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“Adjusting to modern life in New York circa 1900 meant learning to see skeptically. To function successfully, even to survive, every inhabitant of the modern city, every target of competitive marketing, every participant in the new mass culture, every beneficiary of modern science and technology, every believer in spiritual realms had to process visual experiences with some measure of suspicion, caution, and guile” (1). These bold and intriguing lines open Michael Leja’s recently published book, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp. Exhaustively researched and brimming with original and brilliant interpretations, Leja’s book proposes a provocative… Full Review

For the best part of the twentieth century, the work of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905) was not accessible to the Anglophone reader. We have particular reason to welcome this highly readable translation of his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts because this particular book was recommended by its original editors, Otto Pächt and Karl Maria Swoboda, as the best introduction to Riegl’s thought. They would have had good cause to know, as they were intimately involved in his first renaissance in Vienna in the 1920s. Earlier translations of Riegl’s writings—Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The Group Portraiture… Full Review

If there can be any consolation for the sad passing of John Shearman in August of 2003, it is the legacy of this magisterial book, which the author was able to see through to press before his death and which will continue to impact future scholarship for generations to come. Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602) succeeds Vincenzo Golzio’s venerable but outdated Raffaello nei documenti (Vatican City: Pontifica Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, 1936), a book Shearman greatly admired (he confesses in his introduction [2] that while his own book was taking shape over several decades, he affectionately referred to… Full Review

In her first book, published in 1993, Marcia Kupfer drew attention to the underdiscussed frescoes of Romanesque central France, reading the images as a field within which political tensions were played out and through which social divisions were reinforced. In her second book, The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town, Kupfer returns to the same fertile ground but focuses still more acutely, concentrating on the wall paintings in the crypt of the collegiate parish church of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, in the diocese of Bourges. The result is a rewarding—but also difficult and speculative—work… Full Review

Mesopotamia, in particular Assyria and Babylon, occupies a foundational place in Western cultural identity derived from classical and biblical texts. Material traces, however, were scarce until large-scale excavations in what is now northern Iraq began in the mid-nineteenth century. In Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Frederick Bohrer examines the complex reception of ancient Mesopotamia through the lens of reception theory and postcolonialism. With the “discovery” and acquisition of monumental sculpture from sites such as Khorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh in the 1840s and their subsequent introduction to European audiences, a new engagement with the “ancient Orient”… Full Review

As the name implies, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life is the second in a series of readers edited by the Sarai Group, a collaborative formed by fellows at Delhi’s well-known institute for social and political research, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and the media artists and critics at the Society for Old and New Media in the Netherlands and the Raqs Media Collective in Delhi. Sarai Reader 01 explored the contemporary contours of the idea of public domain, particularly in relation to changing forms of knowledge, proprietorship, and notions of publicity. Sarai Reader 02 … Full Review

By acquiring nearly twenty thousand acres of countryside near the town of Frascati (twelve miles southeast of Rome) and refurbishing three residences on this land, the nephew of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, both created a papal retreat for his uncle and established a vast agricultural enterprise that was administered from the principal residence on this land, the Villa Mondragone. In Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era, Tracy Ehrlich contends that with these initiatives, Scipione Borghese made a comprehensive claim for his family’s nobility, seigniory, virtue, and elegance. Perhaps… Full Review

Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Nanga discusses how diplomatic contact between Korea and Japan during the eighteenth century helped to shape a new Japanese landscape painting style. By examining possible Korean influences on the development of Nanga, or Japanese literati painting, the author sheds new light on China’s Southern school of painting with respect to its cross-cultural transmission in East Asia. Students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art histories will all find this book of interest. Divided into three parts with an introduction and conclusion, Burglind Jungmann’s book provides an in-depth discussion on the… Full Review

To the untrained eye, Thai paintings can be hard to decipher. They look confusing, crowded with colorful figures that appear similar in detail and character, leaving no place to focus one’s attention. For those who wish to study Thai painting in its various forms—murals, banners, and manuscript painting—guidance from a visually rich, scholarly book would be invaluable. Reading Thai Murals by David Wyatt, the distinguished American historian of Thailand, should be such a book but falls short of the mark. Attractively presented, Reading Thai Murals focuses on the distinctive Buddhist murals dating from the late nineteenth… Full Review

What do we mean when we attribute a painting to an artist in the Netherlands or consider it belonging to the “school of Florence”? These regional designations, the coupling of artworks with place, are central to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new book, which examines notions of cultural geography as they apply to art. Toward a Geography of Art offers the first concentrated consideration of the value of location in the definition of works of art and, as such, is a thoroughly useful endeavor. Only some twenty years ago, Karl Poma, vice president of the Flemish Government of Belgium, introduced a lavish… Full Review