Portraits in fiction

She looks at the way writers use portraits to conjure up the past, as in Ford Madox Ford´s The Fifth Queen and Virginia Woolf´s Orlando. She explores they erotic use, the idea of painting as a sexual act, full of danger. And she examines the creation of ficcional portrait painters by writers like Balzac and Zola, whose writing was closely linked, in diferent ways to the art of Cézanne.