Paul Gauguin's "Genesis of a Picture," his explanation of Mana'o Tupapa'u, can be seen as a polemical intervention into the market of interpretations. But it is also an indirectly illuminating account of the creative process that it claims to describe.

Going back meant going forward beyond illusionism, not only to neoclassical artists at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries but to the once admired and now almost forgotten Nazarene painters. The decline in their reputation raises questions about the influence of art history and the ideologies it embodies in determining how—and even if—works of art will be viewed.

In the second half of the 19th century several Russian artists marked by the critical spirit of the Nihilist generation of the 1860s, as well as by contemporary Western criticism of religion, began to focus on an aspect of Christ traditionally neglected in orthodox painting—his manhood.

This article examines the criticism and acceptance of sculpture by female artists through an analysis of the history and development of Marcello's Pythia, an early Symbolist sculpture located, since 1875, inside Charles Garnier's Opéra.