Recently Published Reviews

A growing body of publications has finally dispelled the myth that the Song dynasty (960–1279) marked the beginning of a long and inexorable decline of Buddhism throughout the imperial era in China.[1] Summit of Treasures: Buddhist Cave Art of Dazu, China by Angela Howard is an eloquent addition to this new scholarship. The subject of inquiry is the Baodingshan complex in Dazu County, Sichuan province, the only known Buddhist site in China exclusively constructed during the Song dynasty and devoted to religious development at the time. As the first major scholarly investigation of an artistic monument that functioned primarily outside… Full Review

The townscapes of Bernardo Bellotto (1722–80) have always delighted those in the know. Although never as prominent as his famous uncle, Antonio Canaletto, Bellotto has remained familiar to scholars through the regular appearance of his paintings in exhibitions and occasional reproduction in books. Yet he lingers on the margins of English-language scholarship, perhaps because he spent most of his career in the relatively unfamiliar terrain of Central Europe. Confusion about Bellotto's relation to Canaletto has also hurt his critical fortune, since some assume that the younger artist simply transferred his uncle's visual language to a different context. It hasn't helped… Full Review

Like Simon Marmion (d. 1489), Jean Poyet is a celebrated late fifteenth-century French painter whose documented works elude certain identification. Recorded in Tours between 1483 and 1498, Poyet was ranked with Jean Fouquet and praised for his mastery of perspective by several early sixteenth-century writers. Poyet's reputation waxed again three hundred years later, when his name was attached to the celebrated Hours of Anne of Bretagne (Paris, BNF, lat. 9474). With the discovery in 1868 and publication in 1880 of a document that decisively identified that book's illuminator as Jean Bourdichon, Poyet's contemporary and chief rival in Tours, the latter… Full Review

In The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, Alex Potts explains the transition from self-contained figurative sculpture to sculpture-in-the-expanded-field as the culmination of two centuries of beliefs that sculpture incites a "distinctive mode of apprehension" (2) from painting. This significant divide rests not strictly on the formal means of the two mediums, but also on the reactions these means prompt in viewers: For Potts the "vividly embodied physical and perceptual responses" (5) that accompany the spatiotemporal process of looking at three-dimensional art are necessarily unmatched in any flat, two-dimensional experience. Potts's study does not recount the historical debates on painting… Full Review

It is now widely recognized that much of African art has been created to sustain social harmony, improve living conditions, and encourage political cohesion. The varied functions of African works have been addressed in numerous exhibitions and books, yet for our times, there may be no topic more thought-provoking and inspiring than the resilient roles that African artworks play in healing and crisis management. Art and Oracle: African Art and Rituals of Divination, published in conjunction with the exhibition Art and Oracle: Spirit Voices of Africa, explores the complex relationships between art and divination… Full Review

In The Architecture of Norman England, Eric Fernie has produced the first indispensable study of medieval architecture for the new millennium. He achieves an admirable balance between a good introductory survey for the uninitiated and a new handbook for specialists. All of us are in his debt for making the material both interesting and accessible. The book will have a long and useful shelf life, all the more because it is, ultimately, a book about ideas and theoretical conceptions in architecture carefully grounded in archaeology, building analysis, and documents. It belongs in every reference library, as well as in… Full Review

See Susan Fillin-Yeh and Robert Moore’s response to this review The title of this anthology is misleading: The collection is not consistently about dandies, only tangentially about fashion, and the word “finesse” disappears after the title. The book offers both less and more than the title promises, skimping on the historical specificity of dandyism but expanding the reach of this term. At its worst, it simply spices common art-historical knowledge with a new nomenclature. At its best—and several of the essays are excellent—it affords new insight into overlooked aspects of modernism and even casts familiar images in… Full Review

Given the strong religious tenor of the last two decades of culture wars and the expansion of the "new art history" into visual culture, it seemed to be only a matter of time before the scholarly field took on the artifacts of religion for the work of academic debate and interpretation. In the preface to their fine anthology, editors David Morgan and Sally M. Promey point to a relatively widespread lack of scholarly discussion of religious imagery by North American art historians and religious historians alike. While the former has seen the onslaught of ideology and belief as eclipsing aesthetic… Full Review

Although more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), the ability of that groundbreaking study to stimulate new ways of considering monumental works of Renaissance culture has hardly diminished. Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art is a collection of essays inspired by Greenblatt's work that attempts to extend his concept of literary self-fashioning to a wide array of examples in the visual arts. Fashioning Identities contains fifteen essays: the introductory first chapter by Joanna Woods-Marsden, which provides both a summary of and… Full Review

The current explosion of critical and art-historical writing on "Conceptual Art," like the discursive production of "postmodernism" of the 1980s and early 1990s that preceded it, posits that the art production of a particular group of artists, by means of critical attack and strategic engagement, extended the development of visual modernism into what has been termed a "critical postmodernism" of the late twentieth century. Therefore, we are at this moment witnesses to the slow process of canonization that often characterizes the discourse of art history. It comes chronologically on the heels of American and European exhibitions that have attempted to… Full Review

This book advertises itself as a simple republication of the book-length essay, "Leonardo's Last Supper," that first appeared in the Art Quarterly in 1973 (Art Quarterly 36, no. 4, 1973: 297–410). Steinberg interlards the introduction with italicized passages; the first mentions Jonathan Crary's invitation, in 1997, to republish the essay as a book, and another begins: "At this point, I might as well reprint the rest" (13). But the book is far from a reprint: The majority of paragraphs are revised, there are wholly new pages, the notes altered and the chapters renumbered and rearranged, and the catalogue of… Full Review

Introducing himself as an "ardent searcher after the purest form in art," a young Parisian artist, Robert Pouyaud, wrote in 1924 to the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, asking him to correct the "error" of his art education. Gleizes responded by inviting Pouyaud to join in the collective exploration of his compositional exercises with his two Irish pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. Thus commenced a master-disciple relationship that soon had other consequences. In 1927, Pouyaud was a founding member of Moly-Sabata, a quasimonastic, rural art community established by Gleizes to unite urban artists with the soil. As Peter Brooke observes… Full Review

"The great advantage of a hotel," states the waiter in George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell, "is that it's a refuge from home life." In the 1950s, however, as an increasingly wealthy American middle class began to travel a world whose boundaries were largely defined by the Cold War, hotels could find considerable advantages in open links to the familiarity of home life. Consider, for example, the seventeen massive Hilton hotels built on foreign soil between 1949 and 1966. By piping ice water into each air-conditioned room, by serving milkshakes at a lobby soda fountain, or by setting… Full Review

While broad art-historical interest in the conditions of artistic production and the use of specific materials can now be said to date back more than a generation, there exists a rich body of literature describing detailed artistic practices that is much older still. Indeed, hundreds of surviving medieval manuscripts contain instructions, sometimes hasty and at other times meticulously detailed, relating to the preparation of pigments, inks, and varnishes. And yet, as Mark Clarke notes in this useful volume, there is no extant index that fully surveys the technologies of medieval painting, illumination, and related crafts. His aim is to fill… Full Review

Readers glancing at Erica Cruikshank Dodd's book on the frescoes in the Syrian Monastery of Moses the Ethiopian will not find ready evidence of the "new art history." Unfashionable terms like "influence" and "Oriental" abound, and nowhere does one come across references to "the gaze" or the construction of gender. More careful examination, however, will soon show that Dodd indeed participates in current debates about the visual culture of the Mediterranean in the period of the Crusades. She does so in two principal ways: by bringing to scholarly attention a virtually unknown painted church program from Muslim-controlled Syria, and by… Full Review