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An intriguing concept lies behind this anthology: in 1999, a group of graduate students under the direction of Yves Christe in Geneva began the systematic comparison of the iconography of the Bibles moralisées and the stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. In 2001, their results were presented along with other scholarship on the Sainte-Chapelle at an international colloquium organized by Christe and Peter Kurmann at the Collège de France. Four contributors from the Geneva...

The History of British Art, Volume 1: 600–1600 is the first of an ambitious new three-volume series produced by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain. Edited by Tim Ayers, this volume is, temporally at least, the most ambitious of the three, covering the period of the conversion of Britain under Augustine around 600 AD to a rather more difficult period to account for, ca. 1600. The latter date—which denies the normal boundary...

Artists’ books are a strange genre in contemporary art, hovering between several different disciplines and having multiple histories. One of the persistent arguments in the field concerns the definition of an artist’s book. A reductive form of this argument might be: is it a craft practice or is it some kind of conceptual art form? Arguing definitions in the abstract is a fruitless and pointless activity, but examining the work of specific artists is rewarding...

Over the last two decades much important research has been done on Spanish portraiture of the early modern period and court portraiture in particular. A feature of this research has been its interdisciplinary approach, such as Juan Miguel Serrera’s seminal essay on the uses of portraiture (“Alonso Sánchez Coello y la mecánica del retrato de corte,” in Alonso Sánchez Coello, exh. cat., Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 1990, 38–63) and Javier Portús Pérez’s groundbreaking publications...

Anyone who has ever wondered why and how representations of the human nude became so central to Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western art will derive great pleasure from this catalogue, which documents an exhibition of fifty-six drawings from the impressive collection of the Crocker Art Museum. The works splendidly demonstrate the skillful use of pen-and-ink and wash techniques as well as combinations of black, red, and white chalks, most by renowned artists such as Peter Paul...

Lori Boornazian Diel’s study of the colonial Mexican manuscript known as the Tira de Tepechpan is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly literature examining colonial historical documents, both pictorial and textual. The Tira de Tepechpan is an annals-style manuscript documenting the history and ruling lineage of the central Mexican town of Tepechpan. It was probably begun around 1553 and its imagery completed ca. 1590/96, with written annotations in Nahuatl added at an...

Over the past twenty years or so, Paul Gauguin’s imagery has drawn a good deal of interest from scholars who have analyzed it from feminist, post-colonial, and socio-historical perspectives. Taken together, the contributions of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Griselda Pollock, and Stephen Eisenman have deepened our understanding of the ways in which Gauguin operated uneasily within Western, patriarchal, imperialist norms and structures. For her part, Debora Silverman has anchored his work in nineteenth-century Catholic theology and visual...

Those unfamiliar with earlier publications by Jérôme Baschet, a member of the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, might well approach this modest little paperback in expectation of a useful but uninspiring handbook devoted to the matching of written text and visual image. Defined by Erwin Panofsky as preliminary to the true interpretation of meaning, iconography has too often been conceived in practice as a matter...

“Both at the moment of the Revolution and long after its official end,” writes Trish Loughran in The Republic in Print, “the challenge posed by national dispersion would be the most recurrent problem in American political economy” (62). The “United States” had to be constructed as a self-evident, self-identical entity during precisely the period that its populations were dispersing most rapidly over a vast geographical space. How did anything like unity—rhetorical or actual—emerge from conditions...

In his historiographic essay “American Histories of Photography,” Anthony Lee claims that the photographic field is “mercurial and eclectic” in both “interests and methods.” This happens, he asserts, “partly because its subject has continually proved to be a moving target . . . and partly because the contours of photography’s multiple histories have touched on so many areas of inquiry—aesthetic, scientific, industrial, and more. For these and other reasons, the American history of photography is...