Recently Published Reviews

The University of Texas’s spacious new Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which opened in April 2006, recently mounted an outstanding exhibition devoted to Luca Cambiaso, the leading native-born figure in sixteenth-century Genoese painting. Organized with the Palazzo Ducale Genoa, this first monographic exhibition in fifty years was supported by a beautifully produced catalogue, in English, edited by Jonathan Bober, the show’s chief architect and the Blanton Museum’s curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings. The volume comprises 118 substantial catalogue entries, each accompanied by a superb full-page color plate, preceded by an excellent fortuna critica, an anthology of… Full Review

Palladio’s Rome offers an unusual recreation of the Renaissance city in the words of the celebrated architect from northern Italy. Palladio made several visits to Rome when he was still an aspiring architect, producing a pair of guidebooks that were published in 1554—one an introduction to the ancient city (The Antiquities of Rome), and the other a companion guide to the churches of contemporary Rome (Description of the Churches). In keeping with standard practice of the time, the texts are brief and unillustrated, but the contents are surprising given the identity of the author. Vaughan… Full Review

It is a sign of the times, I suppose, to begin a book review, itself published online, with a reference to a website. For in many ways, Jane Geddes’s The St. Albans Psalter is a book that was spawned by a website. In 2003, the University of Aberdeen undertook, under the direction of Geddes, to publish the St. Albans Psalter on the internet as a virtual facsimile (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml). As academic websites go, this is a truly impressive accomplishment, for it provides high-quality color images of every page of this twelfth-century psalter (including the blank pages). For the first time… Full Review

A generation of Anglophone scholars has depended on Michael Baxandall’s masterwork, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), for its inimitable introduction to the subject of the golden age of German carved altarpieces from around the turn of the sixteenth century. Now, a quarter-century later, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol—perhaps one of the most beautiful books ever produced—reintroduces this material in a translation of the 2005 Hirmer edition, with the usual high production values of that Munich art publisher. In this case, the accompanying text is truly worthy… Full Review

In 1775 an artist named Nathaniel Hone submitted a painting called The Pictorial Conjuror, Displaying the Whole Art of Optical Deception (1775) to an upcoming exhibition at the British Royal Academy. The painting depicted in its top left corner an image of the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman frolicking naked with other naked artists, among them her friend Joshua Reynolds, who is shown lewdly jabbing his oversized, trumpet-shaped hearing aid in the direction of Kauffman’s parted legs. Hone’s painting was understood by contemporaries to be an attack on Reynolds, the president of the Academy, a mockery of Reynolds’s rumored love affair… Full Review

For some there is a paradox in the fact that Bob Jones University, a Christian-fundamentalist institution that bills itself as the bastion of “old-time religion” based on the absolute authority of the Bible, should be a repository for one of the best collections of Catholic art in the United States. In the words of Henry Hope, who first introduced the university’s museum to the public (“The Bob Jones University Collection of Religious Art,” Art Journal XXV, no. 2 (1965–66): 154–162), the spirit of the collection is “more that of the Counter Reformation than of Martin Luther” (162). In this respect… Full Review

The Early Modern Painter-Etcher, curated by Madeleine Viljoen, Director of the La Salle University Art Museum, and Michael Cole, Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, reexamined art-historical categories. Specifically, it looked at the ways in which painters in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries took up not just any print technique but in particular the technique of etching. The excellent catalogue, with four essays and substantial entries, thoughtfully points out the ways in which etching as a medium was accessible to painters, and the ways in which artists… Full Review

According to the curators of Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso: Time, Truth and History, the dominant themes of Spanish painting can be captured in fifteen categories ranging from art-historical genre (“Bodegones,” or still lifes) to those seemingly made to fit the loans received (“Flyers,” “Landscapes of Fire”). The curators took great—and controversial—license in liberating Spanish painting from the conventions of chronology, school, and patronage that usually provide the foundation for its presentation. However, if the resulting exhibition does not succeed in presenting the masterworks on view in a more memorable way, or in making them somehow more… Full Review

A hypothetical reader familiar with the history of twentieth-century Europe but unfamiliar with the art produced in that period would be baffled by the leading survey texts of our day. The three major totalitarian regimes of the century—Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Stalinist Soviet Communism—brought down upon humanity the most severe cataclysm in recorded history. Even the aftermath lasted through the end of the century. Yet our imaginary reader would find little evidence for that in textbooks on art and architectural history. Except for Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Internationall (1919–20) and an occasional reference to the… Full Review

Because the appreciation of illustrated books requires direct contact between the object and the viewer, it is difficult to make the experience of viewing these books accessible to a wide audience—notwithstanding recent advances in digital “page turning.” Viewing a book is usually a solitary act; at most two people might be able to appreciate a volume at the same time. The images in them are encountered one by one in the sequence determined by the artist but at a pace set by the viewer. When a book is exhibited in a gallery, only one opening per volume may be displayed… Full Review

[NB: All translations from the text are by the reviewers.] As summarized on the book’s back cover, the authors, Pierre Colman, professor emeritus at the Université de Liège, member of the Classe des Beaux-Arts of the Belgian Acedémie royale d'archéologie, and honorary member of the Commission royale des monuments, sites et fouilles, and his wife, Berthe Lhoist-Colman, art historian, include texts from twenty years of research on the study of the beautiful metal font of Saint-Barthélemy, in Liège, Belgium, a masterpiece of medieval art and probably the best-known baptismal font in the world. The book gathers ten of their… Full Review

From 1803 to 1805 the English watercolorist John Sell Cotman spent much time in the north of England and Wales under the patronage of a highly agreeable family of landed gentry, the Cholmeleys. In his early twenties at the time, the son of a wigmaker from Norwich, Cotman was eager to continue his sketching tours in the scenic north and Wales, tours that were considered de rigueur for young landscape painters of the day. Previously thought of as a medium for intimate, small-scale, personal, and spontaneous work, watercolor was emerging as a genre worthy of serious attention and respect. Cotman’s… Full Review

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India offers a welcome examination of the work of the many British artists active in India during the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century—including Johann Zoffany, William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniell, Tilly Kettle, James Baillie Fraser, Arthur William Devis, and Robert Home—as well as a double-barreled thesis. The art that these men produced on the subcontinent stimulated the Romantic Movement in England, the authors believe, and, in turn, was transformed into the “cultural imperatives” of the Victorian era in Great Britain, these assertions thereby necessitating a look at artists… Full Review

Hotei Publishing is a commercial press established in Leiden in the mid-1990s as a specialized publisher of finely designed and beautifully illustrated English language books on Japanese ukiyo-e prints. In recent years it has expanded to publish books on various Japanese arts, mainly of the Edo (1615–1868), Meiji (1868–1912), and Taishō (1912–26) periods. Catering at first primarily to the large numbers of ukiyo-e print collectors in the West, its ukiyo-e publications are nevertheless distinguished by the rigorous scholarship of its authors, both collectors and academics. Consequently, its publications have immensely enriched scholarly understanding of the ukiyo-e tradition. Building on… Full Review

Of the diverse artistic specialties that developed in the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century, architectural painting was the last, fully emerging only during the 1650s. Interior and exterior views of major local buildings—real or imagined—along with depictions of the larger built environment of the rapidly growing Dutch cities allowed artists to celebrate national power and prosperity while examining aspects of visual experience also explored in many landscapes and genre paintings of the period: space and the interaction of solids and voids as revealed within varying conditions of natural light. Particular artistic problems are posed, however, by the need to… Full Review