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In his long-awaited monograph on the Tempietto del Clitunno, Judson Emerick seeks to dispel the myths surrounding this enigmatic building. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists who discovered the building saw it as a Roman temple converted to Christian purpose. Thus, Leon Battista Alberti observed, "I myself have seen in Umbria a small ancient temple..." (book 1, chapter 8). Modern scholars however, have concluded that the structure was built in the medieval period, principally because the carved tympana bear cross monograms unknown before the early fourth century. Subsequent debate has centered on the dating of the monument--with proposals from… Full Review

The reverberations of Saint Louis's oath to embark on his first crusade to the Holy Land were acutely felt throughout the royal domain. In examining this period, Daniel Weiss draws a connection between the iconographic program of the Ste-Chapelle in Paris (1244–48) and the Old Testament manuscript produced in Acre shortly after 1250, now in the Bibliothèque d'Arsenal in Paris (MS 5211) (8). This bold confederacy of monuments is based on the common themes of sacred kingship, holy war, wisdom, and piety that are underscored in both iconographic programs. The preeminence of David and Solomon, the importance of God's intervention… Full Review

In eighteenth-century Britain, expanding mercantile enterprise, supported through rapid colonial expansion, yielded broad cultural expectations concerning access not only to wealth, but also to the status traditionally accorded to the aristocratic elite. A burgeoning material economy confused the visual economy producing status. Customary signs of wealth and standing were devalued, awash in a flood of luxury goods. Simultaneously, these very markers, desired for their power to project an image of social standing, were criticized, seen as reflecting selfishness and personal gain, and therefore threatening the ideal of a public sphere of disinterested citizens. In this destabilizing of traditional… Full Review

As suggested by the title Pacific Arcadia: Images of California, 1600-1915, this exhibition and the book that accompanies it study the changing and inducible imagery of the "California Dream" as presented by Claire Perry, curator of American art at Stanford's Cantor Center for Visual Arts. Perry traces how, over a period of centuries, a variety of pictorial imagery was used to market California as the golden land of opportunity. Perry's text, based on her doctoral dissertation, not merely catalogues the exhibition, but stands on its own as an important resource on the cultural history of California. The scope and… Full Review

A recent profile of Jasper Johns finds the painter amid various projects in his studio ("A Master of Silence Who Speaks in Grays," New York Times, Sept. 5, 1999, Section 2, page 29, col. 1). On the wall is a work in progress that includes a string suspended from two points along the perimeter and forming a gentle curve as it arcs across the canvas. When told by a house guest that the resultant curve not only has a name but also a precise mathematical derivation, one frequently used by engineers, the artist is taken aback: "I'd never heard… Full Review

Ross Neher's recently published book, Blindfolding the Muse: The Plight of Painting in the Age of Conceptual Art, has all the makings of a curmudgeon's acerbic longing for the days when painting was the only game in town, before "ideas" were privileged over the visual. Not short on wit and one-liners, Neher's book envisions a solution for painting's return to the unique status it once held. But the author refrains from excessively condemning Conceptual art for bringing down painting. Not written in the dialectical fashion popular with many critics and historians, his is a lucid account of what does… Full Review

Britain's grand age of market hall construction, 1830-90, saw the transformation of traditional open-air markets into mammoth multi-storied buildings with standardized stalls and shops arranged within variations of a parallelogram. Often wrapped in a Gothic, Italianate, or eclectic shop-front façade, the market hall provided the modern townscape with a new and distinctive addition to an expanding range of civic and commercial structures, such as the town hall, courthouse, railway station, department store, arcade, and hotel. Prototype for the modern shopping mall, the market hall was a classroom where urban dwellers first learned to be consumers in the modern sense—mastering the… Full Review

Why "yet another study" of Abstract Expressionism? David Craven answers his own question by positing that his book discloses "new material," provides a "novel approach," and embodies "a shift in critical perspective" (p. 2) regarding the art historical analysis of what may well be American art's best known and most widely discussed style of painting. The new sources that Craven examines consist of two sets of previously unpublished materials: 200 pages of FBI files on various Abstract Expressionist artists (Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner); and a series of interviews with Meyer Schapiro… Full Review

This long-awaited volume springs from a 1992 conference at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Sikh Art and Literature, held in conjunction with an exhibition focused on Sikh painting, Splendors of the Punjab: Art of the Sikhs. Generously illustrated with many color plates and almost one hundred pictures in black and white, the book provides a fine compilation of visual arts we may associate with Sikhism, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, architecture, and the artistic documentation of colonial observers, as well as, importantly, photography and paintings by contemporary Sikh artists. Essays concerning accomplished Sikh authors of the nineteenth and… Full Review

John O'Brian's compact but ambitious book eludes categorization. Most obviously, it is the latest entry in the "modernism comes to America" genre. It is also a reception study more sophisticated than the usual "critical fortune" type, taking account of muted but tenacious ideologies as well as overt expressions of opinion and taste. Finally, the book positions itself within the recent trend of institutional histories in the art world, especially of museums and the trade in art. O'Brian's point of entry into this intersection of diverse fields is the art of Henri Matisse and the response to it in the United… Full Review