Browse Recent Reviews

Focusing on the etchings of boats by Balthazar Solvyns (1760–1824), Robert Hardgrave, who is preparing a book on this artist’s life and work, demonstrates how revealing these prints are as expressions of the materiality of daily lives. The book is filled not only with boat lore and facts, but also with information about social order, class and caste (the Muga Chara type of boat, for example, is used by the lower classes to celebrate marriage), tribal identities, pirates (the Arakanese, called Maghs, from Burma), and the economics of eighteenth-century river trade in India. Hardgrave’s wealth of knowledge about boats and… Full Review

With this important book, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Rosamond Mack has joined a growing number of scholars who have challenged the well-known model of the Renaissance as an exclusive and singular moment of genius and invention centered in Italy. According to this familiar standard, the Renaissance signaled both the definitive emergence of European civilization and the irreparable rupture between East and West. Scholars such as Jerry Brotton, Charles Burnett, Anna Contadini, Deborah Howard, Lisa Jardine, Gülru Necipoglu, and Julian Raby, to name a few, have countered this paradigm by viewing the period’s achievements in… Full Review

See Kishwar Rizvi’s review of this book Rereading Eurocentric or North American definitions of modernity has become a frequent pursuit for scholars during the last two decades. Instead of the virtual projection of one continuous modernism, discussions of the period’s heterogeneous character have emerged, and beyond that, cross-cultural debates have become important in understanding the spread and development of modernism outside Europe. Since Edward Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), the hybridity and complexity of non-Western societies and cultures have become a new field of research. This new paradigm has entered the field… Full Review

Tondi (autonomous paintings or sculpture in a circular format) became a popular art form in Florence between the mid-fifteenth century and approximately 1520. A large majority of tondi—which feature the Madonna and Child, often in the company of saints or angels and occasionally in narrative scenes—were generally created for private devotion in the home during the Renaissance. Examples of famous tondi include Domenico Veneziano’s Adoration of the Magi (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, ca. 1441), Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat (Florence, Uffizi, ca. 1482), Michelangelo’s Doni Holy Family (Florence, Uffizi, ca. 1503–6), and Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia (Florence, Galleria Pitti, ca… Full Review

There are some areas of our discipline that can be studied effectively with little reference to archaeology. Early medieval art history is not one of them. Those venturing into this field, particularly into central Europe before the formation of the Carolingian empire in the late eighth century, will probably find themselves studying as many excavation site reports as medieval texts. Therefore, the publication of this volume, promising to bring together written and material evidence in a relatively brief English-language survey, should have been cause for rejoicing. Herbert Schutz does indeed give an overview that is useful in some ways, but… Full Review

In the opening three chapters of her study of late medieval painting in Cologne, Brigitte Corley sets the stage with impressive scenery and a promising cast of characters. Sancta Colonia was a beautiful city of relics, pilgrimage, trade, learning, and spectacular imperial visits, in which various groups—archbishops, patricians, and city councilors—competed for power and prestige. Shifts in power resulted in fluctuating “patterns of patronage” that left behind a rich material culture of altarpieces, chapels, and liturgical objects. As Corley writes: “As political power changed hands…so patronage changed its initiators and its agenda. The archbishops primarily expressed spiritual and worldly power,… Full Review

Aware that art history still remains all too traditional in its orientation, much too focused upon European art, many art historians would like to have a true world history of art. As a student at Yale University, David Summers was inspired by George Kubler’s classes on pre-Columbian art. Now, after publishing justly renowned books devoted to Michelangelo and Renaissance naturalism, he has written a postformalist history of world art. This enormously long, clearly written book is not easy to summarize. Ordinarily surveys are organized historically, taking the reader from the Egyptians to the ancient Greeks and… Full Review

In his Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, Andrew Hemingway provides a materialist history of the left movement in the visual arts in the United States, beginning with the founding of the magazine New Masses in 1926. The year 1956 is a more symbolic terminus: the date the American Communist Party (CPUSA) “imploded,” to use the author’s oblique characterization. (Specifically, this was the year Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, among other critical events, resulting in an exodus of members from an already weakened and contracted organization.) Extensively researched, this important and provocative book challenges… Full Review

The quincentenary of Agnolo Bronzino’s birth was celebrated this year at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Toronto. The sessions there, organized by Janet Cox-Rearick, sought to plumb an artistic intellect that produced some of the most challenging art of the early modern period. Bronzino, noted for aloofness, impenetrability, and extreme refinement in his art, emerged in presentations on his eroticism and varietà as a prolific exponent of bawdy, burlesque poetry parodying the neo-Petrarchan modes and expression that saturated the cultural circle in which he moved. This seeming paradox of refinement in his art and travesty in his… Full Review

Great Altarpieces: Gothic and Renaissance is one of the latest additions to the new wave of scholarship on the altarpiece as a genre. The last two decades of the twentieth century were marked by an increasing pace of publications on altarpieces—which had not been studied as such since the late nineteenth century, when Jacob Burckhardt wrote an article called “Das Altarbild.” Recently a number of monographs on altarpieces of various regions have appeared, including: Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function; Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice; Judith Berg Sobré, Behind the Altar Table: The… Full Review