Recently Published Reviews

A book with the title Narrative and Experience: Innovations in Thirteenth-Century Picture Books seems to promise insights into how stories function and work upon readers; or perhaps, how narratives come to be significant within cultures. Alternately, such a study might immerse its readers in the intricacies of the working of a few particularly intriguing stories. Unfortunately, in terms of these sorts of expectations, Kumiko Maekawa's book delivers only disappointment. Nonetheless, even if a title seems to promise more than it delivers, it is unfair to criticize an author for failing to write the book that one would like to read… Full Review

Anne D. Hedeman's Of Counselors and Kings offers a comprehensive investigation of the Dialogues of Pierre Salmon. Salmon was an advisor to the ill-starred French king Charles VI (r. 1380-1422), whose debilitating mental illness contributed to a series of profound crises during his reign. The manuscripts consist of a set of questions purportedly posed by the king to Salmon—first concerning political issues and then theological matters—followed by a collection of transcribed letters relating to Salmon's attempts to discover a remedy for the king's illness. A second, slightly later version of the text also includes a lengthy treatise on virtues and… Full Review

A temptation with formal analysis is to detach the object of study from larger life, to concentrate on its properties that inhere in similar objects, and to restrict art's importance to art itself. Analysis of form is David Van Zanten's strength, but by narrowing his perspective, it leads to questionable conclusions. For example, the point where this stimulating book begins to unravel is when the authors claims that "Sullivan's Houses are as Important as His Banks," almost the title of Chapter 4. Sullivan's houses are as important as his banks only if we regard them as primarily design exercises, which… Full Review

Given this book's title, it bears asking what comprises the new media? Lev Manovich enumerates them early on: "Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality (VR), multimedia, computer games, interactive installations, computer animation, digital video, cinema, and human-computer interfaces" (8-9). What, then, is the new media's "language"? By language, Manovich intends both the diverse conventions used by new-media practitioners to organize data and structure the user's experience, and the various discourses that surround the new media. Grounded in an analysis of the ways in which new media have appropriated the forms and conventions of older art and communications media, Manovich's central… Full Review

Good things come in small packages. Diebold's book should join the ranks of other petit books that have made a large contribution not only to their field of specialization but also to a wider audience. Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art has found a place on my personal bookshelf alongside Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage (1909) and Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Diebold offers a fine, lively text—free of inhibiting scholarly apparatuses—that students and novice readers can enjoy. Based on his classroom lectures, Word and Image explores many of the key issues… Full Review

Janet Ward's Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany offers a rich, ambitious, and theoretically acute analysis of this subject and its legacy in our own time. In this book, Weimar visual culture emerges in its various guises—architectural, cinematic, and consumerist—to reveal the transition from the modern to the postmodern and the merging of high and low culture. These developments in turn prefigure our own current state of saturation with regard to the visual codes of consumerism. In its promotion of a pervasive urban spirit—and cult of surface that extended into the visual arenas of fashion, architecture, advertising, film… Full Review

The series of erotic pictures known as I modi, or The Positions, from which this book takes its allusive title, acts as a catalyst for a study of the erotic in Renaissance culture that makes an unprecedented attempt to determine—in terms untainted by modern day squeamishness or purulent curiosity—the origins, proliferation, and circulation of erotic and obscene material in early sixteenth-century Italy. Bette Talvacchias painstaking reconstruction of the fluctuating borders between that which was considered an acceptable representation of the erotic (and therefore appropriate for wide circulation) as opposed to that which was decreed obscene and… Full Review

As Francis Haskell reminds us in this meticulously researched book, the idea of a permanent collection of paintings is slowly becoming a thing of the past. The collecting, arranging, and display of art works in museums reflects an increasingly ephemeral experience determined by the needs of museums and galleries to prove their worth in a world of accountability. In a witty introduction, the author reminds us that as jets are ferrying their precious cargo to blockbuster exhibitions throughout the world, curators work like harassed nibelungen to ready paintings for fast-approaching deadlines. In The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master… Full Review

In cities and towns across the United States, museums and galleries stage countless art exhibitions in the course of a season. Direct mailings and advertisements may lure us in, but it is often a critic who persuades us to go or stay home. Revered or reviled, art critics have an effect on our actions and opinions. And to whatever extent we agree or dispute with these critics, we read their reviews. Or do we? That question haunts Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826-1925, for difficult as it might be to determine who read reviews and how much… Full Review

With the collection of nineteen essays in Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, Paul Corbey Finney promises to provide a revisionist account of the relationship between Calvinism and the visual arts by challenging the presumed, prevalent view that Calvinism had either no impact or a purely negative effect on the development of the visual arts. Rather than focus on acts of Reformed iconoclasm, Finney calls his readers to examine the positive contribution that Calvinism made to the visual arts. Discovering the gift offered, however, remains a daunting task, for according to the editor, the nature… Full Review

By invoking the name of this well-known Dutch cultural idol in the title of their magnificent exhibition and catalogue, the organizers of Vermeer and the Delft School assured historically packed houses for both of the museums that hosted this show. As visitors realized upon entering, however, the show did not focus narrowly upon the genius Vermeer, who produced only about sixteen of the 159 works on display. Rather, its scope was broadly historical, examining the rise of Vermeer's native Delft as an artistic center during the course of the seventeenth century and probing the special properties of Delft painting. Is… Full Review

This is a valuable book for both historians and art historians concerned with Renaissance Florence. It boasts the intriguing topic, "Art, Memory, and Family," and contains scholarly essays from leading historians and art historians in their respective fields. As discussed by the art historian Patricia Lee Rubin in the book's preface, the essays originated in a symposium held at the National Gallery in London in 1996. Although some of the conference papers have since appeared elsewhere in print, Rubin's thoughtful preface (the historian Ciappelli wrote the introduction) incorporates their ideas to make this volume an almost complete record of the… Full Review

The text that comprises Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 is, to borrow from Roland Barthes (writing around the time Artforum became an established art-world institution), not “a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning,” but rather “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.”[1] Consisting of fragments of interviews woven together to produce a narrative that chronicles the first twelve years of Artforum’s publication, this text is literally a “tissue of quotations.” Thus, the structure of the book reflects the discursive nature of this project’s source. As Amy Newman writes in the introduction, “An unruly group… Full Review

In his previous book, The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics and Art History, Keith Moxey called on art historians to abandon their quest for objectivity and instead foreground the precepts of critical theory. Its sequel, The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox & Power in Art History, considers what such an approach means for the discipline of art history. Moxey rejects what he perceives as the nostalgia for order and tradition in the current reaction against the incursion of critical theory because he believes it ignores the most important development of recent times: the demise of grand narratives. The… Full Review

"Rome is the most glorious place in the Universal World"—this was how the twenty-six-year-old Scottish architect Robert Adam described his reaction to the city on his arrival in 1755. Both Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century and the exhibition it was created to accompany are lavish, vivid demonstrations of that assertion. The catalogue, however, is much more; it combines illustration of the exhibition—called The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome and held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston during the spring and summer of 2000—with a tremendous amount of research that, until fairly recently… Full Review