PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Chriscinda Henry is Associate Professor of Art History at McGill University.
Playful Pictures provides a rich and welcome study of secular Venetian domestic paintings, many of which are familiar to art historians but have not been connected fully to the literary, social, and performative worlds of Venetian culture. Henry brings a well-researched interdisciplinary perspective and vividly re-creates the viewing contexts for these paintings. -Jodi Cranston, author of Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice Playful Pictures addresses a lingering gap in our understanding of a significant innovation: secular pictures, often open-ended, produced for the home in Renaissance Venice at the end of the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries and described by contemporaries as delitie (delights). Henry takes this term seriously, and readers are rewarded for this insight as she reinserts a range of famous to lesser-known works into their shared performative context in the domestic sphere. -Tracy E. Cooper, author of Palladio's Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic
