In Drawing and the Senses, Caroline Fowler seamlessly interweaves her research about artistic practice, philosophy, and print culture in early modern Europe. The book consists of an introduction, three chapters, and an epilogue that render the discussion both interesting and accessible in scope. Fowler immediately poses the question of why numerous seventeenth-century artists incorporated representations of bodily fragments into their printed drawing books. Examining books by Odoardo Fialetti, Luca Ciamberlano, and Abraham Bloemaert, Fowler relates these artists’ use of eyes, ears, and mouths to contemporary print culture and to an interest in antique fragments, as well as to seventeenth-century perceptions of the senses as means of understanding oneself in relation to the world and to God.

Chapter 1 goes back in time to consider Albrecht Dürer's construction of the ideal figure using geometry and line, and to explore fifteenth-century conceptions of the imagination as “a highly theorized part of the cognitive faculties known as the internal senses, which acted as the gateways between the external organs—eyes, ears, tongue—and the soul” (41). The author notes the influence of Dürer's treatise on proportion for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pedagogical works, but remarks that later artists simplified his ideas, focusing more on a sensory tradition of pedagogy. Chapter 2 reflects on the expressive effect of Jusepe de Ribera's studies of mouths and eyes and suggests that they go beyond a didactic function to relate to contemporary ideas about the five senses. It is interesting, as Fowler points out, that both Ciamberlano's and Bloemaert's prints show hands in movement in order to portray the sense of touch. Fowler develops a parallel between an engraved impression and an idea developed in the artist's mind—depicted as a sort of tabula rasa by Ribera in his print of The Poet, which was in fact included in printed drawing books. Chapter 3 is a fascinating examination of the historical connections made between the act of drawing and the act of longing for an absent figure (as recounted by Plato and repeated by Joachim von Sandrart), as well as between drawing books and Charles Le Brun's interest in defining legible passions. It is initially difficult to follow Fowler's discussion of personifications of the figure Caritas and the figure's relationship to drawing books. However, Fowler's examination of the Apostles’ varied emotional responses in Leonardo's Last Supper, and her characterization of their influence on seventeenth-century studies of Apostles’ heads—including those by Jan Lievens and Peter Paul Rubens—as “an ideal way to study and imagine the passions as united under the guiding passion of love and caritas,” strengthens this connection (138). Fowler brings together several stimulating ideas about the viewer's role, artistic creation, and early modern notions of the passions as being contagious (as described by Gian Paolo Lomazzo). It would have been interesting to learn more about Le Brun's theories on the passions, and perhaps Fowler could have returned full circle to Fialetti and Ciamberlano through a discussion of the Carracci's influence and their interest in affetti—but these are minor points. The epilogue discusses the physician Giovanni Morelli's study of painted body parts as clues revealing the hand of a particular artist, and serves as a summary consideration of how fragments, connoisseurship, the senses, memory, and pedagogy were thought about in relation to one another in varying ways.

Drawing and the Senses differs in approach from earlier scholarly writings about drawing books, such as Chittima Amornpichetkul's “Seventeenth-Century Italian Drawing Books: Their Origin and Development,” in Children of Mercury: The Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1984), and David Rosand's seminal Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (2002). This volume is a useful resource for scholars, and makes an important contribution to discussions of the practice of drawing, drawing books, and print culture in early modern Europe.