Petrus Christus

Petrus Christus: His Place in Fifteenth-Century Flemish Painting by Joel M Upton, 114 pages

Petrus Christus, long unknown, has typically been regarded as entirely inferior to the great geniuses of fifteenth century Flanders, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.  Provocatively, Joel Upton argues that Christus' works are personally engaging in a way that those of the better known artists of the previous generation were not, reflecting the inward turn of the devotio moderna.

Books are seemingly unavoidably commercial products, and as such economic considerations dictate their form.  Even so, it is a shame when such an intriguing and well-developed argument is accompanied by black and white reproductions of the works it discusses.