Recently Published Reviews

Beauty returns and is redeemed (perhaps) in Arthur C. Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. The central concepts and examples, especially Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, will be familiar to those who know the philosopher’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). The readable Abuse of Beauty, based on the Paul Carus Lectures that Danto presented to the American Philosophical Association in 2001, connects earlier points—his query of… Full Review

The catalogue raisonné is art history’s effort to associate itself with Enlightenment science. Identifying the complete production of a particular artist according to a consistent, authoritative, reasoned taxonomy, this kind of publication has long been a staple of academic art history. So it might surprise some to know that this volume is the first time a catalogue raisonné has been dedicated to the work of a photographer. The project has required its authors—representing the combined resources of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford, England—to face up to… Full Review

The goal of the organizers of the first Clark Studies in the Visual Arts conference in 1999, which resulted in this book, was simple enough. It was “to move the discussion [of the curator-academic divide] into a new and, we hope, less contentious phase, to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the respective practices and goals of the two art histories and of how each of them is engaged in the production and dissemination of art historical knowledge” (xii–xiii). In the introduction, editor and conference co-organizer Charles Haxthausen interprets the large audience and “spirited exchange” as evidence of the… Full Review

Books are valuable for many reasons. Some tell good stories or offer different ways of thinking, while others help us to understand the evolution of a field. Jules Prown’s new collection of essays does all this and more, lifting the curtain on the life of a renowned art historian and a pioneer in material culture analysis. It is as if Prown beckons us aside, whispering secrets to his scholarly success: “Look closely, think broadly, and avoid narrow categories. Most important, change and grow.” Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture demonstrates how research can shimmy and shift, veer… Full Review

The Morgan Old Testament (New York, Morgan M638, also known as the Morgan Crusader Bible, the Morgan Picture Bible, the Maciejowski Bible, and the Shah ‘Abbas Bible) is an extraordinary illuminated manuscript in the mid-thirteenth-century French Gothic style. Almost certainly made for or within the entourage of the crusader, Louis IX of France (1226–1270), or “Saint Louis,” the manuscript comprises a pictorial narrative of the early books of the Bible, from Genesis 1 through 2 Kings 20, and emphasizes the martial history of the Israelite advance on the Holy Land in a way that was “inspired and inflected by the… Full Review

Although the Ste-Chapelle in Paris has been featured in recent scholarship, notably by Daniel Weiss in Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and in a monographic study by Jean-Michel Leniaud and Françoise Perrot entitled La Sainte-Chapelle (Paris: Editions Nathan, CNMHS, 1991), Alyce Jordan’s book deepens our knowledge of the monument by focusing on the relation of the nave windows to the royal chapel’s function in Louis IX’s Paris. Not only does her work attempt to reconstruct the original thirteenth-century placement of the glass, but it also reveals the contemporary narrative strategies… Full Review

Focusing on the etchings of boats by Balthazar Solvyns (1760–1824), Robert Hardgrave, who is preparing a book on this artist’s life and work, demonstrates how revealing these prints are as expressions of the materiality of daily lives. The book is filled not only with boat lore and facts, but also with information about social order, class and caste (the Muga Chara type of boat, for example, is used by the lower classes to celebrate marriage), tribal identities, pirates (the Arakanese, called Maghs, from Burma), and the economics of eighteenth-century river trade in India. Hardgrave’s wealth of knowledge about boats and… Full Review

With this important book, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600, Rosamond Mack has joined a growing number of scholars who have challenged the well-known model of the Renaissance as an exclusive and singular moment of genius and invention centered in Italy. According to this familiar standard, the Renaissance signaled both the definitive emergence of European civilization and the irreparable rupture between East and West. Scholars such as Jerry Brotton, Charles Burnett, Anna Contadini, Deborah Howard, Lisa Jardine, Gülru Necipoglu, and Julian Raby, to name a few, have countered this paradigm by viewing the period’s achievements in… Full Review

See Kishwar Rizvi’s review of this book Rereading Eurocentric or North American definitions of modernity has become a frequent pursuit for scholars during the last two decades. Instead of the virtual projection of one continuous modernism, discussions of the period’s heterogeneous character have emerged, and beyond that, cross-cultural debates have become important in understanding the spread and development of modernism outside Europe. Since Edward Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), the hybridity and complexity of non-Western societies and cultures have become a new field of research. This new paradigm has entered the field… Full Review

Tondi (autonomous paintings or sculpture in a circular format) became a popular art form in Florence between the mid-fifteenth century and approximately 1520. A large majority of tondi—which feature the Madonna and Child, often in the company of saints or angels and occasionally in narrative scenes—were generally created for private devotion in the home during the Renaissance. Examples of famous tondi include Domenico Veneziano’s Adoration of the Magi (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, ca. 1441), Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat (Florence, Uffizi, ca. 1482), Michelangelo’s Doni Holy Family (Florence, Uffizi, ca. 1503–6), and Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia (Florence, Galleria Pitti, ca… Full Review

There are some areas of our discipline that can be studied effectively with little reference to archaeology. Early medieval art history is not one of them. Those venturing into this field, particularly into central Europe before the formation of the Carolingian empire in the late eighth century, will probably find themselves studying as many excavation site reports as medieval texts. Therefore, the publication of this volume, promising to bring together written and material evidence in a relatively brief English-language survey, should have been cause for rejoicing. Herbert Schutz does indeed give an overview that is useful in some ways, but… Full Review

In the opening three chapters of her study of late medieval painting in Cologne, Brigitte Corley sets the stage with impressive scenery and a promising cast of characters. Sancta Colonia was a beautiful city of relics, pilgrimage, trade, learning, and spectacular imperial visits, in which various groups—archbishops, patricians, and city councilors—competed for power and prestige. Shifts in power resulted in fluctuating “patterns of patronage” that left behind a rich material culture of altarpieces, chapels, and liturgical objects. As Corley writes: “As political power changed hands…so patronage changed its initiators and its agenda. The archbishops primarily expressed spiritual and worldly power,… Full Review

Aware that art history still remains all too traditional in its orientation, much too focused upon European art, many art historians would like to have a true world history of art. As a student at Yale University, David Summers was inspired by George Kubler’s classes on pre-Columbian art. Now, after publishing justly renowned books devoted to Michelangelo and Renaissance naturalism, he has written a postformalist history of world art. This enormously long, clearly written book is not easy to summarize. Ordinarily surveys are organized historically, taking the reader from the Egyptians to the ancient Greeks and… Full Review

In his Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, Andrew Hemingway provides a materialist history of the left movement in the visual arts in the United States, beginning with the founding of the magazine New Masses in 1926. The year 1956 is a more symbolic terminus: the date the American Communist Party (CPUSA) “imploded,” to use the author’s oblique characterization. (Specifically, this was the year Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, among other critical events, resulting in an exodus of members from an already weakened and contracted organization.) Extensively researched, this important and provocative book challenges… Full Review

The quincentenary of Agnolo Bronzino’s birth was celebrated this year at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Toronto. The sessions there, organized by Janet Cox-Rearick, sought to plumb an artistic intellect that produced some of the most challenging art of the early modern period. Bronzino, noted for aloofness, impenetrability, and extreme refinement in his art, emerged in presentations on his eroticism and varietà as a prolific exponent of bawdy, burlesque poetry parodying the neo-Petrarchan modes and expression that saturated the cultural circle in which he moved. This seeming paradox of refinement in his art and travesty in his… Full Review