Recently Published Reviews

The title of Kamil Khan Mumtaz's book is in keeping with architectural debates in South Asia, which for almost a century have remained anchored in questions about modernity and tradition. This book is a collection of sixteen short polemical essays by Mumtaz, a well-known Pakistani architect, written between 1967 and 1997. The essays chronicle the gradual shift in his position "from a committed 'modernist' to a believer in the essential value of traditional wisdom." Mumtaz's argument does not adequately problematize issues such as economic and cultural domination, or religious nationalism and secular identity. Instead, he remains satisfied with the limitations… Full Review

See Stephen Fine's review of this book. As its title suggests, Kalman P. Bland's The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual revisits the evidence on Jewish aniconism and uncovers the origins and meanings of this most prevalent of modern myths. The conventional wisdom Bland seeks to overturn is now a profoundly internalized truism formulated during the course of the last 200 years by a broad range of writers, thinkers, artists, and scholars of all stripes (Jew and Gentile alike). The truism holds that Jews are a people without art. Judaism's presumed… Full Review

This book systematically examines the ways in which the sun was understood metaphorically, symbolically, and scientifically in a range of texts and images available to Michelangelo during the period in which he designed and painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (1534-41). Observing that Michelangelo's Last Judgment differs from previous renditions in that it offers a circular composition with figures rising and falling in a clockwise pattern around a figure of Christ before a sun-like mandorla, Valerie Shrimplin hypothesizes that the artist might have had a heliocentric model of the universe in mind. Each of her ten chapters addresses… Full Review

In a manner appropriate to its subject, The Theatrical Baroque is slender in size but broad in scope. The catalogue, like the exhibition it accompanied at the University of Chicago's David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, explores a wide range of interactions between the visual and performing arts in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The project's structure also sets forth an ambitious agenda, as it proposes that faculty and students working together across disciplinary boundaries can generate new and meaningful insights into the often neglected collections of a university art museum. An introductory… Full Review

See also: Hans Mielke, "Pieter Bruegel: Die Zeichnungen":http://caareviews.org/reviews/250, reviewed by Dorothy Limouze As the European Cultural Capital of the year 2001, Rotterdam had something quite special to offer—a sensational exhibition, the likes of which will scarcely, if ever, occur again. Almost all of the total graphic work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (ca. 1525–69) was on view this past summer at the Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum in the Netherlands. This splendid show was conceived in close collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will be shown this fall. … Full Review

The present work is a much awaited study of the architect Kunio Maekawa (1905-86), one of the three principal Japanese who worked with Le Corbusier (from April 1928 to April 1930). Maekawa has long been recognized both in Japan and the West as a key figure in the evolution of Japanese modernism. While Maekawa himself published accounts of his work (from the 1930s through the late 1960s), his writings are not numerous if judged by the standard of his peers nor by those of later contemporaries. In 1930 he was the Japanese translator of Le Corbusier's important early text "L'art… Full Review

Meyer Schapiro’s contribution to our understanding of Impressionism has had an importance that goes well beyond his actual written contribution to its study. If we exclude his work on Cézanne, that contribution has consisted of scattered passages in articles and published lectures and, more focally, less than a dozen paragraphs written in the 1937 essay "The Nature of Abstract Art" (Marxist Quarterly 1 (1937); reprinted in Schapiro, Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers [New York: George Braziller, 1978]). These paragraphs—more precisely, two among them—have been stimulating for social historians working in the field: they begin: "Early Impressionism… Full Review

Those of us who live in Massachusetts are fortunate that Lawrence Vale settled here to apply his considerable intellectual and writing talents to the study of public housing in Boston, rather than, say, in Chicago, San Francisco, or St. Louis. The rest of you, don't despair: From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors is not just a parochial story about Boston, but an insightful historical analysis of the relationship between the cultural meanings of land and home, attitudes about responsibility for both oneself and others, urban design, and social policy. Vale convincingly argues that one cannot… Full Review

Many an undergraduate lecture hall still furnishes a home for the Icoelacanth of medieval studies—hat is, for the historian who shows slides of medieval images as mere illustrations of daily life, or as nothing more than a graphic adjunct to the words of medieval sources. In an episode of habitat encroachment that none need lament, this collection of Herbert Kessler's recent essays makes life more difficult for the living fossil. Again and again the author shows how early medieval images from Byzantium and the West "reveal[ed] truth in sensual beauty" (205), expressed arguments, and embodied "complex theological interpretations" (201) in… Full Review

The graphic novel, a story presented as a fully illustrated narrative, is a high-art version of the comic strip. Like the true novel, the graphic novel treats serious subjects, but using images together with words combined with pictures. The proceedings of a conference on the graphic novel held at the University of Leuven, May 2000, The Graphic Novel contains studies of such well-known graphic novels as Art Spiegelman's Maus, Jacques Tardi's visual narratives, and some lesser-known writers, and several essays devoted to the theory of the relation between word and image in these strips James Reibman, Ed Tan, Sue… Full Review

The idea of viewing systematically world art from a single moment in time offers an extraordinary opportunity to consider the prospect of a world art history that parallels an emerging subdiscipline of history that has come to be called world history. It looks at systems in an interlocked world, for example trade in sugar or slaves. Recognizing that even in ancient times people moved over vast distances and carried with them ideas that influenced the production of art, the discipline of art history as well could develop a world art history. Such a subdiscipline, i.e. world art history, could do… Full Review

Memory and the Medieval Tomb gathers together eleven essays that explore the commemorative function of the tomb, from the early Christian catacombs to the fifteenth century, in England, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and France. It is a valuable collection that offers a wide range of themes and approaches. Some papers are about the way in which the design and location of tombs were carefully contrived to keep alive the memory of the deceased, so that his or her soul might enjoy the benefits of repeated masses and prayers. Others are about the ulterior meanings these monuments might bear and the connotations… Full Review

Significant collections of American miniatures are owned by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Yale University Art Museum in New Haven, CT, and the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC. While some of these institutions have produced catalogues, relatively few publications exist that discuss the portrait and mourning miniatures in their own and others' collections. Art-history monographs and dissertations on American miniaturists are even more rare, save for those on Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Charles Fraser, and Charles… Full Review

The publication of these two intellectually engaging and visually appealing textbooks by Laurie Schneider Adams provides a good opportunity to reconsider the main options available for surveys of Italian Renaissance art. Art historians, like most academics, tend to argue the relative merits of different textbooks with great gravity, finding fault for reasons of coverage, method, or quality of reproductions. In this age of interactive web syllabi, these problems are relatively surmountable; we can link students to news articles, museum, educational, and informational websites, electronic texts, or other images to fill in the perceived gaps. But the textbook remains the basic… Full Review

The publication of Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage posthumously honors C. R. Dodwell's lifelong work on early medieval art. Timothy Graham, formerly Dodwell's research assistant, considerately saw the book through to press. In this volume, Dodwell considers the origins of the illustrations in Carolingian Terence manuscripts and their possible relationship to illuminations produced at Canterbury or under Canterbury's influence in the eleventh century. Although its deductions are problematic, this study is nonetheless valuable for its systematic analysis of gestures in the manuscripts' imagery; it will interest not only art historians but also intellectual historians and classicists. … Full Review