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Herrad of Hohenbourg's Hortus deliciarum has remained, despite the best efforts of a series of scholars since the early nineteenth century, one of the most enigmatic manuscripts of the central Middle Ages. Although it was destroyed in 1870, a casualty of the bombardment of Strasbourg's Library during the Franco-Prussian war, enough of its contents had already been either traced or edited to give historians and art historians a good impression of the wealth of texts and images generated by the manuscript's author, Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg. This evidence was assembled and a reconstruction posited by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine… Full Review

Archive Style is an excellent book. Focusing on three U.S. survey artists—one well-known, two others obscure—Robin Kelsey shows that American expeditionary art of the nineteenth century is more pictorially innovative and more rigorous than many readers might have thought. “The representation of straightforwardness has never been straightforward,” he writes (5); and Archive Style, like the work of the artists it studies, like many strong books that lucidly examine the mysterious subtleties and intricacies of their topics, is a labyrinth laid in a straight line. Timothy O’Sullivan is Kelsey’s better-known subject, the focus of the second of the book’s… Full Review

The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review

In her essay for the monumental catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, Clara Bargellini writes, “The mere thought of attempting to comprehend in some sort of unified way all of the art, or even only the painting of colonial Latin America, provokes a sense of exhaustion” (322). Whereas most recent exhibitions of colonial art have taken what curator Joseph Rishel calls a “vertical” approach by focusing on a single nation, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aim for horizontal coverage, addressing the Spanish viceroyalties and the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The material likewise transcends boundaries… Full Review

Some of the most perplexing problems in the history of the reception and recovering of antiquity come down to timing and silence. Why, for instance, did the Parthenon not solicit more description from Vitruvius or Pausanias? Why did the temples of Magna Graecia, especially those at Paestum, attract so little attention before the 1760s? Why was it not until the nineteenth century that people could accept the idea of a painted classical temple? Why, moreover, did James “Athenian” Stuart cling to such sun-bleached ideals even after he himself had observed the presence of pigment on ancient structures? In terms of… Full Review

This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings. Historical highlights are amply celebrated as Nehamas explores the place of beauty in… Full Review

In 2006 Yale University Press published an English translation of Manfredo Tafuri’s last book—fourteen years after the Italian original and twelve years after the death of its author. Why? Admittedly Tafuri (Rome, 1935–Venice, 1994) was both famous and controversial in the Anglo-Saxon world. Famous because of the incredibly wide range of his knowledge and his refined scholarship, controversial because of his Marxist views and his preference for urban development over individual works of architecture. In Europe Tafuri was mainly known as a notoriously “difficult” author whose theoretical and historical essays were equally dark and impenetrable. Said an Italian architect: “Tafuri… Full Review

John Pedley has conceived Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World as a college-level introduction to Greek sanctuaries and their place in ancient Greek society. Particular emphasis is given to the natural and built appearance of sanctuaries, to the works of visual arts populating those spaces, to the visual experiences of visitors, to the ritual activities, and to the transformations of sanctuaries over time, from their origins up to the present. After outlining the main themes of the book, Pedley sketches a general introduction to the nature and development of sanctuaries from the Geometric period to the… Full Review

Le rocaille, le goût pittoresque, le petit goût, le goût moderne. During the eighteenth century these terms were used in equal measure to describe artistic production now categorized as rococo, a locution perhaps most famously coined in the “Van Loo, Pompadour, rococo” rallying cry of the students of Jacques-Louis David. Indeed just as the designation rococo was imposed upon the visual culture of an earlier era by those who later rejected its charms, so too was its theorization completed by its detractors, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alike. In titling her book Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher… Full Review

The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Vaast at Arras was founded in the mid-seventh century and dedicated to the first bishop of the combined dioceses of Arras and Cambrai, Vedastus (d. 540). Its early years are obscure, but it enjoyed a certain flowering in the Carolingian period, illustrated by the abbacy of Rado (808–815), whose name has been tentatively associated with the production of a modestly illuminated pandect Bible, now preserved in Vienna (ÖNB lat. 1190). In late Carolingian times, the Franco-Saxon style of book illumination seems to have held sway at Saint-Vaast, though it was perhaps not the principal center from… Full Review