Playful Pictures

“Henry’s book makes an important contribution to scholarship on the history of collecting and display as an activity related to, but distinct from, patronage. And it conveys a substantive interdisciplinary look at early modern Venetian secular images, seen through the lens of contemporaneous developments in literature, music and theatre, which up to this point have been studied in isolation from one another.”

—Susan Nalezyty Journal of the History of Collections

“Henry helps readers think about the role of pictures and their construction or reflection of sex and gender, courtship, love triangles, modes of behavior, and relations to other art forms. She assembles an array of paintings often discussed in isolation and renders them much richer together in the complex web of Venetian cultural experience. Though aimed at an academic audience, this book will reward all serious readers. The many familiar works Henry looks at become new again through their enhanced associations.”

—A. V. Coonin Choice

“Well-written and learned, the book succeeds in synthesising a vast literature devoted to the cabinet paintings of the late quattrocento and first half of the cinquecento, convincingly setting them into their specifically Venetian cultural milieu.”

—James Jewitt Burlington Magazine

“Playful Pictures is a study in copiousness, skillfully bringing together a large number of sources, including original archival research, and describing a matrix of intertwined cultural phenomena.”

—Anna Christine Swartwood House Renaissance and Reformation

“Just as Henry notes that Carlo Ridolfi, the seventeenth-century art critic and biographer, called pictures ‘delights of the home,’ so too Henry’s book delights as it engages readers and advances understandings of the Renaissance and Venice.”

—Kristin Love Huffman Renaissance Quarterly

“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