Browse Recent Book Reviews

Baroque Rome was in large part built by talented Lombards, among whom were Domenico Fontana, Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini, and Carlo Fontana. A native of the diocese of Como, Giovanni Battista Nolli (1701-56) was a surveyor (geometra) who, between the years 1722 and 1734, prepared cadastral maps, first in Lombardy and then in Savoy, utilizing the plane table (tavoletta pretoriana), a device then only recently introduced into Italy. In Rome, no longer a functionary within a centralized state bureaucracy, he put his cartographic skills to entrepreneurial use in devising a plan, published in 1748, that was… Full Review

Recent decades have seen a number of inventive studies that have added significantly to our understanding of medieval and early modern images of the Crucifixion, from James Marrow's analysis of Passion iconography in Northern art to Anne Derbes's examination of the impact of Franciscan devotional piety on medieval Italian art. No less inventive is Mitchell Merback's book, which plunges us into the world of judicial spectacle, for it is this author's central claim that "late medieval realist painters presented the sacred scene of the Crucifixion in terms of their own, but more importantly their audience's, experiences with criminal justice… Full Review

Megan Holmes's beautifully-illustrated book on Fra Filippo Lippi sets a standard for the study of Florentine Renaissance art by demonstrating how much more remains to be done, even for an artist who has been the object of study for centuries. Florentine Renaissance art is, after all, one of the oldest fields of art history, and the bibliography is extensive. Writers since the late quattrocento have reveled in the beauty of the works, and already in the sixteenth century Vasari had established a trajectory for the field as well as the emphasis on the individual artist that still commands our interest… Full Review

As a reflex of the growing resistance among European intellectuals in industrialized societies to glaring colonialist appropriations, an avant-garde emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which adopted an open-minded anthropological perspective. Rejecting racially tainted claims of the superiority of Western cultural traditions, it proposed a series of expressive theories that valued the authenticity and originality of the "primitive." After World War I, however, and notably since the twenties when a "Call to Order" was issued, a different attitude supervened critics, extolling High Art in terms of a timeless, present, assimilated art négre to the purist forms of… Full Review

It is not hard to see the significance of photography—as idea, as technology, as way of seeing—to Andy Warhol's art. His most famous paintings are appropriated photographs (think of the Marilyns, Jackies, race riots, electric chairs, or the commissioned portraits) and they visually signify as such. Moreover, Warhol's method for making use of photography—silkscreen—mimics the process of technological reproduction that characterizes photography. (Warhol: "With silkscreening, you pick a photograph, blow it up, transfer it in glue onto silk, and then roll ink across so the ink goes through the silk but not through the glue. That way, you get the… Full Review

It is rare that an exhibition pushes curatorial conventions, particularly in a monographic show which is so dependent on the stylistic development of an artist. The exhibition An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine held at the Jewish Museum (1998), however, bypassed standard organizational principles of chronology or thematic genres and concentrated, instead, on the history of Soutine's critical reception. The unorthodox groupings allowed us to look at Soutine, as well as the apparatus of art criticism, anew. To be sure, as the first retrospective of the artist's work to be organized in thirty years, our eyes were… Full Review

Chinese art scholarship is undergoing invigorating change, in tandem with the larger field of art history but with special characteristics of its own. The book under review illuminates the political and cultural significance of painting during the first two dynasties of China's early modern period: the Sung (960-1279) and the Yuan (1279-1368). The original occasion for this volume's seven papers was a symposium held in conjunction with the 1996 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taiwan. A welcome openness to a variety of approaches is nicely reflected in… Full Review

In 1940 John I. H. Baur organized an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum devoted to the work of Eastman Johnson (1824-1906). For the next three decades, the publication accompanying that show was the standard source on the painter's life and achievement--for the few who chose to disturb Johnson's posthumous obscurity. In 1972, in tandem with her dissertation research, Patricia Hills assembled a retrospective of the artist's work for the Whitney Museum of American Art; her text became the foremost reference related to the painter and American nineteenth-century genre painting. The publications of both Baur and Hills revealed much about both… Full Review

For some years now, a lingering sense of inadequacy has plagued U.S. historians of ancient art and text, a sense of having somehow got behind in the great "race for theory" (Barbara Christian's phrase). Everyone elsewhere and in other fields always seemed to have read more broadly and to have thought more originally about theoretical frameworks for scholarship. But The Art of Ancient Spectacle, an elegantly produced and intellectually sophisticated collection of nineteen essays on Hellenistic, Etruscan and Roman culture, demonstrates the pointlessness of continuing the lament; the majority of papers reveal a… Full Review

Bernadette Fort has performed an important service by editing this new edition of the reviews of the biennial Salons or officially sponsored art exhibitions originally published in that remarkable 18th-century French periodical, the Memoires secrets. The eleven Salon reviews included in the volume, spanning the last two decades of the old regime, are one of the most important sources we have to document contemporary reactions to the painting and sculpture of this period, that saw the shift from Rococo to neoclassical and the emergence of such talents as Jacques-Louis David and Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. These reviews also represent an important… Full Review