Ockman has taken an unexpected, but for me inspired decision, to introduce a last chapter devoted to the works of Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith that can be seen as parodying and thus subverting Ingres-like constructions of women's bodies and which, more importantly, offer ways of resisting the negative meanings construed for them. Two chapters of the book have already appeared as articles in learned journals. Each chapter could be enjoyed separately. Yet there is a concern in the book with broad overarching issues of sexuality that have been differently addressed in the discourse surrounding Ingres's work. These are the object of Ockman's researches and consideration and they give the book coherence. Her sense of anger, frustration, and determination to write a 'corrective' work come through powerfully at the end of chapter five as she seeks to shed the disturbing compulsions and fears of twentieth-century 'masculine' writing that make the association between women's bodies and the deformed or bestial seem unproblematic. Her opposition to binary thought may be occasionally pushed a step too far, as in the identification of the young Ingres in his early Self-Portrait with the figure ofBriseis in Achilles receiving the Ambassadors of Agamemnon; but I am grateful for the anger and the frustration. They have impelled the author to problematise the whole question of reception and of changing perceptions of Ingres's work and to invite the reader not only the feminist reader to look, with a different understanding of pleasure and distaste, at Ingres's eroticized bodies. This learned, stimulating book is also immensely enjoyable, lucidly written, beautifully produced and illustrated, and offers a new feminist challenge to received ideas on Ingres and essentialist notions of sexual differ-