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This book is one of the University of California Press's Discovery Series, each of which focuses on a single important work of art, artist or theme in the history of art. Thus, Pressly's contribution examines in detail two paintings illustrating incidents in the French Revolution: Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, (1794, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut) and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers, August 12, 1792, (ca. 1794 [unfinished], Museum der Stadt, Regensburg). Johan Zoffany (1793-1810) was born in Germany where he was trained as a history painter. He studied in Italy,… Full Review

See also: Nadine M. Orenstein, ed. "Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints":http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/443, reviewed by Nils Buttner This recent catalogue of the drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the product of decades of research on the part of its author, who served as a curator of the Berlin-Dahlem Print Room from 1971 until his death in 1994. A widely respected scholar, Hans Mielke was the author of several significant publications, including major catalogues of the drawings of Dürer, Rubens and his circle, and Albrecht Altdorfer. Mielke became absorbed in the complexities of Bruegel's drawings during his… Full Review

The Dahesh Museum once again offered a valuable exhibition that expanded the offerings of art on view in New York. Dedicated to the display of "academic" art, its exhibitions have focused on the discarded artists of the modern period—Bouguereau, Rosa Bonheur, Alexandre Cabanel among others. This exhibition was no exception. While English art is on permanent display in New York at the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it tends toward the well-trod areas of eighteenth-century English portraiture and early nineteenth-century landscape paintings, whereas Victorian paintings are in short supply. Briefly for a few precious months, this exhibition… Full Review

George Michell has been publishing on aspects of South Asian architecture for more than twenty years, offering volumes of often broad scope on little known or underdeveloped topics and monuments. From his many publications on the remains and archaeological activities at the South Indian site of Vijayanagara in particular, but also Chandragiri, Firuzabad, and Deccani architecture to his volume on south Indian architecture published as part of the New Cambridge History of India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Michell has produced valuable documentation of the architecture of India, especially the south. The Royal Palaces of India is a welcome… Full Review

Frederick C. Moffatt has written a handsomely illustrated and abundantly researched book on George Grey Barnard's somewhat notorious statue of Abraham Lincoln. Part of the American Arts Series of the University of Delaware Press, this volume contributes to the growing number of publications on American sculptural history. Over the years, this series has held a special commitment to this underserved field with its publication of such prestigious tomes as Wayne Craven's Sculpture in America (originally printed in 1968). Although Moffatt surveys the bibliographic field of American sculpture until 1992 in his introduction and in further detail in a footnote (pp… Full Review

We have learned a great deal in recent years about the conditions under which images became commodities, to be dealt in, traded, even speculated in during the early modern period, from the researches of many scholars, including Michael Montias, Lorne Campbell, Dan Ewing, Lynn Jacobs, Hans van Miegrot, and Elizabeth Honig. Jean Wilson has made important contributions to this discussion with her studies of Bruges artists in the early sixteenth century. This book offers an overall synthesis of Wilson's earlier work in articles to present a picture of the dynamics of the development of painting as an economic activity in… Full Review

Showing it to be wholly a creature of the enlightenment, W. J. T. Mitchell has connected what would appear to be all the implications offered by the image of the dinosaur. In this regard, The Last Dinosaur Book is continuous with his more narrowly art-historical work on the landscape as a cultural construction. While some might think that an image ubiquitous to the bedrooms of America's children would be worth at least one book by an American cultural theorist, Mitchell has been accused of making too much of his topic. He anticipates this question (p. 183), but apparently to no… Full Review

The very name of the collection containing many of the depictions of sex discussed in John Clarke's Looking at Lovemaking—the "secret room" (il gabinetto segreto ) in the Museo Nazionale, Naples—suggests the challenge this material presents to interpreters of Roman visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated study, Clarke sets out to consider these coyly closeted objects in context, in order to analyze a cultural construction of sexuality that is markedly different from that of the late twentieth century. After addressing the Greek and Hellenistic background, he devotes three chapters to the Augustan-Julio-Claudian period—one on male-to-male sex featuring the Warren… Full Review

Poststructuralist theory has taught us to distrust a language that purports to represent its subject transparently and innocently, for words do not just present a value-neutral world for our consideration and use. Rather, such words as "woman artist," for example, give us both the thing and its meaning. If we accept this theory as correct, all language is suspect, but some forms of writing, such as biography, are capable of more mischief than others. Although biography claims to be nothing more than an account of a person's life supported by facts and dates, the choice and arrangement of those facts… Full Review

Call this a time when translations of Michelangelo's notoriously difficult poetry have entered into their own in English, and be grateful for the heroic labors of so many first-rate translators. John Frederick Nims's fine new rendition of Michelangelo's complete poems is the fifth major one to appear since 1960. In that year Joseph Tusiani offered the first rendition of the entire corpus in appropriately elevated, energetic, often enigmatic verse. Three years later Creighton Gilbert produced a marvelously exact, tonally accurate, scrupulously scholarly translation. In 1987, George Bull produced a documentary version with useful notes and apparatus. 1991 brought… Full Review