A major figure in the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s, the renowned Italian artist Giuseppe Penone is known for his exploration of the relationship between art and the natural world in a body of work that includes sculpture, performance, works on paper, and even garden design. His first works in porcelain, the exquisite disks presented here draw attention to the moment of touch—the convergence of surface and skin—that underpins so much of his work. Published to accompany The Frick Collection, New York’s temporary installation of works by Penone, this new volume comprises eleven porcelain disks that the artist made during his 2013 residency at the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres, the influential porcelain factory founded in the 18th century. A continuation of his Propagazioni (Propagations) series, begun in 1995, which includes various media, each disk bears the imprint of one of the artist’s fingertips. One of them is in gold, its imprint a variation on the artist’s index finger. Never before presented to the public, the installation of the disks in a gallery adjacent to the Frick’s early Italian paintings on gold grounds and the porcelain room kindles a rich artistic dialogue with both porcelain and gold.

This beautiful publication presents for the first time the Eveillard Gift of drawings to The Frick Collection, the most important gift of drawings and pastels in its history. It accompanies an exhibition at the Frick and includes a catalogue of the works and commentaries by noted scholars. Twenty-six works of art promised to The Frick Collection by Elizabeth and Jean-Marie Eveillard dramatically advance the museum's commitment to the research and display of European drawings. Included in this transformative gift from two longtime supporters of the Frick are exquisite drawings, pastels, prints, and one oil sketch by Francois Boucher, Gustave Caillebotte, Edgar Degas, Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Thomas Lawrence, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, John Singer Sargent, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others. The works include figurative sketches, independent studies, portraits, and landscape scenes, each either deepening the museum's celebrated holdings or bringing the work of an artist who is not face=Calibri>- but should be - represented in the collection. This lavishly illustrated publication, which accompanies an exhibition at the Frick, includes a catalogue of the works, as well as comprehensive commentaries on each of promised gifts written by noted scholars in their field.

Various identities for the richly dressed, contemplative young man in this portrait have been proposed but none with any certainty. The mood of the subject and the diffused, gentle play of light over the broadly painted surfaces are strongly reminiscent of Titian’s Venetian contemporary Giorgione. In many ways, the Frick portrait epitomizes a new tendency in Italian Renaissance portraiture in which the depiction is intended less as a description of the sitter than as an encounter with them. A rich contribution by artist Elizabeth Peyton accompanies an illuminating essay by Giulio Dalvit which addresses the many questions of provenance, chronology, attribution and of who this mysterious young man might be.