Close Reading puts the artwork in the center of concentrated art-historical interpretations programmatically. Seventy-two international authors each analyze one work of architecture, sculpture, painting, drawing, or graphic work, from Albrecht Durer and Matthias Grunewald, to Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi, Michelangelo, and Nicolas Poussin, Francesco Borromini, and Fischer von Erlach, to Oskar Kokoschka and Shirin Neshat. They pursue various methodological approaches, address the creation context or questions regarding dating and attribution, the history of a collection, provenance, and restoration, or dedicate themselves to relationships between picture and text as well as to iconographic, iconological, and image-theory aspects.