Recently Published Reviews

Though it is a far-reaching critique of the kind of historicism that contents itself with studying the past without regard for the present, Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History is not an attempt to liberate us from history. On the contrary, it is a critique of historicism in the name of history, and it never loses sight of the urgent issues that have fueled historicism, especially in the last century. In the final chapter of the book, for example, Moxey argues that art historians adopted historicist distance after the Second World War as a means of guarding against… Full Review

Beginning with the title—Moche Art and Visual Culture in Ancient Peru—Margaret A. Jackson frames her first book as a comprehensive new approach to Moche visual arts. She proposes to address the corpus of Moche visual culture from an innovative theoretical perspective that “challenges conventional opinions” and “tests operative paradigms” about incipient writing systems in the Americas (10–11). Jackson argues that the perceived visual complexity of Moche iconography may be understood as “neither strictly linguistically informed nor purely pictorial” (149), but rather as an intermediate category, which she describes variously as “semasiographic,” “systematized notation,” and “hybrid presentational syntax.” The… Full Review

Tom Henry’s The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli looks to the past and the future. The product of the author’s decades-long engagement with the artist, the book is unabashedly an artist’s biography that aims “to embrace Signorelli’s humanity” (xiv). When Henry writes, “A man's work is, after all, the most satisfactory and reliable document for those who take the pains to decipher it—the autobiography which every man of genius bequeaths to posterity” (17), he echoes the first book in English on Signorelli, written by Maud Cruttwell and published in 1899, Luca Signorelli (London: Bell), a volume in the “Great… Full Review

Alex Potts’s ambitious new book, Experiments in Modern Realism, attempts to decenter and reconfigure dominant notions concerning the nature of art production in one of the liveliest periods in the history of art, roughly 1945–1968. At nearly five hundred pages and with numerous chapters and subheads, the book has the broad scope and episodic feel of a textbook, but it also has some of the rich texture and nuance of a volume with more specialist concerns. If Potts’s last book, the brilliant The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) (click here for review… Full Review

In the fall of 2013, scholars, artists, collectors, and art aficionados gathered in Washington, DC, for a two-day symposium to consider the role of Africa and its diaspora in the development of art in the United States (available as a webcast). Welcomed by Elizabeth Broun of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Johnnetta Cole of the National Museum of African Art, the event consisted of two days of panels interspersed with comments from respondents and complemented by the insightful opening remarks of the eminent art historian David Driskell. In short, the seventeen distinct papers reflected the breadth and depth… Full Review

The subject of this collection of eleven essays (plus two introductions) is exceedingly broad: in the words of co-editor Marcia B. Hall, it is "the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period" (1). Broadening the subject even more is her immediate qualification that "here 'sensuous' refers to the dictionary definition of the term: of, related to, or derived from the senses, usually the senses involved in aesthetic enjoyment" (1). In other words, this is not merely the "sensual"—that is, the sexually titillating—whose problematic presence in early modern religious… Full Review

It is a long way from the Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro to the sumptuous interior of the Frick Collection, where six of the panel paintings by the famously enigmatic Piero della Francesca for the high altar of Sant’Agostino were reunited. Yet the preciosity of these mid-quattrocento works in oil and tempera, some resplendent with gold leaf and fictive jewel-encrusted fabrics, was deceptively compatible with the luxurious neo-classical setting. That the secular venue and Piero’s religious images share a monumental imperturbability belies, however, the radically different ways in which the paintings would have been seen and understood by their… Full Review

Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome by Barbara Wisch and Nerida Newbigin is a rich, interdisciplinary study of the visual and material culture of the Confraternity of the Gonfalone, the largest and most prestigious lay brotherhood of Renaissance Rome. Focusing on the confraternity’s lavish art and architectural patronage, Wisch and Newbigin bring the spectacular public ceremonies, liturgical devotions, and broad charitable initiatives of the community vividly to life. Their study spans a tumultuous century for both church and city (1495–1584) and illuminates the sodality’s resilience and phenomenal growth in the wake of urban renewal, papal… Full Review

The concept of interdisciplinarity seems increasingly unavoidable in modern academia—but then, who would want to avoid it? As the relevance of the humanities is more and more frequently questioned, and cash-strapped universities are creatively reorganizing liberal arts departments in ways that might indeed encourage a widespread unification of intellectually contiguous disciplines such as art history, literature, and history, one has everything to gain in joining forces with colleagues across the disciplines. Art historians (especially in the field of Renaissance art) have of course been engaged for more than a century with interdisciplinary inquiry involving an integration of sources, contexts, and… Full Review

The 1970s is a decade whose image has not yet crystallized. As Rosalind Krauss reported at the time in “Notes on the Index,” seventies art in America was “diversified, split, factionalized” (October 3 [Spring 1977]: 68). Despite art history’s attempts to trace a clear picture that would bring this “willful eclecticism” into some explanatory order, the decade that followed the Minimalist and Conceptualist reductions of the 1960s and preceded the excesses of the 1980s continues to pose challenges to viewers and students of contemporary art. The Whitney Museum’s ambitious exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and… Full Review

For Westerners in the nineteenth century, and even for some today, art and architecture of ancient and far-flung peoples stood as evidence of cultural sophistication upon which to pronounce a global hierarchy of culture, from “primitive” societies of colonized peoples to their own advanced civilizations. The artworks considered most significant in determining that hierarchy were those classified as “monumental,” that is, elaborate architecture and stone sculpture. It was in this environment that Pre-Columbian arts gained scholarly attention. Explorers trekking through dense forests in Central America encountered awesome ruins of the stone and stucco Classic Maya cities, their plazas filled with… Full Review

In her introduction to Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History, Leslie Webster states that “the aim of this book is to give an accessible overview that covers the entire Anglo-Saxon period, placing it within a broader cultural and historical context, and incorporating the new discoveries and new thinking of recent years” (10). For an intended audience of beginning students and the interested public, Webster takes a thematic approach, with chapters entitled “Reading the Image, Seeing the Text”; “Rome Reinvented: The Early Inheritance”; “Rome Reinvented: The Impact of Christianity”; “Celtic Connections, Eastern Influences: Sixth to Ninth Centuries”; “Art and Power: From… Full Review

Robin L. Thomas’s elegantly written and richly illustrated account of the urban transformation of Naples during the reign of Charles of Bourbon (1734–59) highlights the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’s place on the map of eighteenth-century Europe. Although other major European cities have received ample attention from scholars of early modern architecture, Naples has suffered from relative scholarly neglect despite its status as one of Europe’s largest and most culturally vibrant capitals. Furthermore, the few historical accounts of early modern Neapolitan architecture have tended to focus on questions of style rather than on the city’s participation in… Full Review

A compelling mid-career survey for the Shanghai-based artist and filmmaker, Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013 showcased several key works by the artist who is perhaps best known for his stylistically noir films that focus upon the ongoing social complexities facing a generation of Chinese born after the Cultural Revolution. The second iteration of a traveling retrospective that first opened at the Kunsthalle Zürich in April 2013, works exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive included several films by Yang as well as photographs, multi-channel video installations, and a selection of archival materials documenting the artist’s prodigious… Full Review

So much attention has been given to the spiritual aspect of Indian art that it may seem a cliché to search for the sacred in its diverse and many works, yet an important element of Parul Pandya Dhar’s recent book, The Torana in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, is how it makes a compelling case for just such quests. This is not, however, because the author makes “meaning” to be the most important criteria of her study. Rather, it is Dhar’s careful and wide-ranging consideration of the forms of toranas, which she defines as arched portals or festoons… Full Review