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Walter Melion’s The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625, like the early modern works it studies, calls for a disciplined eye and close reading. Although the text is quite lengthy and includes numerous Latin references, it is neither dry nor tedious to read. Nonetheless, it is demanding. For readers willing to face the challenge, Melion’s book reveals the complexities and nuances of early modern visual piety in a fresh and powerful manner. Not only does it provide a new interpretation of prints seldom studied, it also encourages readers to examine artistic and devotional practices linked to… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road celebrates a 2007 gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography to the J. Paul Getty Museum of more than eight hundred photographs by the Italian-born photographer Felice Beato. The gift tripled the size of the Getty’s Beato holdings, making it the world’s largest institutional collection of his photographs, which almost exclusively depict subjects in Asia and the Near East. The exhibition catalogue features 120 of these photographs, organized chronologically to showcase Beato’s long and productive career. Framing this work are informed and thoughtful commentary by Anne Lacoste, assistant curator… Full Review

Walter Gibson’s latest book investigates aspects of the relationship between word and image in early modern Netherlandish art. Although his subject is the depiction of proverbs, he does not dwell on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting in Berlin that depicts more than one hundred proverbs set in a human landscape. Rather, he discusses the general phenomenon of the reliance on proverbs in Netherlandish culture, charting the rise of proverb books and the use of proverbs in several literary genres. Gibson then introduces a series of case studies, some drawn from earlier publications but revised for this venue. The… Full Review

With Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, Stephanie Leitch adds her distinct voice to the vast literature locating a critical epistemic shift in Europe ca. 1500. That she chooses the words “early modern” for her title is certainly deliberate in viewing this period as one of nascent modernity in its self-consciousness, broadening awareness of cultural relativity, use of the printing press, and emphasis on empirical observation (whether actual or feigned) for truth-claims. Leitch’s great contribution begins with the observation that although early modern Germany at the turn of the sixteenth century was not among the first European powers to… Full Review

Michael Marrinan’s Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 is an extraordinary book: highly interpretive and synthetic, sprawling in the breadth of visual culture it surveys, yet very readable and entertaining. Those familiar with Marrinan’s previous publications might expect an emphasis on Romantic painting, and there is plenty of that; but this book integrates painting and the pictorial arts into a sweeping narrative that includes museums, collecting, urban planning, architecture, sculpture, artisanal and industrial objects, dioramas, arcades, and more. It relates visual culture to politics, memory, emerging forms of public and private life, and new modes of commerce, industrial… Full Review

Paul Crowther’s Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics. The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history. Crowther’s approach might be called the “phenomenological depth theory” in so far as “depth” is a word with which he appears fascinated. The main theoretical issues are addressed in the second chapter, whereas the first turns present-day art history into two phantom camps—the one defined as “reductionist” as against the other, Crowther’s, which focuses on a… Full Review

The attractive exhibition catalogue under review here shines a bright light on the rich and diverse collection of Egyptian art that is the Myers Collection at Eton College in Windsor, UK, with the added benefit of a chapter featuring coins and other post-pharaonic artifacts from the University of Birmingham. It is not only a welcome addition to previous publications of artifacts from the Myers Collection (e.g., Stephen Spurr, Nicholas Reeves, and Stephen Quirke, Egyptian Art at Eton College: Selections from the Myers Museum, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), but also a prime example of the kind of… Full Review

This impressive, generously illustrated collection of essays edited by Claire Farago developed from a symposium held in London in 2001 that focused on the historical reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura. Twenty-three studies, including introductory remarks and an annotated bibliography, by twenty authors (three scholars make multiple contributions) examine the transnational fortune of the treatise and consider Leonardo’s influence on the institutionalization of artistic production in early modern Europe. The focus on reception leads to consideration of fundamental issues regarding Leonardo’s legacy, such as the development of the modern conception of artistic genius, as well as broader… Full Review

Jacob Lawrence is best known for his multi-panel series The Migration of the Negro (1940–41), with the Philips Collection in Washington, DC, owning the odd-numbered panels, and the Museum of Modern Art, the even-numbered ones. In November 1941, Fortune magazine published twenty-six of the works, and in December of the same year Edith Halpert showed the entire series at her Downtown Gallery. With this exposure, Lawrence became, at the age of twenty-four, a nationally recognized artist. The sixty small paintings that document the wave of black migrants from the rural South to the urban North have been widely reproduced and… Full Review

Sequestered in the darkness of storage more often than not, a consequence of the friability of the light-sensitive, powdery medium, pastels are rarely exhibited on a regular basis by museums. It was an unusual and welcome happening, then, when the Musée d’Orsay staged in the fall of 2009 what must have been a visually sumptuous installation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pastels drawn from its unparalleled permanent collection. The project was initiated by Serge Lemoine, the outgoing former director of the Musée d’Orsay, and seen to completion under the direction of his successor, Guy Cogéval. It was accompanied by a… Full Review