Recently Published Reviews

This anthology was put together by the editors under the auspices of a group of women teachers at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Caroline Arscott, senior lecturer in nineteenth-century British art, and Katie Scott, lecturer in early modern French art and architecture, formulated and nurtured their project in discussions with their colleagues, several of whom ultimately contributed essays to the finished book. The anthology consists of eight essays (one by each of the editors is included) and centers on depictions and the significance of the figure of Venus in the history of art. I like very much the… Full Review

This detailed, beautifully printed volume, while aimed at the needs of an extensive exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, acquires the permanence of carefully researched scholarship about a hitherto neglected aspect of China's rich embrace of the visual arts. Initial gratitude must go to the principal collector and donor, the late Richard G. Pritzlaff, who in the distant spaces of his New Mexico ranch was initially overlooked by intellectuals he delightfully branded as a "superficial and disappointing lot" (20). Redemption at least partially follows, however, in this work of two scholars from that maligned assembly, authors… Full Review

Art historians familiar with Richard Wollheim's early writing on art will recall his "Minimal Art" essay, first published in the January 1965 issue of Arts Magazine. Historians of 1960s art have attributed Wollheim with having coined the term "minimal," now widely used to identify a nonunified field of 1960s art making: minimalism, minimalist, literalist, or specific object. The fact that Wollheim's essay addressed none of the artworks or artists that have since become identified with minimalism (etcetera) is an acknowledged peculiarity. What has gone virtually unnoticed in the literature on 1960s art, however, is that minimal art for Wollheim… Full Review

Taoism and the Arts of China is a welcome scholarly endeavor. The exhibition and catalogue were organized by Stephen Little, Pritzker Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, with assistance from Shawn Eichman, exhibition coordinator for the show. Both were well suited to the task, having addressed the topic in previous scholarship. The catalogue, like the exhibition, contains a diverse range of media to delight the eye, stimulate the intellect, and indicate the social and cultural depth of this belief system. A list of no fewer than 151 objects from fifty-eight private and public collections and ten countries worldwide underscores… Full Review

Anita Moskowitz has devoted her distinguished career to two distinct albeit related subjects: the study of Italian sculpture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the definition of the Italian variant of "Gothic" style. The period broadly defined by the chronological limits of this book is habitually called Gothic, yet pinning down precisely what is meant by this term in Italy is not an easy task. Moskowitz succeeds in defining and explaining Italian Gothic as it was expressed in sculptural form. As Moskowitz notes in her Conclusion, Italian Gothic sculpture was forged of a "complex dialectic produced by the absorption… Full Review

A growing body of publications has finally dispelled the myth that the Song dynasty (960–1279) marked the beginning of a long and inexorable decline of Buddhism throughout the imperial era in China.[1] Summit of Treasures: Buddhist Cave Art of Dazu, China by Angela Howard is an eloquent addition to this new scholarship. The subject of inquiry is the Baodingshan complex in Dazu County, Sichuan province, the only known Buddhist site in China exclusively constructed during the Song dynasty and devoted to religious development at the time. As the first major scholarly investigation of an artistic monument that functioned primarily outside… Full Review

The townscapes of Bernardo Bellotto (1722–80) have always delighted those in the know. Although never as prominent as his famous uncle, Antonio Canaletto, Bellotto has remained familiar to scholars through the regular appearance of his paintings in exhibitions and occasional reproduction in books. Yet he lingers on the margins of English-language scholarship, perhaps because he spent most of his career in the relatively unfamiliar terrain of Central Europe. Confusion about Bellotto's relation to Canaletto has also hurt his critical fortune, since some assume that the younger artist simply transferred his uncle's visual language to a different context. It hasn't helped… Full Review

Like Simon Marmion (d. 1489), Jean Poyet is a celebrated late fifteenth-century French painter whose documented works elude certain identification. Recorded in Tours between 1483 and 1498, Poyet was ranked with Jean Fouquet and praised for his mastery of perspective by several early sixteenth-century writers. Poyet's reputation waxed again three hundred years later, when his name was attached to the celebrated Hours of Anne of Bretagne (Paris, BNF, lat. 9474). With the discovery in 1868 and publication in 1880 of a document that decisively identified that book's illuminator as Jean Bourdichon, Poyet's contemporary and chief rival in Tours, the latter… Full Review

In The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, Alex Potts explains the transition from self-contained figurative sculpture to sculpture-in-the-expanded-field as the culmination of two centuries of beliefs that sculpture incites a "distinctive mode of apprehension" (2) from painting. This significant divide rests not strictly on the formal means of the two mediums, but also on the reactions these means prompt in viewers: For Potts the "vividly embodied physical and perceptual responses" (5) that accompany the spatiotemporal process of looking at three-dimensional art are necessarily unmatched in any flat, two-dimensional experience. Potts's study does not recount the historical debates on painting… Full Review

It is now widely recognized that much of African art has been created to sustain social harmony, improve living conditions, and encourage political cohesion. The varied functions of African works have been addressed in numerous exhibitions and books, yet for our times, there may be no topic more thought-provoking and inspiring than the resilient roles that African artworks play in healing and crisis management. Art and Oracle: African Art and Rituals of Divination, published in conjunction with the exhibition Art and Oracle: Spirit Voices of Africa, explores the complex relationships between art and divination… Full Review

In The Architecture of Norman England, Eric Fernie has produced the first indispensable study of medieval architecture for the new millennium. He achieves an admirable balance between a good introductory survey for the uninitiated and a new handbook for specialists. All of us are in his debt for making the material both interesting and accessible. The book will have a long and useful shelf life, all the more because it is, ultimately, a book about ideas and theoretical conceptions in architecture carefully grounded in archaeology, building analysis, and documents. It belongs in every reference library, as well as in… Full Review

See Susan Fillin-Yeh and Robert Moore’s response to this review The title of this anthology is misleading: The collection is not consistently about dandies, only tangentially about fashion, and the word “finesse” disappears after the title. The book offers both less and more than the title promises, skimping on the historical specificity of dandyism but expanding the reach of this term. At its worst, it simply spices common art-historical knowledge with a new nomenclature. At its best—and several of the essays are excellent—it affords new insight into overlooked aspects of modernism and even casts familiar images in… Full Review

Given the strong religious tenor of the last two decades of culture wars and the expansion of the "new art history" into visual culture, it seemed to be only a matter of time before the scholarly field took on the artifacts of religion for the work of academic debate and interpretation. In the preface to their fine anthology, editors David Morgan and Sally M. Promey point to a relatively widespread lack of scholarly discussion of religious imagery by North American art historians and religious historians alike. While the former has seen the onslaught of ideology and belief as eclipsing aesthetic… Full Review

Although more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), the ability of that groundbreaking study to stimulate new ways of considering monumental works of Renaissance culture has hardly diminished. Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art is a collection of essays inspired by Greenblatt's work that attempts to extend his concept of literary self-fashioning to a wide array of examples in the visual arts. Fashioning Identities contains fifteen essays: the introductory first chapter by Joanna Woods-Marsden, which provides both a summary of and… Full Review

The current explosion of critical and art-historical writing on "Conceptual Art," like the discursive production of "postmodernism" of the 1980s and early 1990s that preceded it, posits that the art production of a particular group of artists, by means of critical attack and strategic engagement, extended the development of visual modernism into what has been termed a "critical postmodernism" of the late twentieth century. Therefore, we are at this moment witnesses to the slow process of canonization that often characterizes the discourse of art history. It comes chronologically on the heels of American and European exhibitions that have attempted to… Full Review