to issues of gender roles, new roles, and throwing off the roles society attempts to impose upon all of us.

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.