Browse Recent Book Reviews

That Hebrew illuminated manuscripts are currently a hot topic owes much to a handful of scholars; none more so than Katrin Kogman-Appel who, for the last fifteen years, has published prolifically and authoritatively on the subject. Her 2006 volume, Illuminated Haggadot from Medieval Spain: Biblical Imagery and the Passover Holiday, is an ambitious undertaking that bears witness to its author’s long engagement with this complex and fascinating subject. This is the only book to examine intensively the biblical cycles of Iberian Haggadot, which are the earliest Jewish narrative imagery to appear since Late Antiquity and the first to render… Full Review

The rare publication of an English monograph on Ottonian art is always cause for celebration. Still too little known, the art produced in the Germanic realms in the forty years on either side of 1000 CE is among the most sumptuous and complex of the entire Middle Ages. Although not a survey of the period, Eliza Garrison’s Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II is a fine demonstration of this claim, and Ashgate is to be congratulated on producing a handsome book whose mostly full-page illustrations do justice to the beauty and power… Full Review

John Mraz’s latest book has its origins in the exhibition Testimonios de una guerra: Fotografías de la revolución mexicana, which opened simultaneously in thirty national museums on November 18, 2010, coinciding with the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of the revolution. For both the exhibition and ensuing book, Mraz had vast archival collections from which to make his image selection. The Casasola Archive alone, from which many of the photographs presented in Photographing the Mexican Revolution are derived, comprises over 37,000 items from the armed phase of the revolution, not to mention the multiple regional, national, and university photo… Full Review

This excellent volume, one of seven published, forthcoming, or projected in Cambridge University Press’s Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance series, traces the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence between 1300 and 1600. Organized chronologically, the book divides these centuries into eight sub-periods, each the focus of a separate chapter. Francis Ames-Lewis, Florence’s editor, summarizes the aims of the series and this volume in his introduction: individual authors were charged with describing the major achievements of each period while also reexamining Florentine Renaissance art within a “broader artistic and cultural context” (2) in order to produce, together… Full Review

In her essay, “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory: Printup Hope, Rickard, Gansworth,” literary scholar Susan Bernardin writes that she is learning to “see what has been invisible for too long in discussions of Native American literary studies: the informing, vital lens of indigenous visual arts” (162). With this statement, Bernardin underscores the purpose and the voice of the collection of essays entitled Visualities: Perspectives on Contemporary American Indian Film and Art, edited by Denise K. Cummings, in which “Seeing Memory, Storying Memory” appears. The book originates in the fields of literary and cultural studies, and all of the contributors deftly… Full Review

For historians of photography, Josh Ellenbogen’s Reasoned and Unreasoned Images provides a significant theoretical discussion of photography’s aim to capture the visible and non-visible and, more widely, of its complex relation to human perception, cognition, and memory. The book undertakes close examination of the photographic oeuvres of Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) as approached through the work of philosopher of science, physicist, and mathematician Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). Through this approach, Reasoned and Unreasoned Images becomes both a work of the philosophy of science and the history of photography. Indeed, this is its greatest strength… Full Review

Forty years ago, when I graduated from college, I applied for a year’s traveling fellowship to take me around the Mediterranean to study the reuse of ancient materials in medieval buildings. The committee rejected my application, telling me (off the record) that it was a “stupid” topic. Little did I know that a few years earlier, the German scholar Arnold Esch had begun a lifetime’s career publishing on that very subject (beginning with “Spolien. Zur Wiederverwendung antiker Baustücke und Skulpturen im mittelalterlichen Italien,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 51 (1969): 1–64), and forty years later “spoliology” has developed into a burgeoning… Full Review

The significance of Charles Palermo’s Fixed Ecstasy for scholarship on Joan Miró, and for modernist studies in general, is undiminished by the fact that after five years its only review appeared in France soon after the book’s publication. Palermo’s study not only breaks new ground by reevaluating Miró’s relationship to Surrealism, but also elucidates the stakes of the artist’s commitment to automatism. Encouraged to abandon a narrow view of automatism as a mere technique or as the suppression of conscious control, readers discover it to be a mode of experience that, when represented, evokes effects of continuity and separation between… Full Review

The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Machine Art exhibition of 1934 is one of those events that historians love, seemingly so rooted in its time and place that it all but becomes a metaphor, a defining moment of high modernism. Even the catalogue is iconic. With its cover photograph of a complex ball bearing system—all circles within circles—silhouetted against a black field, its lofty quotes from Plato and Aquinas, Josef Albers’s clean page layouts, and its crisp photographs of industrial equipment and household items, the publication exudes self-assurance and conjures a world of endless perfect forms in steel and glass… Full Review

Between about 1591 and 1592, Annibale Carracci, his older brother Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico decorated the main room of the Palazzo Magnani in Bologna with a cycle of frescoes depicting the life of the mythical founder of Rome, Romulus. Since their unveiling, the frescoes have been recognized as among the seminal achievements of the Carracci. The seventeenth-century art critic Giovan Pietro Bellori was particularly fulsome with his praise, writing that the cycle “renders the name of the Carracci glorious in all aspects of painting, and principally in coloring, for it is believed that none better was produced by their… Full Review