Browse Recent Book Reviews

Debate continues over whether visual culture studies represents a coherent field with the means to effectively train students in historical methods. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader mounts a powerful challenge to the field’s critics both by providing a historical genealogy of visual culture studies as a discipline that may trace its origins to the role of vision and visuality in the works of key writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century such as Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin, and by presenting a carefully chosen set of scholarly essays that make good on the opening claims… Full Review

Although the French seized upon the idea of national patrimony during the July Monarchy (1830–48) and have never let go, the constructed nature of the past this engendered has not been widely studied in France. In the past twenty years, Pierre Nora’s volumes of essays on “lieux de mémoire” have spawned French editions of the writings of Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, among others. Jean Nayrolles’ L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne is a welcome in-depth study of such sources for a nascent French art historiography. It follows his earlier titles from the mid-1990s as… Full Review

Tonio Hölscher’s essay belongs to a particular moment in art-historical scholarship, not to mention Roman art history. The moment, to be more precise, is the mid-1980s, when semiotics was a thriving method of inquiry and two of the most formidable Romanists in the German language, Hölscher and Paul Zanker, both indebted to structural linguistics, separately set out to explain why Roman art looks the way it does. For example, Zanker, in his book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), explores the political language of both subject and style in Augustan… Full Review

The early Dutch Republic witnessed an explosive growth in the popularity of paintings and prints representing groups of handsome young men and women absorbed in social pleasantries. These “merry company” scenes, as they are often termed, characteristically show their ostentatiously attired figures occupying richly appointed interiors or elegant open-air gardens. Gathered around tables covered by freshly ironed linens and set with expensive goblets and platters, they engage in good-natured conversation, make music on various instruments, smoke pipes, drink wine from stemmed glasses, and play board games. What was the reason for the burgeoning popularity of these arresting pictures? Moreover, what… Full Review

For nearly ninety years, John G. Johnson’s bequest of 1,279 objects to his native Philadelphia has counted among the city’s great treasures. For over twenty years, Carl Strehlke, adjunct curator of the collection; Mark S. Tucker, the Philadelphia Museum’s vice chairman of conservation and senior conservator of paintings; and Tucker’s extensive team have focused scrutiny on ninety-seven early Italian pictures in the Johnson Collection and another twenty among the museum’s holdings. Their work has long constituted a vibrant force in the prolific, ever-dynamic scholarship of that field. The museum has published countless outstanding catalogues over many decades, and this meticulously… Full Review

The American Culture Association’s presentation of its 2006 Cawelti Book Award to Martin Berger’s Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture is an early indication of its deserved recognition and acclaim. This terse volume is doubly ambitious: as a groundbreaking investigation of a category of analysis mostly uncharted by the field of US art history, and as the delineation and defense of a provocative interpretive methodology that reads “artworks against the grain of their visual evidence” (24). First and foremost, Berger’s text represents the discipline’s overdue contribution to the relatively new but rapidly expanding field of whiteness studies. At the… Full Review

If it is historically true that “clothing makes the man,” this collection of essays determines how that dictum was enacted in the Middle Ages. Désirée Koslin and Janet Snyder have assembled a variety of articles exploring medieval fashion and dress with a truly interdisciplinary approach. The scope of the collection is broad in several ways. The essays discuss textiles and dress diachronically from the Merovingian period of the seventh century to the sixteenth century. They combine the perspectives of archaeology, art history, economics, religion, costume history, material culture, and literary criticism, and explore fabrics from England, Ireland, France, the Low… Full Review

The title of Peter Stewart’s Statues in Roman Society subtly delineates the major premise of his innovative study: that the modern notion of sculpture hinders our ability to understand the quotidian functions of statues within Roman society. As explained in his introduction, “classical art history has generally been concerned with Roman sculpture as a kind of art, not Roman statuary as a remarkable accumulation of objects working in society” (10). Using a variety of approaches, Stewart attempts to reintegrate Roman statues into their physical and social contexts, and at the same time, to provide a thought-provoking criticism of some of… Full Review

As Cécile Whiting acknowledges in the introduction to her recent analysis of the relationship between Los Angeles and the art produced there, a copious literature already exists addressing both the city and its art world. That said, Whiting offers a fresh approach to the subject that illuminates how diverse artists helped redefine Los Angeles in the public imagination during the 1960s. Perhaps even more important is Whiting’s methodology, which promises a broad applicability well beyond its obvious relevance for those interested in West Coast Pop and the expanding field of the 1960s Whiting foregrounds the city of Los Angeles itself,… Full Review

For many scholars, the historiography of their own fields is a late-career feat, arrived at after decades of slow rumination—George Kubler’s Aesthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) comes immediately to mind. This slim volume, by contrast, is the reworking of a dissertation (Yale, 1998). Its five chapters are written with vigor and freshness, and while they lack the intellectual heft of Kubler’s work (though this could be said of most works in the field), they offer an easily accessible introduction to some key nineteenth-century writers who tried to make sense of the ancient history… Full Review