Recently Published Reviews

Anthony White’s monograph on Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana is a long overdue intervention in the literature on Italian and South American twentieth-century abstraction. Correcting for a longstanding lacuna in the scholarship, White departs from the tendency on the part of what scant accounts do exist to focus only on Fontana’s post-World War II production, the punctures (Buchi) and slits (Attesse) he famously made up to his death in 1968. Looking at the entirety of the artist’s development, from his early years of training at the Brera Academy in Milan during the years in which Italian Fascism… Full Review

The Spirit of Vitalism: Health, Beauty and Strength in Danish Art, 1890–1940 (originally published in Danish as Livslyst. Sundhed—Skønhed—Styrke i dansk kunst 1890–1940) is a collection of essays with a catalogue that was published to accompany an exhibition entitled Zest for Life. Health—Beauty—Strength in Danish Art 1890–1940 held at the Fyns Kunstmuseum/Odense City Museums and Fuglsang Kunstmuseum in 2008. Both exhibition and publication were the result of a long-term project dating back to 2001 and involving the participation of a number of Danish museums (7). The large-format volume consists of fifteen essays written by fourteen contributors, and a substantial… Full Review

Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture offers a lucid and perspicacious examination of the evolving social lives of major Mughal monuments, an overlooked topic in the now-extensive corpus of literature on Mughal architectural history. In the early 1990s scholars revisited Mughal architecture, a subject that had been neglected since the colonial era. The best-known scholars of Mughal architecture, Ebba Koch and Catherine Asher, provided expansive studies that examine how patronage, politics, and religious concerns shaped the formal, decorative, spatial, and symbolic programs of various Mughal monuments (Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture, Oxford: Oxford… Full Review

Students of the late John Shearman who were too young to have seen the exhibitions devoted to Federico Barocci (1535–1612) in Bologna and Florence in 1975—myself included—often heard that their beauty and interest had finally proved that exhibitions could be of real inspiration and value, subtly altering and enlarging one’s understanding of an artist’s achievement. Current generations had the possibility of experiencing the same pleasure and profit through exhibitions recently held in St. Louis and London. This monographic exhibition traced the work of the great Urbinate artist, who probably came of age in Pesaro in the later 1540s, attempted a… Full Review

Scholarship on Giotto’s architecture has focused on work such as the campanile in Florence (1334) as well as other buildings he is said to have designed, along with the origins of Giotto’s depicted structures, whether and how he based these renderings on actual buildings. To this point, Decio Gioseffi’s Giotto architetto (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1963) is the only monograph dedicated to the full span of Giotto’s painted architecture—in addition to discussing his role as architect. In Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (3rd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), John White brilliantly analyses a few frescoes in the… Full Review

Arranged topically rather than chronologically, the English translation of Paul Zanker’s concise and highly accessible review of art in the Roman world is a valuable contribution and will appeal to students and general readers alike. Divided into seven main chapters, Zanker examines both political and non-political imagery as seminal elements in a “system” of visual communication. As he states in the introduction, much of his approach is indebted to the earlier studies of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli and, more recently, Tonio Hölscher (Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Center of Power. Roman Art to A.D. 200, trans. Peter Green, London: Thames… Full Review

Neal Keating has written a stimulating—and bold—book. Iroquois Art, Power, and History “describes and interprets the historical and current practices of visual expression carried out by indigenous Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America.” (Haudenosaunee refers to the original six member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.) Covering more than four centuries, Keating seeks “to demonstrate a significant cultural continuity between contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples and their pre-colonial and colonial-era ancestors.” Fortunately, he recognizes this is “an argument that is surprisingly contentious in the field of Iroquois studies” (3), and so his assertions are, on the whole, well… Full Review

The abundance of literature on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio published in the last four decades has shown not only an incredible divergence of attitudes toward the painter but also an increased number of interpretations that in some cases make it seem as if a new Caravaggio has emerged with no clear reference to the real one. It is these assessments of the painter that brought Sybille Ebert-Schifferer to take a step back and reexamine Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre in light of the sources and the documents known to us today. In that, Ebert-Schifferer’s purpose seems to be ambitious on the one… Full Review

The advent of digitization has created methods of cultural production that bring new considerations to the relationships between ideas, artifacts, and audiences. Looking at the San Diego Museum of Art’s exhibition Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design, conceived by Michele De Lucchi, one can observe the effects of digitization, as the eighteenth-century designer and fabulist’s work is expressed though twenty-first-century opportunities. The show goes far beyond previously typical methods of curation, creating entirely new incarnations of Piranesi’s work. The result is an exhibition of eighteenth-century work with the resonance of a twenty-first-century cultural spectacle. Its ambitions tread into… Full Review

The publication of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) marked the rebirth of the Mediterranean, both as an object of study and as the space characterizing a given object of study. Since then, the sea and its many corruptions, from antiquity to early modernity, has fallen under the lens of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, as well as art and architectural historians. Mediterranean Studies became increasingly multi- and interdisciplinary, with a growing number of scholars interested in cross-cultural interaction and exchange. Indeed, it has grown so exponentially that one can… Full Review

In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, celebrated the university’s acquisition of Norma Jean Calderwood’s impressive, yet largely unpublished, private collection of Persianate art. Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, certainly faced challenges in cohesively displaying this private collection, which consists of a disparate array of over 140 objects and spans a thousand years of production history. However, the exhibition ultimately provided a thoughtful and welcome display of Islamic art during a time in which Harvard’s permanent Islamic collection is… Full Review

Illuminated manuscripts offer the best-surviving evidence of Jewish artistic production in the Middle Ages, bearing witness to the tastes of their Jewish patrons, the skills of Jewish scribes, and the aesthetic acuity of Jewish readers and viewers. Jews did not live in isolation, and the artists responsible for the decoration of their books—who were not necessarily Jewish but may have been—both drew from and contributed to the artistic conventions of the dominant culture. Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries, an exhibition held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2012–13 and online via the Jewish museum website… Full Review

The American author and artist Henry Darger, Jr. (1892–1973) lived in almost total seclusion for most of his adult life, earning subsistence income as a hospital custodian. His real life’s work, discovered posthumously, is the 15,145 page, single-spaced, illustrated manuscript for The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger’s epic and its accompanying graphics depict a fantasy universe in which the heroic Vivian Girls, young hermaphroditic sisters endowed with magical powers, venture to protect their world from attack by… Full Review

Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? is the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name that was mounted in 2011 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. With this project, Georges Didi-Huberman continues his exploration of the links between desire, collecting, images, and redemption (or at least remembrance). Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is the point of instigation for the exhibition and catalogue. Didi-Huberman has already written extensively on Warburg, whom he seems to claim as a kindred spirit. Warburg’s work resisted both scientism and aestheticism, though he was fully capable of dogged… Full Review

Jo Applin’s Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America argues for a more pluralistic take on American sculpture in the 1960s than the established dominant narrative figured in historical overviews such as Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss (New York: Viking Press, 1977) or The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist by Alex Potts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which privileges Minimalism. At the moment of this writing when mainstream contemporary art discourse seems to love Minimal art more than ever (James Turrell recently filled the Guggenheim rotunda while Carl Andre graced the cover of Artforum), Applin’s book… Full Review