"The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy" (1771-72) is a great conversation-piece portrait that includes a significant historical detail: Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, the only two women among the nearly 40 Academicians, are represented as portraits hanging on the wall, since women couldn't be present in the painting's setting, a studio with nude male models.
In the first decades of Rembrandt's career (between 1625 and 1642), he and other painters (whether assistants or pupils) produced a great many history pieces, portraits, and tronies (single heads or busts not considered to be portraits but which have other meanings and functions).
His last piece, a portrait of a Tunisian Islamist, captured the quest for a synthesis of faith and democracy at the heart of Arab transformations.
This swath of the book is an affecting set piece, a portrait of a young mother who might have been written by Alice Munro: finding herself alone with a distant husband, she "resigned herself to a marriage of no hope" and devoted herself to raising her kids.
Perhaps the most surprising piece in "Portrait Inside My Head" is cast as a long letter to an editor on why, after one unpleasant try, he refuses to read any more of the bitter, misanthropic fiction of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard.
The Jesuit Father Arnall's shocking set piece dominates Portrait's third chapter and infects Stephen Dedalus's imagination with a litany of damnations so unrelenting (How long is eternity? How much of hell can we even imagine?) the reader feels subjected to a sort of verbally-induced derangement.
The most renowned pieces are "Portrait of Nancy Cunard," a wood sculpture made by Constantin Brancusi in the 1920's that was insured recently for $12 million, and Alberto Giacometti's bronze "Chariot" from 1950, with a similar valuation.
His stunning brush-and-ink piece "Self-Portrait" (1938) shows his passion for bold line and decisive shadow, while the screen print "Nocturne" (1942) holds an alluring, fantastical, dreamlike quality not unlike the more whimsical prints of Joan Miro.
Arnold, 52, learned the sculptural aspects of his art by apprenticing himself to master stone carvers in Pietrasanta, near the famous quarries of Carrera in Italy, creating marble Madonnas, altar pieces and portrait busts.
