Browse Recent Book Reviews

In Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800–1600, astronomy and celestial light intertwine to illuminate medieval and modern artworks, focusing upon diverse ways light and material form entice and elevate the senses. Adopting a comparative approach, the catalog juxtaposes medieval manipulation, response, inspiration, and engagement with light for Christian, Islamic, and Jewish medieval artists, as well as curates a carefully selected cluster of contemporary comparanda in three discrete interventions: “Part One, Astral Light,” “Part Two, Light and Vision,” and “ Part Three, Aura and Performance.”  In “Part One,” the co-organizers define the parameters of their subject, adducing key… Full Review

At the heart of Noble Beasts, Hunters and Hunted in Eighteenth-Century French Art, Amy Freund describes the popularity of hunting portraits in France between the 1660s and 1730s: men were portrayed at three-quarters length, with their beloved gun dog and flint-lock gun, often accompanied by dead game before a sweeping landscape. They encapsulate her project to center animal bodies in eighteenth-century French art and culture, especially canine companions, and to foreground sites of power and male identity that have often been left out of Anglo-American studies of the Rococo. In her telling, such portraits spoke to certain men’s desire… Full Review

Roland Betancourt’s The Secrets We Keep: Hidden Histories of the Byzantine Empire is a short and lucidly written book, adapted from the Thomas and Barbara Gaethgens Lecture delivered in December 2022 at the Getty in Los Angeles. Its author has—this is no secret—established himself as a central voice in bringing questions relevant to the present into conversation with what might otherwise seem a distant and unfamiliar past: Byzantium. Concise in form, the book revolves around an expansive idea: secrecy, understood in the broadest possible sense. Betancourt moves from reliquaries to siege treatises, from art-historical objects to philosophy, theology, historiography, and… Full Review

Amy Sherald: American Sublime landed at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in November 2025 like an emissary from another time. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents snatched immigrants and citizens off the streets and armed National Guards roamed cities across the country, the exhibition put forward a vision of the United States as joyful, proud, and unequivocally Black. Take The Boy with No Past (2014) in which a young man wearing aviator goggles, yellow pants, a collared shirt, and a warm smile unabashedly stands in the glory of his own imagination. The BMA bills… Full Review

In Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion, Mónica Domínguez Torres reconstructs the itineraries of Caribbean pearls drawn from fisheries of Cubagua and Margarita—off the coast of Venezuela—as they moved through the material, symbolic, and political economies of the Spanish Empire and the broader constellation of courts tethered to Habsburg power. Central to the study is the insistence that early modern consumers were anything but naïve about the conditions under which these precious materials were extracted. As the author claims, the grueling, often coerced labor of Indigenous and African divers was not peripheral… Full Review

Juanita Solano Roa’s Negative Originals: Race and Early Photography in Colombia provides a refreshing take on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography. The book focuses on portrait photography by Benjamín de la Calle (1869–1934) and Fotografía Rodríguez (founded in 1889 by brothers Horacio Marino Rodríguez and Melitón Rodríguez), two Medellín-based studios that witnessed the industrial boom and growth of Colombia’s second-largest city. Solano Roa studied the production of these studios not through their photographs but through their glass plate negatives housed in Colombian collections. This archival impulse and attention to the various modifications the photographers made to the gelatin dry plates… Full Review

What is a photograph without light? In Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography, Siobhan Angus assembles a history of photography around the elements extracted from the earth that the medium requires. In doing so, Angus redirects discourses on photographic history about power often framed with the lens (that is, light, focus, exposure, and so forth), toward the mined metals that undergird our image-saturated world, the land from which they originate, the labor required to process them, and the environmental aftermath of their extraction. She argues that “the mine is a necessary precondition for photography as a medium” (4). … Full Review

The Empire’s New Cloth, the title of Mei Mei Rado’s book on cross-cultural textiles at the Qing Court, playfully evokes the title of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairytale The Emperor’s New Clothes. In it, a vain emperor, excessively fond of fancy new clothes, is exposed before his subjects through the audacity of a child. The tale’s moral lesson is clear: it is important to see things as they truly are, to question assumptions, and empower those with insights, even if such insights go against the mainstream. Rado’s book does all three. By taking a close look at European… Full Review

Alicia Volk’s In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan is a focused and accessible account of early postwar Japanese art history (1945–52), skillfully weaving a narrative that explores the masked and buried discourses of transwar continuities in art and the art world. To this end, Volk examines a range of works, both canonical and lesser known, and draws on prewar exhibition histories to contextualize the development of postwar art and its institutions.  Building on Bert Winther-Tamaki’s seminal writings about paintings from the fifteen-year war and postwar abstract art, Volk frames America’s occupation of Japan as having an afterlife… Full Review

Sarah M. Guérin’s French Gothic Ivories is the first major monograph on this topic since the seminal three-volume study by Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français (Picard, 1924). Guérin’s book is narrower in scope, focusing on religious ivory carvings produced in Northern France and Paris between ca.1230 and ca.1330, but it is much broader in its approach. It draws on a variety of historical disciplines—social and economic history, the history of liturgy, the history of theology and spirituality, the history of medicine, and literary history—to offer a new interpretation of the rise and expansion of Gothic ivory sculpture in its… Full Review