Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

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Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè, eds.
Burlington: Ashgate, 2007. 244 pp.; 21 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754658962)
Amilcare Iannucci, whose death in 2007 robbed us of a creative and prolific scholar devoted to the study of Dante’s reception, often emphasized the “producerly influence” of Dante’s literary art, especially his Divine Comedy, in his extensive scholarship on the subject. In the introduction to Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), which he edited, Iannucci explains: “The Commedia produced not only a philological response [i.e., commentaries and scholarly interpretive works] . . . but also a creative response. It inspired the production of other objects, independent of its structure, in both the artistic and literary spheres”… Full Review
November 12, 2008
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Philip Sohm
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 224 pp.; 25 color ills.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $50.00 (9780300121230)
In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in the human body as connected to artistic issues, resulting in studies as diverse as those by Tracey Warr (The Artist’s Body, New York: Phaidon, 2000), Martin Porter (Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Amelia Jones (Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). In the related field of body aging issues, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging recently posted an… Full Review
November 5, 2008
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Doris Carl
Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. 847 pp.; 33 color ills.; 495 b/w ills. Cloth $219.00 (9782503524597)
Doris Carl’s monograph on Benedetto da Maiano is a monumental achievement, the culmination of decades of research on the artist. Some of her findings were previewed in a series of articles she wrote on specific aspects of Benedetto’s career, but their integration into the unpublished material presented in the book creates a comprehensive assessment of the sculptor’s entire production. The result is a wholly new understanding of the artist as a major figure in late fifteenth-century Italian art. Carl’s analysis forces a total revision of the estimation of Benedetto as a secondary artist that prevailed throughout the late nineteenth… Full Review
November 5, 2008
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Sibel Bozdoğan and Gülru Necipoğlu, eds.
Leiden: Brill, 2007. 309 pp.; 161 ills. Cloth $76.00 (978900416320)
This is a remarkable volume and of considerable significance to art historians and university administrators. It contains most of the papers presented at the symposium “Historiography and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the ‘Lands of Rum,’” held in Cambridge in 2006. A generation ago, the same (or more or less the same) contributions would have been called something like “The Interpretation of Islamic Architecture in Ottoman Times and in Turkey Today.” As I will argue shortly, the difference in titles reflects a major shift in approaching the history of architecture in the Ottoman world, but it is in fact a difference… Full Review
October 29, 2008
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John Richards
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. 200 pp.; 10 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780773452367)
This book likely exists mostly as a by-product of the pressures of the academic tenure process. What would have been an engaging twenty-page article has been inflated into 146 pages of speculation, supposition, and chiefly, digression. The nominal subject of the book is the now-lost cycle of frescoes in the great hall of the Reggia Carrarese in Padua, the Sala Virorum Illustrium. The scheme of the cycle was, according to John Richards, dependent upon a thematically related text by Francesco Petrarch, De viris illustribus. This is a tenable hypothesis, given the author’s close relationship with Francesco il Vecchio Carrara… Full Review
October 29, 2008
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Michael W. Cole, ed.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 568 pp.; 50 b/w ills. Paper $47.95 (9781405108416)
This text forms part of the Blackwell Anthologies in Art History, of which collections on Asian art, Early Modernism, and European and American Architecture and Design have already been published. Two titles in the series exploring art in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries are forthcoming; hopefully, an addition on the fourteenth century is also in the works. Cole’s book compiles classic and recent essays on sixteenth-century art and architecture, touching upon issues in painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and theoretical writings. Some chapters have been translated specifically for this project. The volume compiles twenty-three essays grouped under six rubrics, each… Full Review
October 28, 2008
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Frédéric Cousinié
Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2007. 240 pp.; 59 b/w ills. Paper €22.00 (9782753505148)
Frédéric Cousinié’s Images et Méditation au XVIIe Siècle is a collection of six essays that focus on the relationship between devotional treatises and visual images in seventeenth-century France. This book has neither a formal introduction nor a conclusion, but in the last section (22–24) of the first essay, Cousinié provides an overview in which he briefly summarizes the questions raised in each essay. To best appreciate the book, the reader will need, in addition to knowledge of seventeenth-century imagery, familiarity with the religious history of the period, as well as the fundamentals of semiotics. Central to the study is… Full Review
October 22, 2008
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Richard Shiff
Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2007. 216 pp.; 18 b/w ills. Paper $17.95 (9780415973090)
The “doubt” of the title of this short but very interesting book is meant to be applied to art history. In Richard Shiff’s view, art historians and critics too often erect abstract systems on a partial apprehension of aspects of the artwork. He is as critical of interpretations that float somewhere above the particulars of an artwork as he is with those that do not admit exceptions to their own posited rules. For example, with respect to the ideas of Rosalind Krauss, he observes that “a differential or ‘critical’ term loses its efficacy . . . when we designate it… Full Review
October 22, 2008
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Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 214 pp.; 30 b/w ills. Cloth $19.95 (0674018958)
Cathy Gere
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 201 pp.; 26 b/w ills. Cloth $19.95 (0674021703)
Simon Goldhill
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 194 pp.; 33 b/w ills. Cloth $19.95 (0674017978)
The three volumes under review are part of the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard and produced by Harvard University Press. The expanding series covers the Alhambra, Westminster Abbey, and other major monuments. This series is designed not only to present the various monuments in their original contexts, but also to include the major events in their subsequent receptions throughout history. This important methodological choice allows for the assessment both of the material remains themselves and of how inflections from previous eras continue to shape present outlooks. Even though Cathy Gere, Simon Goldhill, and Keith Hopkins… Full Review
October 15, 2008
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Robert McCarter
New York: Phaidon, 2005. 372 pp.; 85 color ills.; 365 b/w ills. Cloth $59.95 (9780714844701)
From 1690 on, children in colonial America were taught the letters of the alphabet with the New England Primer. Millions of copies of these primers formed the pedagogical cornerstone of elementary education for the next two centuries. These schoolroom textbooks iterated the basic building blocks of the English language—vowels, consonants, syllabariums—supplemented with woodcut illustrations and rhymed couplets that undergirded literacy with moral lessons imbued, in turn, with religious themes and catechisms gleaned from the King James Bible. Given this long tradition, had Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother not stumbled onto the Froebel system of kindergarten instruction as one alternative to… Full Review
October 15, 2008
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