"...this is a compelling book. Solidly researched and cogently argued, it provides an important corrective to the lacuna of scholarship on sculpted portrait busts in the modern era and stands as an excellent complement to recent publications on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraiture"Heather Belnap Jensen, Brigham Young University, in H-France 16.15, 2016(full review text: http://www.h-france.net/vol16reviews/vol16no15jensen.pdf)"The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century offers fresh and game-changing insights into the ways the conventions of the sculpted portrait reflected shifting values in the socio-political sphere of late eighteenth-century France. Like a skillful cryptographer, Milano has decoded the fascinating and revealing information embedded in eighteenth-century French portrait busts, long and mistakenly considered primarily decorative and descriptive. By organizing portrait busts into categories (age, gender, profession), Milano has identified subtle yet content-dense changes in portrait conventions and, more importantly, the ideas these transformations communicated to contemporary audiences. In this engagingly-written study, she clearly demonstrates that portrait busts embodied for contemporary viewers a wealth of ideas through which we can chart the dynamic development of Enlightenment thought." Michelle Facos, Indiana University-Bloomington
