Elizabeth Rodini is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Previously she founded the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University, USA, where she was Teaching Professor in the History of Art.

From time to time a book will inspire us more than most, or convince us that the direction our own thinking has recently taken is worthwhile, or simply engage us in a thought-provoking historical story that is very well-told. Elizabeth Rodini, a distinguished art historian based in Rome, has achieved all this and more with her latest book.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements1. Pursuing a Portrait: Subject, Object, Method2. In Circulation: Courtly Exchange and the Discourse of Objects3. Encounters: Artist, Subject, Audiences, and the Matter of Truth in Painting4. History, Memory, and the Trails from Istanbul to Venice5. Self and Other: Excavating the Orientalist Imagination 6. Constructing Authenticity: Restoration, Provenance, and Reproduction7. To London? Emerging Debates over Cultural Patrimony8. Art, History, or Heirloom? Classifying Gentile’s Portrait in the Twentieth Century9. Return to Istanbul: Situating Mehmed’s Image Today

Elizabeth Rodini is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Previously she founded the Program in Museums and Society at Johns Hopkins University, USA, where she was Teaching Professor in the History of Art.

From time to time a book will inspire us more than most, or convince us that the direction our own thinking has recently taken is worthwhile, or simply engage us in a thought-provoking historical story that is very well-told. Elizabeth Rodini, a distinguished art historian based in Rome, has achieved all this and more with her latest book.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements1. Pursuing a Portrait: Subject, Object, Method2. In Circulation: Courtly Exchange and the Discourse of Objects3. Encounters: Artist, Subject, Audiences, and the Matter of Truth in Painting4. History, Memory, and the Trails from Istanbul to Venice5. Self and Other: Excavating the Orientalist Imagination 6. Constructing Authenticity: Restoration, Provenance, and Reproduction7. To London? Emerging Debates over Cultural Patrimony8. Art, History, or Heirloom? Classifying Gentile’s Portrait in the Twentieth Century9. Return to Istanbul: Situating Mehmed’s Image Today