Recently Published Reviews

Mark Meadow begins his book on Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the practice of rhetoric with a rhetorical exercise of his own: an exordium, a commencement on the artist’s identity, on the contours of rhetorical education in sixteenth-century Netherlandish culture, and on his own art-historical method. Like the sixteenth-century humanist Domenicus Lampsonius, Meadows asks, Who is this new Hieronymus Bosch called Pieter Bruegel? Although much of the painter’s biography escapes us, Meadow rightly argues that the artist’s painting Netherlandish Proverbs reveals that Bruegel was well versed in the art of persuasion and quite capable of imaginatively manipulating rhetorical tropes in… Full Review

The status and experience of children in ancient Greek society receive fresh attention and thoughtful consideration in Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past. Both the catalogue and the exhibition that it accompanies probe the social realities of childhood in ancient Greece by examining portrayals of children in Greek art and other articles made for children’s use. As the contributing authors stress throughout the volume, works of art offer tantalizing glimpses into the lives of children, but they do not tell an objective story. The sculptors and painters of the ancient world were… Full Review

These volumes result from the intersection of two series at Cambridge University Press: the Cambridge Companions collection, now numbering over two hundred titles on subjects from Aristotle to William Wordsworth, but including relatively few artists outside the Italian Renaissance, and a more informal series of important books on Hispanic art and culture, including those produced out of the publisher’s New York office under the leadership of Beatrice Rehl. Both volumes under review were partially written and edited in an exemplary fashion by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, and both will be essential additions to any library on Hispanic art. The Cambridge Companion to… Full Review

Ancient Near Eastern art is considered the poor stepchild of all ancient art, banished to the basement of the canon yet somehow supporting the whole structure of art that followed it. In her latest book, Zainab Bahrani attempts to bring the study of ancient Near Eastern art out of the proverbial cellar and into the forefront of academic attention. Considering the conservative nature of past scholarship in the field, it is somewhat unusual that the author chooses to view the most ancient traces of civilization through the most modern of theoretical lenses. As a “culture translator,” Bahrani concedes that she… Full Review

The appearance of Life magazine’s first issue in November 1936 set off an explosion in American visual culture. With unanticipated eagerness viewers snapped up copies of this new, sight-centered magazine that promised to show them the world, photograph by photograph. Audiences delighted in the new prospects the magazine opened to them, as its images granted voyeuristic access to a spectrum of modern life, from the mundane to the marvelous. Once established, the magazine remained a spark plug of American visual experience for more than a quarter century, serving as a self-proclaimed “Show-Book of the World” until the cessation of its… Full Review

Anne Stanton’s book provides a detailed and insightful examination of the Queen Mary Psalter (London, BLMS Royal 2 B.vii), a luxury devotional text that is densely illustrated with Old and New Testament subjects and marginal illuminations. The author focuses on the manuscript as a material artifact, its relationship to devotional manuscripts in England and France, and the connection between its contents and its proposed royal audience. On one level, Stanton’s study, which is based on her doctoral thesis, expands the work of the Warner facsimile (George Warner, Queen Mary’s Psalter [London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1912]) and therefore includes… Full Review

The intriguing and misunderstood Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) is receiving a much-needed reappraisal in current scholarship. Michael W. Cole’s anticipated Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture is a valuable addition to this effort and indeed to Renaissance studies as a whole. Cole focuses on Cellini as an artist rather than a personality and provides a revealing study of how a sixteenth-century sculptor functioned in his larger cultural milieu in order to “understand the sculptural act” (3), as the author writes in the introduction. Taking the formal and thematic conceptualization of Cellini’s works as his subject, Cole explores the complex social and… Full Review

The Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has been enjoying a renaissance during the past fifteen to twenty years as scholars have attempted to recover the production of European women artists. Famous in her own day for her portraits, altarpieces, and history paintings, Fontana was capable of drawing greater fees than the Carracci, and for a period she was on a par with Anthony Van Dyck and Justus Sustermans. Of all woman artists, she has the largest body of surviving work before the eighteenth century (150 works known), and her oeuvre will doubtless grow since her paintings circulated through Italy, Germany,… Full Review

Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Architecture is the first publication in the Association Villard de Honnecourt (AVISTA) series, Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art. The goal of this series is to provide a publication venue for interdisciplinary studies in the fields of medieval art, architecture, science, and technology. The eleven essays included in the inaugural volume, edited by Nancy Y. Wu, address the geometry and systems of measure that were used to determine the design and construction of medieval buildings. United by their focus on the mathematics and metrology underlying medieval building… Full Review

The study of post-Tridentine art in Italy has, over the past two decades, enjoyed a kind of renascence, with the publication of a number of books, exhibition catalogues, and articles on—inter alia—the most important papal projects of the period, the leading historical figures of the Catholic Reform and their art patronage, Oratorian and Jesuit art of the period, the emergence of early Christian archaeology and its impact on visual culture, and Counter-Reformation art theory. These publications have gone far in illuminating the conjunction of art and post-Tridentine liturgy, new iconographies, and, most generally, the ways in which the… Full Review

When art-history students read about Greek vase-painting, it is often a struggle for them to learn the unusual names of vase shapes, of the artists who made them, and of the mythological figures and stories represented on the vessels. Indeed, many surveys of Greek art concentrate on issues of chronology, style, and typology, a necessity for a body of material that has little in the way of external documentation. What is often lost in this process is an appreciation for the cultural and social context that produced the vases, that these works of art are also artifacts that were part… Full Review

Few statues are more familiar to students of Greek art than the korai from the Athenian Acropolis. From this important study of the korai and other Acropolis votive statues of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., we learn that we do not know them as well as we thought. Catherine M. Keesling takes a rigorously contextual approach to the Acropolis dedications, considering not only the statues themselves but also their inscribed bases and evidence for bronze dedications on the Acropolis, now lost, in an attempt to “rebuild on paper what the Persian invaders destroyed” (xiv). In… Full Review

Richard Ettinghausen once wrote of the Indian art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947): “[t]here are few scholars … whose publications cover a wider range …[:] philosophy, metaphysics, religion, iconography, Indian literature and arts, Islamic art, medieval art, music, geology, and, especially, the place of art in society” (Ars Islamica 9 (1942): 125). With the help of Coomaraswamy himself, Helen Ladd compiled a partial bibliography of his work in that same issue. Roger Lipsey published two volumes of Coomaraswamy’s Selected Papers and a biography in the Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) that include a list of Coomaraswamy’s publications… Full Review

Jane Hawkes has become one of the leading iconographers of Insular, more particularly Anglo-Saxon sculpture, and the volume under review does nothing to disappoint. The Sandbach Crosses: Sign and Significance in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture clearly demonstrates the depth of Insular scholarship from the last twenty-five years, something of which the art-historical establishment remains willfully oblivious. Introductory textbooks present Insular art as though nothing had been written since Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in 1908, while Fred Orton’s blithe assumption that theory conquers all insults those who sweated interdisciplinary blood for years to reach a deeper understanding. Insular art demands attention to… Full Review

A growing literature has emerged describing and analyzing the production and reception of art objects as well as the institutions supporting artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recent book, the published version of Thomas Schmitz’s 1997 doctoral dissertation (University of Düsseldorf), is a thoroughly researched and cogently analyzed account of one of Germany’s unique institutions, the Kunstvereine (art unions). Additionally, he discusses the relationship of Kunstvereine to issues of class identity and cultural self-representation. He has no aesthetic or ideological ax to grind and therefore quite objectively discusses the art unions’ major features, including their strengths and weaknesses… Full Review