The eleven essays in this volume stem from a 2014 conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art on uses of the term ad vivum and its vernacular cognates (from life, al vivo, au vif, nach dem Leben, and naar het leven) across the early modern period in Europe. The volume usefully brings together material from England, Italy, France, and Germany, though there is a particular emphasis on the concept's use in the Low Countries, where notions of ad vivum were influentially elaborated in Karel van Mander's Het Schilder-boeck (1604). Case-study essays examine how ad vivum was used to qualify images and artworks in representational contexts as varied as botanical and anatomical illustration, city views, panel painting, pedagogy, and religious devotion. Arranged chronologically, the contributions chart shifts and overlaps in the functions of the term as a guarantor of reliable representation as well as an indicator of lifelikeness or enlivenment, and as a prompt toward particular modes of viewing and knowing. Ad vivum thus emerges as a textual supplement that negotiated between claims by and about images, on the one hand, and anxieties about human mediation in their making and reception, on the other.

The editors raise two questions that thread through the contributions: what is the “life” referenced in ad vivum, and what roles did the artist play in relation to ad vivum representation? As a pendant to their introduction, Robert Felfe's essay examines the historiography of the term and gives an overview of the main image types in which it had purchase: portraits, landscapes, naturalia, and castings and prints from nature. Several essays address how ad vivum claims, especially in books and prints, lent authority to visual strategies used to convey emergent and contested knowledge. Pieter Martens shows how ad vivum statements bolstered the credibility and persuasiveness of Netherlandish siege prints—conflations of various descriptive vantage points on a city and narrative moments in its military assailment—while Sachiko Kusukawa makes a similar case for the images in Latin works of natural history published between 1520 and 1560. This authority-lending function would persist: ad vivum claims in the 1685 Anatomia Humani Corporis attest not only to careful renderings of the body's materiality and interior space, as Mechthild Fend argues, but also to the plausibility of iconographic tropes of dissection at a moment when microscopy was disrupting the interplay of hand and eye that had hitherto afforded reliable knowledge. By the late seventeenth century, concerns over credibility shifted toward ones of accuracy. José Beltrán shows that au naturel, a French translation of ad vivum, belonged to a mode of knowledge making and exchange among natural historians premised on highly accurate representations of observable particulars in graphic as well as poetic and textual forms. Richard Mulholland argues that, in the context of Linnaean taxonomy and emergent theories of color, ad vivum asserted that eighteenth-century botanical images were accurately hand colored.

Other essays approach the concept from the perspective of enlivenment. Use of au vif to describe various Burgundian court arts establishes color, spatial presence, and animation as central to fifteenth-century Netherlandish visual culture, which, Noa Turel argues, engendered a pictorial realism that was not a symptom of empiricist sensibilities but their precursor. Animation proves central too, according to Carla Benzan, at the Sacro Monte of Varallo. The use of al vivo and da vivo effetto to describe the life-sized polychrome sculptures and to encourage a devotion of enlivenment kept acts of representation and piety in productive tension. Similarly, Daan van Heesch shows that an ad vivum statement added to an unusual drawing of Jerusalem—likely by an armchair pilgrim—functions not as a claim for credible representation but to suggest a significant relationship between annotator and object. Finally, Eleanor Chan argues that notions of enlivenment, animation, and the kinesthetic were critical to emergent visual systems and discourses for mathematics and geometry, particularly those oriented toward practical pedagogy, as seen in fencing manuals, and toward artisanal applications more broadly.

While an essay dedicated to ad vivum's use in the sphere of portraiture might have rounded out the volume, the editors and contributors must be commended for this provocative collection of focused scholarship that refreshes our understanding of a pivotal term for early modern art theory.