Recently Published Reviews

Illuminating Metalwork: Metal, Object, and Image in Medieval Manuscripts by editors Joseph Salvatore Ackley and Shannon L. Wearing is the fourth volume in De Gruyter’s series Sense, Matter, and Medium. The book complements recent exhibitions and publications on the materials of medieval manuscript illumination, such as the Fitzwilliam Museum’s landmark Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts (2016). Projects such as these have drawn on the expertise of scientists and conservators, guided, as the introduction here states, “by the conviction that a sustained incorporation of technical data deeply enriches the art historical project.” Ornamenting a manuscript with precious metals… Full Review

In the introduction to Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, Timothy McCall states that it is his intention to " . . . explore and interpret how [fifteenth-century Italian princes] . . . used art, spectacle, and especially clothing and adornment to reinforce and advertise power, and to seduce those who beheld them." McCall’s focus on aristocratic masculine dress is a significant addition to the growing literature on Renaissance male fashion. Central and unique to McCall’s argument is the assertion that quattrocento rulers such as Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Borso d’Este, and Alfonso d’Aragona purposefully attracted the… Full Review

What constitutes Korean photography? How do photographs of and in Korea shape national identity? Or perhaps more accurately, how are photography and the nation mutually constituted? And how might Korean photography intervene in the history of photography itself? The historiography of Korean photography brings forth a set of methodological issues that continue to shape the field of Korean art history at large. Demanding the construction of “Koreanness” in which a photograph must demonstrate its unique national and cultural authenticity, Korean photography is compartmentalized and perceived as a peripheral modernity that serves or catches up to Euro-American modernity. Two recent works… Full Review

In September 1934, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), announced that it was staging The Making of a Museum Publication, an exhibition that displayed the entire production process of its own publications, step by step. From manuscript through to multiply-reproduced object, typeset and laid-out, printed and bound, the MoMA show not only reinforced the critical role of printed matter as a medium for display in a modern art museum but also ushered in a heightened sense of self-reflexivity in relation to the catalog as an object of art-historiographical attention. In the subsequent ninety years, the question… Full Review

Southeast Asia is a region of ambiguity and complexity. Existing countries in the region went through different historical transformations before coming into being with diverse linguistic heritages. There is no unified lingua franca. Although—on the surface—there is geopolitical unity (such as through ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), art practitioners often struggle to establish cross-cultural understanding because of a lack of resources and knowledge about their neighboring countries. The Modern in Southeast Asian Art: A Reader is an attempt to establish such common ground. With the support of National Gallery Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Centre of… Full Review

The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History is a collection of essays written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw that address African American artists working in the United States from the end of the eighteenth century to today. Many of the essays are revised and expanded from previously published works and taken together demonstrate both the breadth and focus of Shaw’s scholarly and curatorial work over a twenty-year period: to challenge the discipline of art history for its exclusions, to grapple with the imperatives of history and representation in Black aesthetic practices, and to call for critical engagement… Full Review

In their heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, museum catalogs of permanent collections of art from the ancient Americas fulfilled an indispensable role recording the appearances, whereabouts, and growing knowledge of objects in a then-nascent field. At the same time, they frequently aspired to portray a newly amassed collection as “encyclopedic” and posit its significance. Such catalogs—for example, Lee Parson’s Pre-Columbian Art: The Morton D. May and The Saint Louis Art Museum Collections, published in 1980—regularly commemorated major acquisitions from private collections and, as things of beauty themselves, were typically gifted to potential donors to solicit future… Full Review

Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture joins two trends broadening art history’s scope: exposing racial ideologies and analyzing popular art. While others have focused on antislavery imagery, Stephens opens new pathways by illuminating art that supported slavery in the United States, gaining access to unseen works, and researching manuscripts to understand the artists and their clients. For art historians, the book offers greater context for interpreting Southern art; for historians of slavery, it offers visual analysis often missing from studies of political culture. It provides a lay of the land and establishes key waypoints. At the… Full Review

This volume, L’iconographie du Bestiaire divin de Guillaume le clerc de Normandie, by Rémy Cordonnier provides an excellent introduction to the Divine Bestiary (Bestiaire divin, ca. 1210–11)) by Guillaume le clerc of Normandy, through the presentation of the complex textual tradition and an introduction of what is known of the author and the context. In his text, Guillaume explains that he translated Latin prose into French verse. Though originally from Normandy, Guillaume lived in England and was married with children. Working for patrons in the West Midlands, he wrote poetry, moral allegories, and exempla. The Bestiaire divin … Full Review

For anyone concerned with the Middle Ages (and beyond), Jerusalem represents a challenge and an almost inexhaustible source of inspiration. For centuries, the holy city has presented itself to the observer as a liminal space in which the symbolic, legendary, allegorical, and metaphorical dimensions are inextricably superimposed on perceptible reality and tend to overshadow it, to such an extent that any distinction proves useless and even senseless. If there is one constant in the history of Jerusalem, it is its ability to bewilder, puzzle, and thrill its observers, whether they be devout pilgrims of the times past or scholars trying… Full Review

Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power highlights visual culture as a tool of anticapitalist and antiracist revolutionary struggle, and is a key methodological guide for those interested in the idea of art history after Black studies. Analyzing the lens-based and print media authored by the Black Panther Party (BPP) that embodied a Black radical aesthetic in the years 1969–1971, Sampada Aranke makes a forceful and convincing argument about how and why “the visual life of Black Power is activated through Black radical death” (4). The book explores a historic condition that has become more acute in… Full Review

Matthew Rarey’s Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic is the latest addition to scholarship on the knowledge produced by African individuals as they skillfully navigated the violent whims of enslavement and racial capitalism. Spanning the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Insignificant Things tracks an evolving, transatlantic discourse around bolsa de mandinga (translated literally as “mandinga pouch”): amulets with diverse materials contained within a fabric or leather pouch that were used for luck, love, and protection from personal violence. Across the Lusophone Atlantic, bolsas were employed ritualistically by many early modern subjects, but… Full Review

To visit Mexico City’s Plaza de la Constitución (better known as the Zócalo) today is to be immersed in an urban palimpsest spanning seven centuries. The north and east sides of this central plaza are occupied by the National Palace and Cathedral, from which the nation’s political and religious life has been administered since the Viceregal period. In the space between them, dancers and drummers wearing feathered headdresses and seed rattle anklets perform in front of the archaeological site and museum dedicated to the Mexica, or Aztec, Templo Mayor: the most significant ceremonial structure of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec… Full Review

The book of hours, a type of devotional book that usually contains a collection of prayers, psalms, hymns, and other readings to be recited at specific hours of the day, is one of the most well-preserved artistic products from the late Middle Ages. These books have received extensive scholarly attention as complex cultural products that were often richly illuminated. The Book of Hours and the Body: Somaesthetics, Posthumanism, and the Uncanny is focused on illuminations in several books of hours that could have helped their users reflect on issues of embodiment, gender, being human, and the divine. The methodological framework… Full Review

Myrlande Constant: The Work of Radiance, an exhibition volume published for the eponymous show that ran at the Fowler Museum at UCLA in 2023, stands as a major contribution to the contemporary scholarship on the work of Haitian artists. Other examples over the past several decades published in conjunction with museum and gallery exhibitions include Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince (2022), Haïti: deux siècles de création artistique (2014), Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou (2012), In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haiti (2012), and the disciplinary cornerstone of this era of scholarship, Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995)… Full Review