“Drawings in Sterling Silver,” at Hirsch & Adler Modern in New York City, showcased Nancy Lawton’s virtuosity with a medium more widely used during the Renaissance than today. Both Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer (in a famous Self-Portrait executed at age thirteen) made exquisite drawings in silverpoint, a technique that involves drawing on prepared, often gessoed and tinted paper, with a thin silver wire.

Robert J. Brawley paints haunting images in which symbolic density coexists with fluid representationalism. In Early Netherlandish Painting Erwin Panofsky wrote of the “disguised symbolism” of the Flemish Primitives: “The more the painters rejoiced in the discovery and reproduction of the visible world, the more intensely did they feel the need to saturate all of its elements with meaning.”

Mexican painter Agustin Torres Calderón (b. 1948) has had over seventy exhibitions, but his show this June at the Jadite Galleries in New York City marks his United States debut. Although the self-taught artist has been painting since childhood, it was not until 1994, when he sold the family business, that he has been able to devote himself full-time to art-making and teaching.

Flora (2004), an allegorical portrait of a beautiful young woman with folded arms, was the centerpiece of a small retrospective of paintings by Martha Mayer Erlebacher at the Seraphin Gallery in Philadelphia (Feb. 25−April 4, 2005).

The Painting Center in New York City featured two landscape retrospectives in March 2005, juxtaposing artists with very different styles and aims. James Lancel McElhinney paints historical American battlefield sites as they exist today. Since 1991 he has drawn most of his subject matter from American Civil War sites.