“Visuality” is to vision as sexuality is to sex; that is, visuality presents the discourse and particularized cultural habits of viewing art, layered upon the physiology of vision itself. This is a term that has been cropping up more frequently in art historical writing lately, e.g. Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton, 1998), but it has received little theorizing or application in multiple cultures prior to this volume. Its editor, Robert Nelson, will be known to the discipline from his own recent anthology of critical discourse, Critical Terms for Art History(Chicago, 1996; coedited with Richard Shiff), and as a Byzantinist he is well situated to consider a wide variety of cultural instances of visuality. In some respects, his own center forms a center for this volume as well, with essays dominated by scholars of ancient and medieval periods, supplemented by one on medieval China and one on modern Senegal. Nelson’s introduction specifically contrasts these alternate, early visualities as active, performative, and productive, in contrast to the Cartesian model of modern visuality as passive and mechanical. He principally evokes scientific theories of vision itself (Alhazen, Pecham et al.) as his favored discourse instead of his proposed “social”...