Recently Published Reviews

Erwin Panofsky is said to have been particularly pleased with the fact that he possessed one near-sighted and one-far sighted eye. Using his optical inheritance as a model for how one should write the history of art—paying attention to detail and description, while never neglecting the panoramic view—he provided successive generations of art historians with a powerful challenge to disciplinary blindspots. Michael Podro, one of Panofsky's most insightful readers (as witnessed in his much reprinted The Critical Historians of Art [Yale University Press, 1982]) has put this visual lesson to stunning work in his recent writing. Nevertheless, Podro's lavish and… Full Review

This book offers undergraduates and lay enthusiasts who have not had the good fortune of attending one of Professor Ames-Lewis's courses at Birbeck College in London an opportunity to see and understand key monuments of Italian Gothic sculpture through his sensitive and insightful eyes. It offers many insights for more sophisticated readers, as well. Patiently introducing readers to the historical circumstances in which Tuscan sculptors worked, Ames-Lewis cites intriguing examples of how economics, the growth of cities, improvements in roads and communications (including a general concern for improving and beautifying civic infrastructure), and local patriotism led to the production of… Full Review

Epigraphy has long been a subject of tremendous fascination and prodigious investigation within Islamic studies, and has inspired a number of ambitious scholarly undertakings, such as the Materiaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum (11 vols., 1894–1985), the Repertoire chronologique d'epigraphie arabe (21 vols., 1931–91) and the Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum (30 vols., 1955–90). As their titles suggest, the genesis of these multivolume, multidecade compendia was largely archaeological and taxonomic. The thrill was in collecting and ordering (whether by region, language, chronology or media) as many inscriptions as possible, with the aim of using the material thus amassed to explicate aspects (historical… Full Review

The picture painted in Florence sometime in the second quarter of the 16th century by Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo, and known for most of the 20th century as The Halberdier, burst out of the comfortable obscurity of the Frick Collection in New York, where it had been on indefinite loan when Christie's sold it at auction in the winter of 1989 to the J. Paul Getty Museum for more than $35 million. Since very few 16th-century paintings of secure provenance by major masters come on the art market now, specialists found the sale of The Halberdier by the private foundation… Full Review

Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture brings together under one cover a series of essays written over a thirty-year period. The earliest articles, first published in 1970 and 1971 respectively, are H. W. Janson's "The Revival of Antiquity in Early Renaissance Sculpture" and Irving Lavin's "On the Renaissance Portrait Bust." Also reprinted here are Christiane Klapisch-Zuber's "Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento," (first published in French in 1983) and Claudia Lazzaro's "Gendered Nature and Its Representation in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture" (first published in 1991). The remaining seven essays—by G. M. Helms, John T. Paoletti, Joy Kenseth, Sarah… Full Review

Some of the underlying tensions—I hesitate to use the word conflicts—in this ambitious book are expressed even before it is opened, in the juxtaposition of the name of the great Florentine artist, Giotto, with a detail of the Virgin and Child from the Rucellai Madonna painted by the Sienese master Duccio on the cover. Is the point that the era belongs (or has belonged) verbally or nominally to Giotto (i.e., Florence), but, in fact, visually to Duccio (i.e., Siena)? This would seem to be the sense, at least in part, of the author's dual preoccupation with words and images—with the… Full Review

The Anxiety of Interdisciplinarity is the second volume in the De-, Dis-, Ex- series from BACKless Books. The volume features interviews with Julia Kristeva and Hal Foster, essays from Rosalind Krauss, Louis Martin, Timothy Martin, Beatriz Colomina, and Howard Caygill, and photographs of Candida Höfer, all of whom focus on the intermingling and friction between the schools of art, architecture, and theory. The anxiety develops when poststructuralist theory, born of literary and political discourse, enters the hardest, most crystallized science, architecture. The anxiety ferments, because the physical nature of architecture resists relativism. The anxiety fills the proponents of interdisciplinarity, because… Full Review

