Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martin, eds.
Exh. cat. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2004. 412 pp.; 250 color ills.; 105 b/w ills. Cloth $65.00 (030010491X)
The monumental exhibition The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830, held in the fall of 2004 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, signaled recognition of the tapestry and silverwork masterpieces produced during the viceregal period in the Andes. One of the achievements of the exhibition’s curators, Elena Phipps and Johanna Hecht, and consulting curator, Cristina Esteras Martín, was their ability to obtain from both private collectors and institutions vital objects that had rarely, if ever, been exhibited. The result was a remarkable collection of many of the most significant artistic treasures from the late pre-Hispanic Inca and colonial periods… Full Review
January 11, 2007
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Geoffrey Batchen
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. 160 pp.; 80 color ills. Cloth $29.95 (1568984502)
Rumors of a tight relationship between photography and memory have been circulating since the nineteenth century, despite the many objections raised in both scholarly and fanciful works. A feature of these attacks is the prosecutor’s reluctance to produce evidence. Roland Barthes writes a long meditation on photography as a form of counter-memory that ultimately rests on a portrait of his mother that he allows no one to see. Siegfried Kracauer launches his skeptical study of photography and memory by evoking a magazine illustration of the “demonic diva,” whose image lures consumers into the memory-vacuum of an eternal present. And who… Full Review
January 2, 2007
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Alessandra Russo
México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2005. 250 pp.; 351 ills. Paper $36.00 (9703209831)
In the last fifteen years, scholarship on indigenous imagery from colonial Latin America has grown substantially in breadth and sophistication. Across the 1990s, as scholars rejected the dichotomy of resistance to colonial rule versus acquiescence, studies of indigenous agency and creativity became prominent, as did analyses of visual culture and ethnic identity. Recently, as more nuanced understandings of colonial processes have developed (especially in the fields of anthropology and history), interpretive frameworks have again begun to shift. Less crucial is indigenous agency, pure and simple; more pressing questions now concern indigenous practices as constituent of, and pivotal to, colonial society… Full Review
December 20, 2006
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Bronwen Wilson
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. 406 pp.; 100 b/w ills. Cloth $70.00 (0802087256)
Studies of Venice, including surveys of art, architecture, politics, and business, often hinge on an author’s understanding or characterization of Venezianità, or the concept of being Venetian. Bronwen Wilson directly addresses this facet of early modern Venetian studies in her erudite explication of the evolution of Venetian identity in an era featuring the dynamic growth of the printing industry and the increasing use of prints by illustrators and artists. For Wilson, Venetians learned to read images of Venice and Venetians themselves, as did the outside world, and, indeed, “may have come to see themselves as they were seen by… Full Review
December 14, 2006
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Alison Wright
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 352 pp.; 50 color ills.; 170 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0300106254)
In her exemplary book, which began as a doctoral dissertation in 1992, Alison Wright provides a comprehensive examination of the Pollaiuolo brothers’ substantial artistic productivity in Florence and Rome during the second half of the quattrocento, contextualizing their working lives and era. Although she adopts a traditional monographic approach to her subject, the author seeks to reveal the professional reputations of these artists and the innovative characteristics of their works of art. Wright implements a roughly chronological arrangement for her ambitious project, examining Antonio’s and Piero’s works categorically, by medium or project. In fourteen chapters, she explores the iconography, reception… Full Review
December 6, 2006
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Gülru Necipoğlu
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 480 pp.; 250 color ills.; 300 b/w ills. Cloth $99.50 (9780691123264)
In this masterly new book, Gülru Necipoğlu examines completely afresh the centrality of Sinan, chief imperial Ottoman architect between 1538 and 1588, in the creation of what she calls “architectural culture.” Based on a wide variety of primary sources—including some not previously considered from the point of view of architectural history—this is the first exhaustive study offering a wealth of insights into Sinan’s architecture within the context of its own intellectual, political, and religious milieus. The production value of the book is equally remarkable. It is richly illustrated with excellent photographs by Reha Günay, himself an authority on… Full Review
December 3, 2006
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William Vaughn, Elizabeth E. Barker, and Colin Harrison
Exh. cat. Burlington, Vt.: Lund Humphries, 2005. 256 pp.; 233 color ills. $80.00 (0853319324)
British Museum, London, October 21, 2005–January 22, 2006; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 7–May 28, 2006
Samuel Palmer, 1805–1881: Vision and Landscape is much more than a handsome catalogue for a splendid exhibition of the same name. It is a significant contribution to the steadily growing literature about the artist. Essays by eight different scholars place Palmer within his historical context, while detailed entries about each of the 164 exhibited works—these pictures and more, all excellently reproduced in color—give the catalogue a refreshingly visual focus. That so many authors have been asked to contribute to the publication speaks to several important characteristics of the artist’s career. Contrary to the familiar image of Palmer as… Full Review
December 3, 2006
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Erik Thunø and Wolf Gerhard, eds.
Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2004. 320 pp.; many b/w ills. Paper (8882650000)
In the final section of Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Hans Belting discusses the crisis of the cult image in the early modern period when holy images of the past lost their power due to new aesthetic criteria that promoted the cult of art and the emerging role of the artist. While monumental in its scope and methodology, Belting’s text and specifically his characterization of the “era of art” have not remained without critical response. The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance… Full Review
December 3, 2006
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Sarah Bassett
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 314 pp.; 50 b/w ills. Cloth $85.00 (052182723X)
The late antique city Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, was full of statues. Inhabitants and visitors to the city would have seen assemblies of sculpture on display in numerous public spaces throughout the city, in venues as varied as baths and civic basilicas, circus arenas and open forums. The collections were not only large, frequently bringing together dozens of individual sculptures, but they were also exceptionally varied, including subjects ranging from imperial portraits, to animals and traditional Greco-Roman gods, to abstract personifications. Perhaps most incredibly, however, is the fact that the vast majority of these statues, which were set… Full Review
December 3, 2006
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Marilyn Aronberg Lavin
New York: Phaidon, 2002. 352 pp.; 190 color ills.; 10 b/w ills. Paper $19.95 (0714837741)
James K. Banker
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 277 pp.; 1 ills. Cloth $62.50 (0472113011)
Both these books are welcome; and for this reviewer, at least, there can never be enough material about Piero della Francesca if it helps draw us nearer to understanding a painter whose memorable, orderly art is a balm for the soul, and who still stands like a giant among the creators of the Renaissance. By his own admission, James Banker is less interested in the works of art than in the facts, some seemingly negligible, that create the context of the Quattrocento painter’s world. He is the historian, while Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is the iconographer, an acute interpreter of… Full Review
November 28, 2006
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