Thomas Craven sifts through and unearths the people who sat, posed, lived with, loved and occasionally tormented the artists who represented them.

Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian through Rembrandt, Goya, Blake, Turner and others, the book treats the model as part of the machinery of image-making rather than as anonymous material disappearing behind the finished work.

Written in the brisk, personality-driven manner of mid-century popular art history, Craven mixes biography, anecdote and visual criticism, with attention to the traffic between physical bodies and artistic ideals: how a face becomes a type, a lover becomes an allegory, or an ordinary sitter is transformed into something apparently universal. Its assumptions about sex, beauty and artistic genius are very much of its era, which now makes the book interesting in two directions at once — as accessible art history, and as a document of how artists and models were culturally imagined in 1949. Illustrated with 34 full-page reproductions.

Pocket Books, New York, 1949. First Pocket Book edition, first printing. Paperback. Moderate rubbing, creasing and edge wear to covers; vintage Melbourne bookseller label to title page; internally sound with age toning.