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Today, J. M. W. Turner is arguably the most widely recognized artist of nineteenth-century Britain. He has been much on display during the past few years, thanks to several major exhibitions and their accompanying publications: J. M. W. Turner (Ian Warrell, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2007), Turner and the Masters (David Solkin, ed., London: Tate Publishing, 2009), and Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude (Ian Warrell, ed., London: National Gallery, 2012). The first of...

Taking Time: Chardin’s “Boy Building a House of Cards” and Other Paintings is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition mounted at Waddesdon Manor, the country house in Buckinghamshire, England, built in the nineteenth century for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. Today the manor is run jointly by the National Trust and a charitable Rothschild Family Trust headed by Jacob Rothschild, 4th Lord Rothschild. In 2007, the trust purchased Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Boy Building a House of Cards (1735)....

It used to be simpler. When Beaumont Newhall published his first English-language surveys of the history of photography in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the art-historical establishment did not consider photography a legitimate art, and when a modernist did think about the relation of the camera to art, it was often under a cloud of worry that some established painter would be revealed to have used a photograph as his source. Newhall thus began...

Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome, edited by Jill Burke, consists of twelve essays that emerged from a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. They take the art of Rome in the first decades of the sixteenth century as their subject, and collectively foment reconsideration of the notion of “High Renaissance” style. In accord with current scholarship and survey texts, the term “High Renaissance”...

The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, annually inspires millions of people to congregate at a single place in a manner that is unique among world religions. The British Museum’s 2012 exhibition on the subject was accompanied by two publications that bring together the religious, political, economic, and visual histories of the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, from the seventh century through present times. For the main catalogue,...

In her provocative new book, Touching Photographs, Margaret Olin presents an innovative approach to visual and photographic studies. Her essays form interrelated and often fascinatingly oblique case studies pertaining to the use of photography and its metaphorical affect as tactility and touch. Olin offers deep embraces of photographic discourse in James Agee and Walker Evans’s New Deal-era text and photographic essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida; James VanDerZee's Harlem photographs...

In 1953 German art historian Otto von Simson, writing in the pages of The Art Bulletin, heralded Rogier van der Weyden's Deposition (ca. 1435) in the Prado as "the birth of tragedy in Christian art" (Otto G. von Simson, “Compassio and Co-Redemptio in Roger van der Weyden’s Descent From the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 [March 1953]: 9–16). Well-timed to coincide with post-war philosophy's Nietzsche revival, the claim was grounded in a conventional...

“How did images produce religious truth in the later Middle Ages?” Adam Kumler’s Translating Truth is an ambitious book that tries to answer this question through an examination of visual responses to the search for religious knowledge among the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Kumler analyzes a series of exceptional manuscripts containing vernacular texts and images made for a lay clientele in France and England within the new “horizon of expectations” regarding education...

In 1931, seeking to distinguish between a radically modern art and the flood of belle peinture that was submerging the French capital, the expatriate critic Carl Einstein unleashed an unsparing diagnosis in an essay entitled “The Little Picture Factory.” “In Paris,” he wrote, “the fabrication of pictures without worldview or risk is baser than the traffic in young women, for the facile dauber is rewarded by no punishment, only comfortable income” (Carl Einstein, “Kleine Bildefabrik,”...

Born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1865, James Henry Breasted (d. 1935) became the most famous American Egyptologist of his generation. He was known not only for his historical scholarship, embodied in A History of Egypt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), a massive book published in 1905, and the five volumes of Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), published in 1906–07—achievements that led to his appointment to the first professorship in Egyptology in...