Recently Published Reviews

Books on museums certainly keep coming. The historian Randolph Starn rightly noted in 2005 that the phenomenon of museology had burgeoned in little more than a decade, and the problem was now “how to navigate a flood of literature” (“A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 [February 2005]: 68). Andrew McClellan, whose Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994) immediately became a bulwark of the new, historically robust study of museums as institutions, remarked in 2007 that museum… Full Review

François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal by Estelle Lingo is beautifully written, thoroughly researched, intelligently constructed, and handsomely presented. Lingo’s close attention to technique and what she refers to as “bodily presence” (an essential element in the Greek ideal) call for the highest quality pictures, which by and large she gets. Given Lingo’s gifts with ekphrasis, the excellent visual documentation, and her no-stone-unturned approach to investigating modern and early modern sources and documents relating to Duquesnoy and the Greek question, this book serves as a kind of laboratory in which the author attempts to distill the essence of the Greek… Full Review

While standard textbooks on Greek temples are organized according to chronology and building type, the two titles under review here attempt to render Greek architecture more accessible and more relevant to contemporary readers. Tony Spawforth’s discussion of Greek peripteral temples stresses the experiential aspect and endeavors to facilitate the study of these structures by, among other things, updating the vocabulary used to describe them. His text is intended as an introduction to the subject, and is thus copiously illustrated (mostly in color) and conveniently divided up into short sections. Alexander Tzonis and Phoebe Giannisi, on the other hand, assume a… Full Review

Dario Gamboni has a keen eye for significant art-historical projects. In his earlier book with Reaktion, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (1997), he addressed a topical theme—art vandalism—with a high degree of historical nuance and depth. Potential Images shares these qualities. Gamboni examines a phenomenon with which both art historians and more casual viewers of the visual arts are familiar: the intriguing if evanescent tendency to see what we construe as hidden or ambiguous images in works of art and decorative schemes. Citing Marcel Duchamp’s view that “it is the ONLOOKER who makes these… Full Review

The advent of a new millennium is an opportunity to take stock. Blackwell Publishing has begun to do just that, inaugurating several ambitious series whose aim is to map the past, present, and future of the discipline of art history. A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, one of the first volumes to appear in the series Blackwell Companions to Art History, is the middle installment of three essay collections that will treat the state of research on the art of the Christian Middle Ages. The collection covers the period ca. 1000–1300 in northern… Full Review

The literature on Frank Lloyd Wright’s oeuvre expands yearly as, for example, with these two small books on two of Wright’s smaller Usonian houses. The residential component of Wright’s vision for a redesigned United States of North America, Usonians were built across the country in the last two decades of the architect’s long career. They would be enormously influential on American housing design for the remainder of the twentieth century. The books under review take very different approaches, but share a focus on individual Usonian houses and the story of their making. The Sidney and Mildred Rosenbaum House was… Full Review

Visually stunning and intellectually riveting, the exhibition Literati Modern: Bunjinga from Late Edo to Twentieth-Century Japan presented the Honolulu Academy of Arts's newly acquired Terry Welch Collection of over eighty Japanese ceramics, calligraphy, and paintings (in handscroll, hanging scroll, album, and both two- and six-panel screen formats) from late Edo through Showa periods (the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries). It demonstrated the claim—made by guest curator Michiyo Morioka and other panelists in the accompanying symposium—that unlike most schools of Japanese art (Kano-ha, Tosa-ha, Rinpa), Bunjinga (“literati painting”) is not determined by a single style, but rather encompasses a very… Full Review

In philosophy we have important dialogues by Plato, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume. A dialogue is a great format for presenting opposed points of view, without requiring that the author choose between them. But in art history, apart from some staged scenes in Diderot’s Salons, Mondrian’s dialogues, and Roberto Longhi’s short imagined discussion between Caravaggio and Tiepolo, it’s hard to cite examples of this literary form. (There were some French dialogues preceding modernism, and of course Andy Warhol contributed to that tradition in one of his dictated books.) I’ve always been a little surprised that we art historians have… Full Review

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

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

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

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

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently had the rare opportunity to see a survey of hardstone carving in Europe, an art form best known by its Italian shorthand term, pietre dure. By assembling some of the best-known works and a great variety of objects in terms of technique, origin, and appearance, the exhibition was well worth seeing, if not always consistent in the strength and coherence of its presentation. The introductory gallery of the show, as well as the first chapter of the catalogue, might have struck more knowledgeable viewers and readers as somewhat haphazard and… Full Review

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

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