The book comprises 36 miniatures that consider the relationship between the terms in the title. Life, traces, the art of painting (also named zoography) are brought together and thought through the ideas of biography, the act, institution, portrait, phantasm, metonymy, painting as person, and painting’s mutism. Among the authors the book draws on are José Ortega y Gasset, José Saramago, María Zambrano, and Jean-Marie Guyau. The book is in-between the fields of philosophy, literature, and art history.