Recently Published Reviews

Each of these slender, beautifully produced catalogues accompanied exhibitions focusing on landscapes painted by one American artist during the first decades of the twentieth century. Prompted by the desire to highlight the paintings in their collections, both museums chose to showcase a small number of related works. Each catalogue contains contextual essays and full-page color reproductions of every painting in the exhibition. No doubt owing to the contingencies of resources and audiences, however, the curators made different decisions about the scope of works presented, the questions asked, and the issues explored The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum wisely capitalized on the… Full Review

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio's book on Renaissance childbirth and its imagery joins a growing bibliography on the domestic setting and function of art in Renaissance Italy. Peter Thornton's survey of Renaissance interiors, Dora Thornton's monograph on scholars' studies, Cristelle Baskin's analysis of heroine imagery on painted chests, Anne Barriault's discussion of style in Tuscan painted wall panels, and other efforts have enriched our knowledge of the domestic environment, and of the place and function of art in homes. Much of this work is based on Florentine sources. Because Florentines were so meticulous in their record keeping, and because art had such… Full Review

This brief but handsome study offers the reader a detailed account of the close correlation of art and liturgy in medieval Byzantium. In pursuing this end, the book privileges evidence from the sanctuary programs of twenty-seven churches in Byzantine Macedonia, whose decorations date from the early eleventh century to the early fourteenth century (the final section of the book, 80-111, offers a useful catalogue of these programs). In addition to this core material evidence, a number of other churches from Cyprus and the Peloponnesos are discussed in some detail. Discussion of these works is framed by wide-ranging reference to liturgical… Full Review

Franklin & His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America is an ambitious exhibition and catalogue that examines the role of portraiture in the world of natural and physical science in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The selection of Franklin as a focal point for the study was a meaningful way to focus a considerable body of artistic and archival material. In one way or another Franklin's life intersected with that of each of the other figures represented in the portraits selected for examination individually and collectively. Perhaps the most interesting assertion made by the authors is… Full Review

John Wood's edited book is an engaging volume that links theoretical and artistic explorations of information technology. Although the two are currently not as complementary as I would desire, the book suggests the great potential for such collaborations. The five sections of the book contain high-caliber work covering a sweeping range of topics, including virtual reality, knowledge production, ethics, and performance art. The first two sections of the book are theoretical. The other three sections describing artistic projects are strong in their own right, but do not sufficiently complement the theoretical chapters. The main impetus for the book… Full Review

Historians of South Asian art and culture often use models of dynastic patronage and stylistic influence as tools to evaluate the wealth of artistic material that populates India's countryside and museums. In his new book, Andrew L. Cohen critically wrestles with these models, revealing their weaknesses in addressing material that defies their pre-conceived frameworks. Cohen's examination of the southern Nolamba kingdom published in Temple Architecture and Sculpture of the Nolambas: Ninth-Tenth Centuries provides an excellent case study to challenge the appropriateness of categories like regional and dynastic style. The Nolambas were a relatively small South Indian kingdom whose… Full Review

Orientalism Transposed takes on two formidable tasks: to connect the methodologies of art history with the insights of postcolonial scholarship on Orientalism, and at the same time to shift the perspective from which Orientalism has traditionally been formulated. I say formidable, because incorporating both of these elements in a volume accessible and useful for both art historians and postcolonial culture scholars is a difficult balancing act. It requires that one combine theoretical apparati from Saidian Orientalism to Bhabha's "sly civility" while discussing works of art--something neither of those theorists did. Each essay in the volume approaches the colonial encounter and… Full Review

The Restoration has probably received less attention than any other period in nineteenth-century French art history. Long identified with a repressive political regime, it has long been ignored as a discrete period, although many artists, such as Ingres and Delacroix, produced their most memorable work at this time. Marie-Claude Chaudonneret, one of the most eminent French art historians, has now filled this gap with a thorough history of the period. Her previous work on the Troubadour painters was notable for its solid research and she has now brought the same approach to this period. As the title implies, … Full Review

