Browse Recent Book Reviews

As she writes in her foreword, the goal of Anne-Orange Poilpré’s new book on the Maiestas Domini is to analyze the origin and development of this iconographical theme from its emergence in Early Christian Rome and Ravenna until the reign of Charles the Bald (14). It is the most comprehensive work on the subject since Frederick van der Meer’s pioneering book of 1938, and is thus considerably broader in scope than other studies that have dealt with the Maiestas in the Carolingian and Romanesque periods.[1] Conspicuously displayed in church apses, sculpted Romanesque and Gothic tympana, as well as… Full Review

Charles McClendon’s recent book sets forth, perhaps for the first time in English, a substantial prehistory of medieval architecture from late Roman Antiquity through the “Dark Ages” and the Carolingian Renaissance. Ranging over nearly a half-millennium, he focuses on the period between 600 and 900 in explaining the roots of Romanesque architecture. A lavish scholarly apparatus includes a plethora of carefully placed photographic illustrations, many line drawings, and numerous measured ground plans that closely support the meticulously documented, well-written text. An eloquent celebration of a little-known era of architectural history that is plainly meant for the enjoyment and edification of… Full Review

Many of us have had the experience of walking into a little-known church in a quaint European town where we were so intrigued that we considered conducting research on the church’s elaborate decorations. Unlike most of us, who recognize the daunting nature of such an undertaking, Véronique Plesch has spent the last decade documenting, investigating, and analyzing the extensive fresco cycle by Giovanni Canavesio in the church of Notre-Dame des Fontaines at La Brigue. This church, located about eighty kilometers north of Nice, is home to the most well-preserved of four extant fresco cycles completed by Canavesio in the 1480s… Full Review

The theme of cultural intersection in Ptolemaic and Roman-period Egypt has recently captured scholarly attention, particularly that of philologists and historians. Jacco Dieleman’s Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 CE) (Leiden: Brill, 2005), for example, and Susan Stephens’s Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) underscore the interlaced debt of Greeks and Egyptians. And with scarce exception, the articles in the often-cited Life in a Multi-cultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond (edited by Janet H. Johnson; Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1992) also rely… Full Review

Alice Donohue’s new book examines descriptions of ancient Greek sculpture written in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and the light they shed on the intellectual history of classical archaeology. She argues that the practice common in archaeological publication of isolating description from interpretation was instrumental in perpetuating a false empiricism, characterized by the denial of the subjective nature of vision. Her inquiry focuses on the historiography of early Greek sculpture, a category that she maintains was evaluated through misguided comparisons with Classical and Hellenistic works, and conceptualized in accordance with theories of stylistic development which inappropriately applied evolutionary models to… Full Review

“The pope plieth in an old palace of the bishops of this city [Orvieto], ruinous and decayed. . . . The place may well be called Urbs Vetus. No one would give it any other name. Cannot tell how the Pope should be described as at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in Castel Angel. His Holiness could not deny to Master Gregory that captivity at Rome was better than liberty here.” (107) This description of the papal residence in Orvieto written by Henry VIII’s representatives to… Full Review

In Japanese Export Lacquer, 1580–1850, Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg quote English collector William Beckford writing in April of 1781, “I fear I shall never be . . . good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, [and] collecting old Japan” (296). Beckford’s idea of “collecting old Japan” is a reflection of the importance that the black-lacquer and gilt-decorated furnishings, caskets, and assorted decorative objects made for the European market came to occupy by the mid-eighteenth century. That the collection of these objects should command a place in this short list of a gentleman’s… Full Review

This is an admirable example of a type of book that is becoming an endangered species: the illuminated manuscript monograph. As one would expect from such a book, it covers everything about the superbly decorated Christina Psalter (Copenhagen, The Royal Library, GKS 1606, 4˚)—from date, provenance, and textual and visual analyses to patronage and interpretations for the intended reader. Although scholars have discussed various aspects of the manuscript in isolation, Vidas’s book is the first comprehensive account and will now become the definitive study. The first descriptive chapter intricately weaves together text and image. Beginning with the flyleaves, Vidas… Full Review

It is delightful to see the first exhibition in the West devoted to the prolific, yet relatively under-studied Meiji artist Yôshû Chikanobu (1838–1893). To date, Chikanobu has been overshadowed by the popular artists of the time, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), and Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915). Although Chikanobu’s works are often discussed in books and journals, there has been no monograph or exhibition devoted to him in Japan or in the West; thus both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue are significant contributions to the study of Chikanobu’s work and to Meiji prints in general. The exhibition opened in… Full Review

In an interview conducted by curator Jennifer Gross with the contemporary abstract painter Robert Mangold in August of 2004, the artist openly acknowledged his relative unfamiliarity with the Société Anonyme, the progressive, independent art organization that Katherine Dreier (1877–1952) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) founded in 1920. Under the aegis of the Société, Duchamp and Dreier assembled a remarkable collection of modern art, donating the bulk of the holdings to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941 (http://artgallery.yale.edu/socanon). As a student at Yale during the mid-fifties and early-sixties, Mangold recalled that he had “seen individual works” at the art gallery… Full Review