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Georges Bataille’s writings on prehistoric art are known to the English-reading public mainly through two major books: Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art (trans. Austryn Wainhouse, Milan: Skira, 1955) was one of the earliest presentations of Lascaux to be illustrated with lavish color photographs; and The Tears of Eros (published posthumously in French in 1961, and in English in 1989 [trans. Peter Connor, San Francisco: City Lights]) started with a meditation on Paleolithic female figurines. It is less known that Bataille’s complete works in French include many other writings on the subject, ranging from book reviews to notes… Full Review

With Bernini: Art as Theatre, Genevieve Warwick has produced one of the most significant contributions to the recent surge of literature on Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Her fascinating book is articulate and thoughtful, its arguments sound and convincing. It incorporates a wide body of scholarly literature and mines archives and primary sources to provide new looks at well-known objects. Warwick presents an innovative understanding of the aesthetic culture of seventeenth-century Rome, reconstructing the visual expectations of Bernini’s audience and the settings in which his objects were made and displayed. Bernini’s art has often been described somewhat dismissively as theatrical, suggesting… Full Review

Richard Taws’s The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France makes a compellingly original contribution to the study of the visual and material culture of the French Revolution. This book takes as its subject a body of objects that have traditionally failed to garner sustained interest within the discipline of art history, which has preferred to focus on exemplary practitioners such as Jacques-Louis David and works of art made in the durable medium of oil painting. The Politics of the Provisional asks what might be learned about the French Revolution if attention is turned from singular masterpieces… Full Review

Daniel H. Magilow’s The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany and Sarah E. James’s Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain investigate photography in its serial form, recruiting case studies from twentieth-century Germany to explore their claims. Counter to the rather substantive body of research on photomontage that interrogates the semiotics and somatics of juxtaposed, cropped, found, and staged photographs, these recent contributions to the history and theory of photography explore the meanings and subject positions engendered by pictorial succession. More emphatically than the montage of photographs on a single plane, the structure of photographic… Full Review

Anthony White’s monograph on Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana is a long overdue intervention in the literature on Italian and South American twentieth-century abstraction. Correcting for a longstanding lacuna in the scholarship, White departs from the tendency on the part of what scant accounts do exist to focus only on Fontana’s post-World War II production, the punctures (Buchi) and slits (Attesse) he famously made up to his death in 1968. Looking at the entirety of the artist’s development, from his early years of training at the Brera Academy in Milan during the years in which Italian Fascism… Full Review

The Spirit of Vitalism: Health, Beauty and Strength in Danish Art, 1890–1940 (originally published in Danish as Livslyst. Sundhed—Skønhed—Styrke i dansk kunst 1890–1940) is a collection of essays with a catalogue that was published to accompany an exhibition entitled Zest for Life. Health—Beauty—Strength in Danish Art 1890–1940 held at the Fyns Kunstmuseum/Odense City Museums and Fuglsang Kunstmuseum in 2008. Both exhibition and publication were the result of a long-term project dating back to 2001 and involving the participation of a number of Danish museums (7). The large-format volume consists of fifteen essays written by fourteen contributors, and a substantial… Full Review

Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture offers a lucid and perspicacious examination of the evolving social lives of major Mughal monuments, an overlooked topic in the now-extensive corpus of literature on Mughal architectural history. In the early 1990s scholars revisited Mughal architecture, a subject that had been neglected since the colonial era. The best-known scholars of Mughal architecture, Ebba Koch and Catherine Asher, provided expansive studies that examine how patronage, politics, and religious concerns shaped the formal, decorative, spatial, and symbolic programs of various Mughal monuments (Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture, Oxford: Oxford… Full Review

Scholarship on Giotto’s architecture has focused on work such as the campanile in Florence (1334) as well as other buildings he is said to have designed, along with the origins of Giotto’s depicted structures, whether and how he based these renderings on actual buildings. To this point, Decio Gioseffi’s Giotto architetto (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1963) is the only monograph dedicated to the full span of Giotto’s painted architecture—in addition to discussing his role as architect. In Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (3rd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), John White brilliantly analyses a few frescoes in the… Full Review

Arranged topically rather than chronologically, the English translation of Paul Zanker’s concise and highly accessible review of art in the Roman world is a valuable contribution and will appeal to students and general readers alike. Divided into seven main chapters, Zanker examines both political and non-political imagery as seminal elements in a “system” of visual communication. As he states in the introduction, much of his approach is indebted to the earlier studies of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli and, more recently, Tonio Hölscher (Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Center of Power. Roman Art to A.D. 200, trans. Peter Green, London: Thames… Full Review

Neal Keating has written a stimulating—and bold—book. Iroquois Art, Power, and History “describes and interprets the historical and current practices of visual expression carried out by indigenous Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America.” (Haudenosaunee refers to the original six member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.) Covering more than four centuries, Keating seeks “to demonstrate a significant cultural continuity between contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples and their pre-colonial and colonial-era ancestors.” Fortunately, he recognizes this is “an argument that is surprisingly contentious in the field of Iroquois studies” (3), and so his assertions are, on the whole, well… Full Review