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I kept the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) title photograph of Joseph Cornell at work as the main wallpaper on my cell phone for over a month. It is a wonderful and unexpected image: a forty-four-year-old Cornell leans over an uncluttered worktable, where the empty shell of a large box and a few art supplies are neatly laid out. The lean frame of the artist forms a silhouette of dark hair and clothing against a white paper backdrop. It looks totally staged—somewhere between a cooking demo and a magic act. Perhaps it was the jolt of seeing a… Full Review

In January of this year, I visited Longmen on a grey and chilly day. Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen was deliberately my companion. As I walked through the site, up and down the ramps of stairs that give access to the cave temples, the fourteenth-century Muslim poet Sadula’s description of Longmen, which McNair quotes on page 160, resonated with sad truth in my mind: Along both river banks, men in the past bored into the rock to make large caves and small shrines no fewer than one thousand in number. They sculpted out of the rock sacred images… Full Review

Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public… Full Review

Thomas Campbell’s Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court is a must read for anyone interested in tapestry, patronage studies, and cultural history. It is the latest addition to an important group of books mapping the tapestry patronage and collections of early modern royalty and nobility: Clifford Brown and Guy Delmarcel examined the Gonzaga collection (Tapestries for the Courts of Federico Ii, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–1563, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996); Lucia Meoni has already published two out of four volumes that focus on the Medici tapestries (Gli arazzi nei… Full Review

Two weeks after opening its Gates of Paradise exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a symposium to explore various issues surrounding the creation, reception, and conservation of Ghiberti’s masterpiece. An international panel of art historians, curators, and conservators offered a range of general and specialist talks to accompany the remarkable loan of three narrative reliefs and four framing elements from the final set of bronze doors created for the Florentine Baptistery. Ian Wardropper, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of the Metropolitan’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts (ESDA), welcomed conference attendees. Cristina Acidini, Superintendent of the… Full Review

bq. “. . . this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past.” (Petrarch, Africa, IX, 453–7, quoted by Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York: Westview Press, 1960, 10) Petrarch’s concluding words to his epic poem Africa are equally applicable to Ghiberti studies. Long under the dark shadows of Richard Krautheimer and John Pope-Hennessy, Lorenzo Ghiberti and his magnificent Gates of Paradise from the Florentine Baptistery are finally being seen in a… Full Review

The Indian Temple Traceries by M. A. Dhaky, dean of Indian architectural historians, is a fascinating study of the variety to be found within a single element of the fabric of Indian temples—the jāla or jālaka (Sanskrit), jālī (Hindi), tracery, pierced screen, grill, or lattice. Dhaky’s starting point is the terminology of the Sanskrit architectural treatises, which provide names for the types of jāla but generally do not define them. Providing plausible identifications depends not only on comparing the terms in different texts but on an encyclopedic knowledge of the appearance of jāla through the ages. Dhaky’s analysis is accompanied… Full Review

In early 1927, Julien Levy informed his father that instead of finishing his last semester at Harvard University, he was sailing to Europe with the French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to begin his career as an experimental filmmaker. Six months later he returned home to New York with a new passion, Surrealism, and a new calling, gallery director. Levy has long been considered one of the foremost champions in New York of Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, only episodic attention has been paid to an important aspect of his activities: photography. In 1976, David Travis, curator of photography at… Full Review

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 details Venice’s role as a commercial, political, and diplomatic hub, strategically situated at the center of Mediterranean trade, and examines how the city absorbed artistic and cultural ideas from the Islamic world. With its rich essays on the historical and cultural background, focused studies on individual media, and technical examination of paint pigments, textile weaves, metalwork inlay, and lacquer and glass production, the catalogue is an impressive showcase of the resources compiled by its editor, Stefano Carboni, who also served as the exhibition’s curator. Carboni eloquently guides… Full Review

In his Self-Portrait with a Sunflower (ca. 1633), the artist Anthony Van Dyck turns to gaze out at the viewer. With one hand he points to himself while holding up for display the gold chain recently presented to him by his patron, the English monarch Charles I; with the other he gestures toward a large sunflower that seems to mirror the artist’s pose. Both the man and plant appear animated, as his tousled hair and the flower’s thick petals appear to respond to the shifting light and billowing atmosphere surrounding them. The picture’s intertwined themes have long been recognized: Van… Full Review