At a session on the historiography of illuminated manuscripts held during the recent annual CAA conference in New York, it was generally agreed that the publication of catalogues was of particular importance to the advancement of scholarship in manuscript studies. Exhibitions, exhibition catalogues, and catalogues of collections are essential instruments in manuscript studies, because they bring illuminated manuscripts out of the sequestered environment of rare book libraries and into public view. Of course, the Lehman Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art hardly needs publicity. Only a few of the manuscript illuminations belonging to this celebrated group of objects, however… Full Review

This long-awaited volume contains a large selection of the papers that were delivered at a symposia in Washington, D.C., in 1995 and The Hague in 1996 in connection with the Vermeer exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art and the Mauritshuis respectively. The monumental exhibition was itself a spectacular success, drawing immense crowds at each of its venues. In some respects the very occasion of the exhibition as the first one dedicated exclusively to the work of Vermeer could be construed as a culmination of decades of intense scholarly interest in the painter. Indeed, rarely in the discipline of… Full Review

In 1875, Frederick R. Leyland, a prosperous Liverpool businessman and patron of the arts, invited two artists to design schemes for the interior of his new London house at 49 Prince's Gate. He asked his friend the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler to decorate the entrance hall and charged a designer of metalwork and japoniste interiors, Thomas Jekyll, to redesign the dining room to hold his large collection of Chinese blue-and-white Kangxi porcelain, as well as Whistler's painting La princesse du pays de la porcelain. Jekyll's scheme for the room included an elaborate system of open shelves, a Jacobean-style ceiling… Full Review

In recent decades, some of the most influential books about photography have been written by authors outside of art history and American studies, the areas that have fostered photographic studies at universities since World War II. Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punishment increased interest in the social ramifications of photographic practice, and reoriented many scholars from strictly archival pursuits to the contemplation of photography's societal and psychological consequences. The enlarged scope of photographic studies, together with the broad presence of photography in contemporary art, continues to encourage scholars in the humanities and the social sciences to… Full Review

In his influential Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, first published in 1953, Otto Brendel gave a masterful survey of prior accountings of the subject. He noted how Roman art has been the creation of the many presents from Ghiberti's notion that Roman art ended in the reign of Constantine through Winckelmann's privileging of ancient Greece to the detriment of Rome, to the early 20th-century nationalism/racism and formalism/structuralism of Strzygowski and Kaschnitz-Weinberg, respectively. The process continues with the French structuralism or European Marxism that have prevailed since Brendel wrote. This general state of affairs applies, of course, to the… Full Review

How is the critical language of art different for the women artists of sixteenth-century Italy than for the men? In a history of art dominated by male artists, how did writers from 1550 to 1800 differentiate the female capacity for creativity from that of males? In particular, what did it mean to be called a virtuosa, a term reserved for few women artists during the cinquecento? The author addresses these and other important questions in this provocative and illuminating study. Jacobs begins with an extraordinary statistic: Half of the forty women artists of cinquecento Italy have no surviving works.… Full Review

Mianyan zhi wei: zouxiang yishushi zhexue (Dimensions of Duration: Toward a Philosophy of Art History) is the first comprehensive introduction of the methodology of Western art history to a Chinese audience. Ding Ning, professor of art history at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, has focused on the revisionary writings on the theory and practice of art history that were published for the most part between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s in the Anglo-American world. The revisionist key is reflected in the author's borrowing of the 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's time concept durée (mianyan) in the title of… Full Review

Art of the Gold Rush, a book that accompanies an exhibition of the same name, sets out to present the impact of the gold rush on the northern California art scene. The authors' stated aim was to depict the era in works of art selected both for their visualization of gold rush themes, and for their intrinsic aesthetic quality. The project is a fascinating one, linking the influx of miners and artists with the rise in appreciation of the fine arts in San Francisco and Sacramento. The exhibition and book present more than genre paintings of the gold rush, extending… Full Review