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Cynthea J. Bogel’s book With a Single Glance is a page-turner. As dedicated as I am to the topic of premodern Japanese religion, it is not often that I stay up later than I intended, engrossed in the unfolding story. That was my experience of Bogel’s book. Yes, it is erudite and, yes, the plates are gorgeous, but most of all it is a fun read. The book is at the same time deep and breezy. Bogel aims to show that Kûkai, the great Buddhist saint, imported a new language of visuality to Japan. Some of this he brought… Full Review

Contributions to Anglophone scholarship in the past decade have included more than a handful of narratives focused on Mexico’s post-Revolutionary artistic movements. Moreover, photography’s place in the general art-historical account has come to redefine the terms of discussion around what served as that emerging nation’s particular forms of modernism. Histories of photography in Mexico have been intellectually indebted to the persuasive writerly performances associated with the late Carlos Monsiváis and Olivier Debroise. They have gained also from publications like Andrea Noble’s Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000) and subsequent pioneering work by Esther Gabara… Full Review

In her short biographical work Father and Daughter: Jonathan and Maria Spilsbury (London: Epworth, 1952), Ruth Young, a descendant of Maria Spilsbury (Spilsbury-Taylor, after her marriage in 1808), recounts a delightful anecdote in which the future King George IV visited Spilsbury’s studio on St. George’s Row, London. Impatient with how slowly work was progressing on his commission which, to his judgment, seemed complete, he exclaimed, “Really, Mrs. Taylor, I swear that you can do no more to that! You’ve finished it and a damned good picture it is.” Unconvinced, Spilsbury sought a second opinion from her maid. Upon close inspection… Full Review

The most famous works of eighteenth-century Roman architecture and urbanism, such as the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps, have always seemed more at home at the end of histories of Baroque architecture than at the start of histories of modern architecture; there, one is more likely to encounter Laugier's hut or Soufflot's Sainte-Geneviève. The idea that the architectural initiative passed from Rome to the north sometime around 1700 extends back to the eighteenth century itself, and was rarely questioned in the century-long tradition of formalist architectural history inaugurated in the late nineteenth century. But while eighteenth-century Rome has had… Full Review

The title of this superb volume does not fully prepare the reader for its broad scope of relevance well beyond the site of Aurangabad for an understanding of Indian art, religious communities, and socio-economic history spanning eight hundred years from the first century BCE to the seventh century CE. One would expect from the title a focused monograph on the sculptures carved at the cave temples at Aurangabad in India’s Western Deccan, in the present-day state of Maharashtra, dating primarily to the sixth century. Pia Brancaccio not only provides a much-needed focused study, but she also follows the ramifications of… Full Review

De l’imaginaire au musée: Les arts d’Afrique à Paris et à New York (1931–2006) considers the political and ideological contexts that shaped institutional display of the arts of Africa since the 1930s. Based on Maureen Murphy’s 2005 dissertation, the framework of this engaging study is the parallel but distinctive evolution of French and U.S. museums’ presentation of African artifacts as ethnographic objects or as works of art. Following a loose chronology, Murphy carefully unpacks the “imaginary” perception of Africa through its treatment in literature, popular imagery, and exhibitions. In the introduction, Murphy distances herself from an art history… Full Review

Malian designer and artist Kandioura Coulibaly “interpret[s] the stories that are told by the material culture” (106) he uses in his costumes and jewelry. In Janet Goldner’s conversation with Coulibaly, entitled “Using the Past to Sculpt the Costume of the Future: An Interview with Kandioura Coulibaly” and collected in Contemporary African Fashion, readers discover how his work—and his aim to construct a museum of fashion—emerges from a process of reconstructing and recovering a hidden history, one often overlooked in accounts of Africa’s complicated chronology. Seeing fashion as an organizing system, he describes how it is woven from the physical… Full Review

This book is a collection of nine essays and a short preface analyzing some aspects of the connections between Philippe de Champaigne, the convent of Port-Royal, and Jansenism. The editor, Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, contributed two essays; the last one (“La Foi et les œuvres. Postface sur l’œuvre peint de Philippe de Champaigne et ses possibles liens avec la spiritualité de Port-Royal”) functions as a postscript. It provides a useful context for the collection by summarizing the literature and explaining the approaches scholars have used (in the past and here) while proposing Cojannot-Le Blanc’s own interpretation, to which I will return… Full Review

Assyrian relief sculpture forms well-known parts of the collections of several major art museums. Lesser known, perhaps, is the fact that many smaller institutions can also boast of collections of these antiquities. Unfortunately, the sculpture at these smaller museums has not often been fully researched or even adequately published. Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography goes a considerable way toward remedying this situation with respect to the materials from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In addition to dozens of large, high-quality color photographs of the Hood's sculpture, Assyrian Reliefs also includes nine… Full Review

Writing in the 1930s, Italian artist, writer, and musician Alberto Savinio described the invention of photography as “a moment of transformation in the history of humanity that in some ways surpasses the conquest of Constantinople and the discovery of America” (quoted in Diego Mormorio, Una invenzione fatale, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985, 13). Although Savinio comes close, it is hard to overstate the importance of the ways in which photography offered entirely new ways of seeing the world to an unprecedented number of people. The new medium’s cultural impact in Italy was profound, and the country (unified only in 1860 and… Full Review