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Michael Dorsch
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 220 pp.; 60 b/w ills. Cloth $109.95 (9781409403524)
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February 2, 2012

Based on Michael Dorsch’s doctoral dissertation (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2001), French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–80 explores the aftermath of what Victor Hugo called France’s “Terrible Year” as reflected in the field of sculpture. Memorialized in many cases by artists who had themselves endured the long standoff (from 19 September 1870 to 28 January 1871), the commemoration of the siege of Paris forced French artists to confront difficult and unfamiliar...

Sarah Wilson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 240 pp.; 120 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780300162813)
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February 2, 2012

Sarah Wilson’s The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations focuses on the artists associated with the major figures of what the Anglo-Saxon world has called “French Theory,” conceived in a broad way, and corresponding mainly to the 1970s. The various chapters are confrontations between Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Lapoujade or Leonardo Cremonini, Pierre Bourdieu and Bernard Rancillac, Louis Althusser and Lucio Fanti, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Gérard Fromanger, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques...

Charles M. Rosenberg, ed.
Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 468 pp.; 35 color ills.; 228 b/w ills. Cloth $175.00 (9780521792486)
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February 2, 2012

The Court Cities of Northern Italy: Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini, published in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, follows those on Rome, edited by Marcia B. Hall (2005), and Venice and the Veneto, edited by Peter Humphrey (2008), while two forthcoming volumes will address Naples and Florence. The series is conceived as a broadly contextual account of art of all kinds in Italy, 1300–1600. The...

Katherine R. Tsiang
Exh. cat. Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2010. 257 pp.; 160 color ills. Paper $45.00 (9780935573503)

Exhibition schedule: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Chicago, September 30, 2010–January 16, 2011; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, February 26–July 31, 2011; Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, September 11, 2011–January 8, 2012; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, February 18–May 27, 2012

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January 27, 2012

The exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan focuses on sculptural fragments from, and the subsequent digital reconstruction of, the Buddhist cave temple site of Xiangtangshan, located in Hebei Province in northern China. The inception of the site dates to the short-lived yet prolific Northern Qi Dynasty (550–577), the subject of the accompanying international conference held at the Freer Gallery on June 3–5, 2011. The name Xiangtangshan may be translated as...

Anthony Gerbino
The Classical Tradition in Architecture. New York: Routledge, 2010. 326 pp.; 88 b/w ills. Cloth $135.00 (9780415491990)
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January 18, 2012

There comes a moment in every architectural history class when an undergraduate asks how exactly did architects work out the science or mathematics of some major monument. It is not a moment I eagerly anticipate, and I suspect I am not alone. Especially in the large introductory classes I teach each year, my emphasis is on the broad cultural issues of architecture, the ways in which buildings shape human experience and respond to historical pressures....

Robin F. Rhodes, ed.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. 192 pp.; 13 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (9780268040277)
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January 18, 2012

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many writers, such as the economist Stanley Jevons, viewed museums as agents of social reform, but today many scholars have focused on reforming museums and their collecting practices. Specifically, museums’ acquisitions of ancient objects have sparked contentious disputes about these institutions’ responsibilities. These debates are presented in Robin F. Rhodes’s The Acquisition and Exhibition of Classical Antiquities, an edited book of essays from a symposium held at...

John Gage
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006. 224 pp.; 167 color ills.; 29 b/w ills. Paper $18.95 (0500203946)
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January 18, 2012

Color—its optical properties, its physiological effects, its natural and human origins, its cultural and emotional associations—has been John Gage’s subject of choice for several decades, and no one has worked in this area more, or more fruitfully, than he. Gage’s most recent book is apparently narrower in scope but turns out to be more comprehensive in its claims than his Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Bulfinch, 1993) and...

David Jaffee
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 416 pp.; 10 color ills.; 107 b/w ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780812242577)
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January 11, 2012

David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America ends with the cultural phenomenon whose emergence it explains: the Victorian parlor, described by T. S. Arthur in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1849 as a sort of Daguerreian Gallery stuffed with mass-produced goods from Hitchcock chairs and bronze shelf clocks to colorful, machine-woven carpets and illustrated books. Each of these commodities, Jaffee demonstrates, “took its meaning from the ensemble” (323). Contrary to...

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 336 pp.; 39 color ills.; 43 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (9780226426860)
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January 11, 2012

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite paintings are surely among the most entertaining images produced in Europe during the sixteenth century. Twenty-first century viewers respond to them immediately with delight and curiosity, and usually also remark on how much they are like Surrealist paintings. The same sorts of responses are found in art-historical scholarship. Renaissance studies has long neglected Arcimboldo altogether, with the result that his paintings remained to be effectively studied within their own context. In Arcimboldo:...

Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, eds.
Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. 314 pp.; 27 color ills.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754656470)
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January 11, 2012

Sandra Cavallo and Silvia Evangelisti, editors of Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, begin their introduction by reminding the reader that many early modern people did not live exclusively in houses. Instead, the period saw large numbers of women and men from diverse social backgrounds who experienced a variety of domestic arrangements in different types of institutions for part or all of their lives. The slight change of the book’s title from that of...