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To understand museums and art history, Foucauldians say, we need to understand the changing political roles of these institutions. Knowledge of the past is never neutral, for it always serves present goals. Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s very ambitious, splendidly achieved book, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, tells the story of the development of art history in India. Her study explains how English figures such as Alexander Cunningham developed their vision of Indian art’s history, contrasting the elegance of Buddhism with the degenerate excesses of Hinduism. The book also shows how the early colonial museums were… Full Review

El Greco (henceforth cited as Greco) constituted the first comprehensive North American exhibition of the work of Domenikos Theotokopolous (1541–1614) since El Greco of Toledo (henceforth cited as Toledo) of 1982–83, organized by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and traveling to Madrid, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas. A groundbreaking exhibition, Toledo brought together a substantial proportion of the artist’s most important paintings for the first time. The success of that exhibition in defining a corpus of recognized masterpieces is suggested by the inclusion of thirty-seven of the sixty-six paintings from Toledo in Greco. With eighty-three… Full Review

Of the dozen decorated biblical manuscripts that survive from late antiquity, the so-called Ashburnham Pentateuch in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. nouv. acq. 2334) is the most elaborate. Its eighteen (more or less) full-page illustrations contain some one hundred scenes set in detailed landscapes and rich architectural settings; and its ten chapter lists are adorned with decorated arches and ornamental fauna. Compared to the other surviving manuscripts, the Ashburnham Pentateuch is also relatively unstudied: even Kurt Weitzmann, who scavenged virtually every bit of evidence to support his concept of the evolution of the illustrated codex, all but completely… Full Review

Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte, a book that accompanied an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, combines extensive art-historical analysis of the painting with detailed study by conservators. The most dramatic contribution is the “rejuvenated” image of La Grande Jatte, a full-scale reproduction created by Roy S. Berns using digital technology to replace Georges Seurat’s now-darkened zinc yellow with something close to the original color. An essay by Frank Zuccari and Allison Langley traces the compositional evolution of the picture by studying it with a variety of imaging techniques. Inge Fiedler analyzes Seurat’s materials and… Full Review

According to Rosemarie Mulcahy, the reputation of Philip II has suffered from bad press throughout the years. She writes, “The image [of Philip] that prevails is that of the severe assiduous defender of the Catholic Faith, a dry and mean-spirited personality” (xv). Indeed, the specter of the Inquisition, the harsh Spanish rule of the Netherlands, and the aloof late portraiture of the man in black have done little to counter negative impressions. In this book, composed of both previously published research and new material, Mulcahy aims to realign our perception of Philip through the examination of his artistic patronage. She… Full Review

In the past several decades, major art exhibitions and significant scholarly publications on seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and prints of daily life have manifested the enthusiastic scrutiny of such imagery by scholars and the public alike. The thousands of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings offer seemingly accurate views of daily life; however, as numerous scholars have addressed, the subject matter of such scenes has been selectively determined, resulting in the omission of many ordinary aspects of Dutch life. Scholars have posited various methodological approaches to recover the meaning and function of such images for their seventeenth-century middle- and upper-class viewers. In Dutch… Full Review

Building on recent scholarship that has revealed the degree to which the printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi was not a simple copyist but an independently minded artist, Lisa Pon’s book, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, argues that his works are products of collaboration: among the engraver, the inventor, and the publisher on the one hand, and between the viewer and the image on the other. Pon situates Marcantonio’s engravings against the rise during the sixteenth century of what she describes as the “artist-author”—celebrated most memorably in Giorgio Vasari’s description of Michelangelo’s heroic single-handed paintings of… Full Review

By now it should be evident to artists that making art is not without some risk of exposure to harmful substances. But it is also evident that many artists do not pay much attention to the risk. Art students—even senior undergraduate and graduate students—are often wholly unprepared and uninformed about how to reduce their exposure to toxic materials, or even about what the risks are. This must mean that their teachers, who are also artists, do not discuss these issues with them and, perhaps, are relatively uninformed themselves. Mention health and safety issues to your colleagues… Full Review

As a first exposure to the subject of health hazards in the studio, Michael McCann’s book provides an excellent overview of the subject. His catchy chapter titles, such as “Is Your Art Killing You?” and “How Art Materials Can Hurt You,” are exactly the type of attention grabbers needed to encourage the artist or student to read more. As McCann notes in the introductory section, part 1, entitled “Chemical and Physical Hazards,” is meant as a general introduction, to be read first; part 2, “Art and Craft Techniques,” provides specific information organized by particular mediums and practices. … Full Review

In her recent book The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Pamela H. Smith contributes to a growing body of scholarship that reevaluates the relationship between art and science in early modern Europe. She argues that the roots of the Scientific Revolution may be found in the products and practices of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artisans. Equating active knowledge with handworkers, Smith sees the physical engagement of craftsmen with matter and nature as a particular, valuable form of cognition linked to what she calls a “vernacular” or “artisanal epistemology.” She proposes that we consider this… Full Review