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Social media networks like Facebook make us anticipate the moment we turn into objects under another person’s gaze. Yet this experience of becoming a spectacle, and organizing our lives accordingly, is hardly new. Nor is the very small size that our portraits will usually take in these types of media: as Hanneke Grootenboer points out in Treasuring the Gaze, the format of a photo on a smartphone screen is remarkably similar to that of the pre-photographic portrait miniature. In her new book, Grootenboer focuses on a short-lived subgenre of the portrait miniature, the so-called eye miniature or eye portrait… Full Review

Sharon Gregory’s Vasari and the Renaissance Print lays out in orderly fashion the story of prints as told by, and used by, Giorgio Vasari. The strength of the book is its wide-ranging inclusion of all types of print interactions, along with a catalogue of prints mentioned in the Lives. Acknowledging her debt (8) to Patricia Rubin’s landmark book, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Gregory focuses attention on Vasari’s inclusion in his second edition (1568) of a history of printmaking embedded in the life of Marcantonio Raimondi. She carefully traces Vasari’s mentions of prints… Full Review

Italian Renaissance Art by Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole provides a new textbook alternative for those who teach the Italian Renaissance, joining established texts like John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke’s Art in Renaissance Italy and the venerable History of Italian Renaissance Art by Frederick Hartt and David G. Wilkins. While all of these texts are written by leading scholars and largely cover the same material, they do so in distinct ways. History of Italian Renaissance Art, which was first published in 1976, taken over by Wilkins in 1994, and is currently in its seventh edition… Full Review

Perhaps what one first notices about Journeys to New Worlds are its lavish production values. Art history books from Yale tend to be large format, but Journeys sets a new standard, with pages ten inches wide and twelve inches tall. It will tower over and project beyond the other books on the shelf. The interior illustrations are in glorious color, with catalogue photos taken especially for the volume and essay images a mix of new photos and scans from prior publications (the latter having a charming checkerboard moiré). The volume as an artifact, then, is testament to the golden age… Full Review

Archaeological sites that afford a view of several layers of human history, unfolding in chronological succession, capture the imagination of the specialist and the non-specialist alike. Excavation and analysis of such sites as the Parthenon in Athens or the Pantheon in Rome have all afforded clear views of the ways in which structures influenced the shape and function of the edifices that followed. The volume under review is the second in a series of four volumes that collectively constitute the published results of the Florence Duomo Project. As one of the major archaeological campaigns of this generation, the aim of… Full Review

At the age of eleven I attended a summer camp for boys in Pennsylvania. The owner, known by all as Doc, roamed the expansive grounds in a golf cart. During the frequent science fairs, he took pleasure in demonstrating a box that dispensed electric shocks. After approaching the contraption, one set the dial and gripped the handles. Having watched a friend select maximum juicing and not experience any apparent discomfort, I was emboldened to try my luck at a lower setting. I indicated my readiness, the switch was flipped, and I jumped as a large jolt surged through my body… Full Review

As Anne Wagner pointedly noted in 1991, “Rodin’s worldwide stature as the artistic genius of his age rested on, and was enabled by, responses to both his own sexuality and the sexual intensity of his art” (Anne E. Wagner, “Rodin’s Reputation,” Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed., Lynn Hunt, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 191–242). David Getsy’s compelling, lavishly illustrated, and subtly polemical book, Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture, sets out to unpack the role and function of sexuality in Rodin’s work and legacy. Instead of focusing on Rodin’s erotic imagery, however, Getsy makes… Full Review

In Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico, Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera undertake an ambitious survey of sacred females in Mexican art and culture. The authors offer an encyclopedic compendium of Pre-Columbian Aztec goddess cults and the extraordinary range of Mexican Catholic dedications to the Virgin Mary that developed in the colonial period—“a Catholic devotion,” Kroger writes, “that privileged Mary in a way that even I was unprepared for” (xvii). Indigenous artistic traditions and religious institutions are treated not as ancillary material but rather as vigorous devotional traditions that continued to inform the… Full Review

Of the relationship of Albrecht Dürer to his artistic sources it might be said: “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves” (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 5). The images produced by the first generation of printmakers to respond to Dürer also did well to demonstrate this dictum. Hans Sebald and Barthel Beham, Hans Baldung Grien, and Urs Graf seized Dürer’s compositions, toppling their precursor’s equilibrium and tearing through his restraint to expose the rawness of sexuality and the garishness of death. That his unique presence… Full Review

While doing research in Leiden, Maki Fukuoka discovered an unpublished manuscript entitled “Honzō shashin,” which was brought from Japan to Holland by the German physician Phillip Franz von Siebold. Honzō refers to materia medica; the term shashin means “photography” today, but the manuscript was written in 1826, decades before the medium of photography was introduced to Japan in the 1850s. What did shashin mean to Mizutani Hōbun, who compiled the manuscript and led a scholarly group called Shōhyaku-sha in the Owari domain? What does this tell us about Japanese photography, as we now understand it? Fukuoka’s encounter with the… Full Review