Phillips and Bear’s volume about history painting, past and present, opens with an epigraphical quotation from the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer: “History is only present to us in light of our future” (3). The choice is apt. With Gadamer in tow, Phillips and Bear, too, collapse time through their rhetorical framing and commitment to uniting a remarkably wide range of visual material. In their view, the concepts of narrative and history have dictated and delimited understandings of the genre. By revisiting these frameworks, they suggest that history painting in fact escapes definition—and that this elusive quality has long enhanced its appeal to artists and audiences alike.

What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? is not only unprecedented in its timespan, beginning in the fifteenth century and ending in the twenty-first. Few macro-studies and even fewer transnational works about history painting as a genre exist.1 Its position atop...

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