Recently Published Reviews

Ancient Alexandria, in spite of its fame and importance in the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, does not come into focus clearly. Even the most rewarding discussions of Alexandria leave us frustratingly aware of the gaps in the historical record (see the recent Getty symposium documented in Kenneth Hamma, ed., Alexandria and Alexandrianism [Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996]). For this reason, Marjorie Susan Venit’s new book on Alexandrian tombs is of great interest. Venit shares her fascination with this compelling city and justifiably credits her subject matter as bearing “eloquent witness to… Full Review

In 1939, and in response to the massive Mostra Giottesca of 1938, Roberto Longhi wrote a sour, intentionally provocative piece that he curtly called his Guidizio sul Duecento, or judgment regarding the thirteenth century. In the essay, Longhi fretted that writers on medieval art had become so absorbed in establishing the authorship and origins of images that they had largely forgotten to act as responsible critics. They had thus also begun to forget that the majority of dugento works represented—in Longhi’s unshrinking opinion—tired and often-confused debasements of Byzantine imports. Using terminology that was all too common in Fascist Italy, Longhi… Full Review

Of all artists, Leonardo da Vinci is best understood through study of his drawings, as previous scholars such as Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Carlo Pedretti, Martin Kemp, and David Brown have amply demonstrated. Berenson went to the heart of the matter in The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (2 vols. [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1903]) when he wrote: The quality of qualities, then, in Leonardo’s drawing is the feeling it gives of unimpeded, untroubled, unaltered transfer of the object in his vision to the paper, thence, to our eye; while, at the same time, this vision of his … Full Review

This handsome and imposing volume, Moche Art and Archaeology in Ancient Peru, seems destined to become a mainstay of every art historian and archaeologist’s library. From its arresting cover detail of a beetle-browed portrait head vessel—refreshingly not overrestored—to its international array of authors and brilliant images of the exciting discoveries from the past decade, this book presents new material for scholars in both fields to ponder. Color photographs, each one a work of art in itself, nicely accompany the beginning of each essay. Black-and-white illustrations and line drawings, 310 in all, superbly document the text itself. Form aside, the… Full Review

History has not been kind to the Brussels-born genre painter and portraitist Michael Sweerts. Despite having enjoyed patrician patronage in Rome and founding one of the earliest academies of art in his native city, Sweerts was disregarded by contemporary chroniclers of painting, and upon his death his name and achievements were quickly forgotten. When at the start of the last century the artist began to interest scholars and modern collectors, he was wrongly taken for Dutch. Later historians lumped him with Pieter van Laer and the Bamboccianti, those disparaged painters of the Italian popolo basso, much to his disadvantage… Full Review

Adrian Randolph’s Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence possesses a most provocative and, indeed, engaging jacket: an image of the rear view of Donatello’s bronze David. The photograph is cropped, tantalizingly, so that the beholder (the expression Randolph himself uses consistently throughout his book, in place of viewer) is prevented from feasting his or her eyes on what are perhaps the most sexually charged pair of male buttocks ever produced by a Renaissance sculptor. When aligned with the content of the book, the cover’s chastened and desexualized David could be seen as somewhat disingenuous. Randolph’s… Full Review

The catalyst for this volume was the exhibition Private Prayers: Medieval and Renaissance Objects for Personal Devotion, held from September 23 to November 19, 1995, at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Its editors, who also contributed to the volume, have brought together thirteen methodologically diverse essays that examine the relationship between images and lay and clerical devotion in Italy from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. In the foreword, the editors make it clear that their goal was not to tailor the book’s contents to the exhibition, but rather to produce “a collection of studies… Full Review

bq. O, what a world of profit and delight Of power, of honour, of omnipotence Is promised to the studious artisan! bq. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (I: 1, 54–57) Almost a century has passed since Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996) was born; more than half a decade since his death. Yet even after a scholarly career that spanned most of the twentieth century, there is a sense of the unfinished about his legacy. For one thing, his publications are still emerging, including several major public lectures. Even his 1966 Norton lectures on medieval art at Harvard… Full Review

By the end of his career, Meyer Schapiro’s work had earned him virtually unanimous acclaim; art historians as different in their fields and approaches as T. J. Clark and John Pope-Hennessy placed him at the summit of the discipline.[1] Now, six years after his death, his stature is unchanged. Thomas Crow has recently upheld Schapiro’s sixty-year old article on the sculptures of Souillac as a role model for theoretically engaged art historians whose concern with images leaves them frustrated by the logocentric origins of much contemporary theory.[2] This call to imitate instead of avoid the past is highly unusual in… Full Review

This cogently written book presents a forceful argument against an arts advocacy that is based on instrumentalist perspectives, and makes the case for supporting art on the basis of its fundamental role as a vehicle for the expression of creativity. Joli Jensen, professor of communication at the University of Tulsa, is ultimately interested in erasing the strict dichotomy between “high art” and “popular” or “mass culture” in favor of a more complex aesthetic and social point of view that encompasses all forms of art or creative production. The book, which reads like a long essay, is written in a clear… Full Review

This biography of Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) introduces to American art historians a neglected but significant writer on Renaissance Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture. While the book does not neglect Stokes’s wide-ranging social, cultural, and sexual involvements (much of the latter in detail), it primarily concentrates on his development as an art historian, ending with his first two important studies, The Quatro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1932) and Stones of Rimini (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). It is for this aspect of Stokes’s achievement that Richard Read’s biography can be recommended, for Stokes… Full Review

Since the sixteenth century, historians have credited Masaccio—along with Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello—with changing the course of Western art. Indeed, Masaccio’s legacy is endlessly fascinating yet highly problematic. A medieval artist at the threshold of the Renaissance, he produced works both extraordinarily innovative and exceptionally traditional. The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, with ten essays by eminent scholars and conservators, confronts this legacy head-on, making a sophisticated and substantial contribution to the field. The Companion, writes editor Diane Cole Ahl, “seeks to situate Masaccio’s career and contributions within the experiential and artistic… Full Review

Many readers of these reviews have passing knowledge of the salient facts of Portuguese cultural history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A list of such facts would include the rule of João V (1706–50), noteworthy for its duration and riches (thanks particularly to Brazilian gold), as well as the sustained (and ultimately successful) attempts by João to convince the Papacy to establish a patriarchate in Lisbon. Even better known are the king’s construction of the gigantic and oddly situated monastery-palace of Mafra; the horrible earthquake of 1755 that decimated Lisbon and so shook European culture that Madame de Pompadour… Full Review

This is the third major volume of collected essays on Italian confraternities to emerge in the space of two years (the others are John Patrick Donnelly S. J. and Michael W. Maher, S. J., eds., Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 44 [Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1999]; and Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). It is a tribute to the editors of this new volume that notwithstanding the appearance of these other… Full Review

This book offers what one would expect of a catalogue produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy—a thorough study of the subject at hand, essays written by well-seasoned scholars, a complete bibliography, and good-quality color reproductions. As an added bonus, an appendix with pertinent documentation and a chronological chart for Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi are also included. The material is logically divided into two sections, the first on Orazio and… Full Review