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A woodcut illustration of the known world spreads across two pages of the Liber Chronicarum, or Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493. The edges of the map are held in place by Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the three sons of Noah who divided Asia, Africa, and Europe between them and repopulated the human race after the biblical Flood. In this representation, published four years before Vasco da Gama’s circumnavigation of the African continent, the true geographical shape of Africa remains undefined. On the page to the left are images of monstrous races that, according to both classical and Christian traditions… Full Review

At major Maya cities of the eighth century, surfaces of buildings and monuments undulated with images of nobles performing ritual gestures, often amid cosmological frameworks. Springing feathers and bulging ornaments patterned the surfaces, invading the blocks of hieroglyphic texts that framed them. These complex visual phenomena were given a degree of consistency in two principal ways. Maya artist-scribes expressed the semantic congruence between art and writing with an aesthetic focus on calligraphic line that distinguished Maya art and architecture from that of other contemporary Mesoamerican societies (Adam Herring, Art and Writing in the Maya Cities, A.D. 600–800: A Poetics of… Full Review

Just before Christmas 1881, Vincent van Gogh took some of his studies to The Hague to show Anton Mauve, then a well-known painter (and his cousin by marriage). It was his first professional art criticism. As he later wrote to his brother, Theo, “When Mauve saw my studies, he said at once, ‘You are sitting too close to your model.’” No reference to this episode is made in the catalogue or labels for Van Gogh Up Close, but it seems to me quite revealing and pertinent to the theme of the exhibition. Less than a year into his… Full Review

Monumental stone sculpture, a ubiquitous art form throughout Mesoamerica, is among the most distinctive material features in various Pre-Columbian cultures. Unsurprisingly, stone monuments have traditionally received considerable attention from Mesoamerican scholars in a variety of disciplines. Despite this privileged position in Mesoamerican cultural history, few previous studies have tackled issues related to the function and meaning of monumental stone sculpture in the critical Preclassic period, a time of dramatic social and political transformation, and even fewer have attempted to link the art-historical study of formal transitions in sculptural programs to the anthropological consideration of sociopolitical processes. In Sculpture and… Full Review

Mughal painting is no stranger to the museum gallery, or to the exhibition catalogue. Persian Miniature Painting (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), the publication that followed the seminal 1931 exhibition of Persianate art held at Burlington House, London, featured entries for paintings by the sixteenth-century Mughal masters ‘Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid ‘Ali, as well as for two folios from the large-scale Hamzanama (Book of Hamza) manuscript produced for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Mughal painting really came into its own decades later, thanks in large part to The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India: 1600–1660 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine… Full Review

Camera Constructs is a brimful compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture, and urban space. The book enters a field that has grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when architectural historians heeded Marshall McLuhan’s (and other media theorists’) dictums and began to study architecture and its media, and architecture as medium, with a new seriousness. From early groundbreaking studies to more recent focused treatments, the media content of architecture has been laid bare in written text; Alison and Peter Smithson, neo-avant-garde groups like Archigram and Superstudio, and a range of postmodern architects laid similar cards on… Full Review

Artists whose work engages in critical social commentary have never found a particularly warm reception in Japan, and most of them remain underrepresented. Even today, politically oriented artists find support and exhibition venues more easily overseas. Such has been the case with Tomiyama Taeko (b. 1921), an artist who has devoted her life to art and political activism concerning such issues as Japan’s wartime crimes and its victims in the former colonies. Because of such biting content, her art has been better appreciated outside Japan, primarily in North America and East Asia. Turning ninety-two this year, Tomiyama is far from… Full Review

Polis Chrysochous, the modern town in a fertile river valley on the northwest coast of Cyprus mentioned in the scholarly catalogue’s title (but not in the exhibition’s), was, from 1983–2007, the location of excavations by Princeton University’s Cyprus Expedition directed by one of this show’s curators, William A. P. Childs, professor emeritus of art and archaeology. Called “city flowing with gold (chrysos)” since the nineteenth century, the titular City of Gold overlays two rich ancient forebears, which might themselves be considered cities of gold: Marion, a city-kingdom, settled by the eighth century BCE and destroyed in 312 BCE… Full Review

In Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis, Rubén Gallo details the story of his voyage of discovery to trace the thin lines that connect the great Viennese thinker and founder of psychoanalysis to Mexico, itself represented by artifacts, paintings, publications, and a range of intellectuals affected by a psychoanalysis they variously translated (imaginatively rather than literally) into ways of thinking about modern Mexico. The book is also a substantial work of cultural analysis that both defies the regionalization of culture and area studies by criss-crossing the Atlantic, and it brings into a new perspective aspects of the particularity… Full Review

Hard and unyielding, marble is a rock that must be wrestled with by sheer force, exquisite care, and grunt of labor. Human hands require the intermediary hammer and chisel, and touch is distanced in the service of the eye. To give this rock the spark of life is a formidable task, one that few are able to accomplish. Red clay is mud. Dirty, cheap, and plentiful, it is underfoot, low, and common. By dint of water it is plastic and alive, the fingers imprinting an instant record of presence, time, and motion. A mound is grasped—three, four moves,… Full Review