Winner of CAA's "Charles Rufus Morey Book Award":http://www.collegeart.org/caa/aboutcaa/morey.html Jeffrey Hamburger's collection of essays, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, examines the function of religious images in the context of female enclosure in the later Middle Ages. Hamburger's stated objective is twofold: to explore art that medieval women commissioned, or that their superiors commissioned for them; and to situate this art in the context of enclosure. Hamburger began research that led to this publication in 1989. Six of these nine essays have been previously published, but revised for this collection. Though… Full Review

This is an ambitious book on the historiography of seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture, containing essays written by many of the most influential Dutch archivists, art historians and historians at work in the 1990s: Marten Jan Bok, Jeroen Boomgaard, Dedalo Carasso, Frans Grijzenhout, E. de Jongh (with two essays), J.J. Kloek, Eveline Koolhaas and Sandra de Vries, E.H. Kossmann, Debora J. Meijers, N.C.F. van Sas, Eric J. Sluijter, and Lyckle de Vries. Edited by Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen, it originally appeared in a Dutch edition of 1992, and was written in conjunction with… Full Review

For tourists driving to Acadia National Park on Maine's coastal Route 1, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland has become an increasingly popular and rewarding stop. Having long enjoyed a regional reputation for its noteworthy collection of American art, the institution (which includes the adjacent Farnsworth Homestead and the Olson House in nearby Cushing) recently attracted national attention with the opening of the Wyeth Center in 1998. Maine artists and subjects figure prominently at the Farnsworth, but this emphasis by no means constitutes provincialism. Quite the contrary, enriched by the late philanthropist Elizabeth Noyce's bequest of seventy Maine paintings by… Full Review

In 1126, Fujiwara no Kiyohira dedicated a Buddhist Canon in more than 5,000 fascicles copied in alternating columns of gold and silver ink on indigo paper. This Canon is unique in Japan because of the gold and silver script and also because Kiyohira was the only commoner of his day to sponsor an entire Buddhist Canon. Kiyohira, the descendant of Emishi ("toad barbarians"), ruled from Hiraizumi, capital of a stronghold in northern Honshu that has been variously identified as a kingdom, a polity, a military government, and as "the Buddhist heaven of the eastern barbarians" (202). Kiyohira's son Motohira and… Full Review

Thomas Crow is one of the most exacting and vigilant of art historians, never prone to following received opinions, methods, or practices. His way of thinking has sometimes produced works that are exemplary in their circumspection and nuance; the theory of society and art embedded in the opening chapter of Modern Art in the Common Culture has yet to be adequately answered. The Intelligence of Art is an attempt to say more generally, but with the precision afforded by individual examples, where the discipline of art history might find promising models. Crow is especially concerned with what he… Full Review

This book takes on the challenging topic of Italian (despite its title) Renaissance portraiture and self-fashioning, but with a particular focus, that of artists' self-portraits. The author's premise is that the increasing number of such self-portraits over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marks the changing status of the artist within the culture from craftsman to intellect. Such an evolutionary claim is certainly supported by historical evidence familiar to students of the period, most notably the application of the epithet of "divino" to artists like Michelangelo and Titian toward the end of the period Woods-Marsden discusses and by Castiglione's assertion in… Full Review

Lisa Peters begins her beautifully illustrated book John Henry Twachtman: An American Impressionist with strong language: "A painter of intimate landscapes rendered in an original and expressive style, John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) was the epitome of the modern American artist in the late nineteenth century" (13). This position is antithetical to the usual understanding of Twachtman within the canon of American art. In Wayne Craven's textbook American Art: History and Culture (1994), we learn that Twachtman "never received the critical acclaim he hoped for, and he died at age forty-nine" (353). In Milton Brown et al.'s text American Art: Painting,… Full Review