Recently Published Reviews

The Nazarenes engaged the most vital philosophical, theological, and poetic issues of their time with an intensity scarcely rivaled in the history of nineteenth-century art. Thus, given the interest of contemporary art historians in theory and interdisciplinary studies, one could confidently assume that research on Nazarenism would represent a burgeoning field. And yet, the contrary is the case. The puzzling lack of scholarly engagement with Nazarenism has partially resulted from the modernist disdain for the movement's historicist idiom and its orientation toward religion. Whereas these issues clearly bear ideological connotations—reinforced by questions of taste—the neglect of Nazarene art reflects more… Full Review

For too long, ancient mosaics have been the stepchild of histories of ancient art, although they exist in countless numbers from all over the Empire, contribute substantially to the décor of the buildings, both public and private, in which they occur, and constitute an extraordinary repertory of ornamental and figurative motifs. For several decades, however, under the leadership of Henri Stern and his many colleagues and successors in Europe and America, there has appeared an extensive, if largely descriptive, archaeological and art-historical literature, especially on Roman mosaics, whose disparate character is fully revealed in the publications of the various congresses… Full Review

For three decades, Hayden Maginnis has helped shape the way historians of medieval painting consider the art of Italy. Noted for his illuminating essays, Maginnis has recently set out to produce a three-volume study of thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Sienese painting that will surely set the standard for new approaches to art history for generations to come. The first book in this series, the highly acclaimed Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation, appeared four years ago. That volume has now been followed by its sibling, The World of the Early Sienese Painter, a text that… Full Review

Since the mid-1960s, art and design critics, theorists, and practitioners have wholeheartedly embraced issues of site and context as part of the creative process. When Jack Burnham published "Systems Esthetic" in the September 1968 issue of Artforum, he identified a body of work that could not be described or evaluated according to narrowly construed modern-art criteria that valued an autonomous, bounded object. The site-specific works, happenings, and process pieces that Burnham noted include works by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, and Alan Kaprow. These works, often embedded in particular places, were as much fragments or interventions… Full Review

At the stroke of midnight, December 31, 1977, valuable collections vanished suddenly and probably forever from museums all over the United States. The dollar value of the loss has never, to my knowledge, been assessed. Yet, it certainly ranked in the many millions. Surprisingly, museum officials at first took little notice of their loss. They filed no police reports, made no insurance claims. In the days and weeks that followed, there were no mass protests against the vast conspiracy, reaching to the very highest levels of the U.S. government, responsible for this uncompensated transfer of huge amounts of museum… Full Review

A book with the title Narrative and Experience: Innovations in Thirteenth-Century Picture Books seems to promise insights into how stories function and work upon readers; or perhaps, how narratives come to be significant within cultures. Alternately, such a study might immerse its readers in the intricacies of the working of a few particularly intriguing stories. Unfortunately, in terms of these sorts of expectations, Kumiko Maekawa's book delivers only disappointment. Nonetheless, even if a title seems to promise more than it delivers, it is unfair to criticize an author for failing to write the book that one would like to read… Full Review

Anne D. Hedeman's Of Counselors and Kings offers a comprehensive investigation of the Dialogues of Pierre Salmon. Salmon was an advisor to the ill-starred French king Charles VI (r. 1380-1422), whose debilitating mental illness contributed to a series of profound crises during his reign. The manuscripts consist of a set of questions purportedly posed by the king to Salmon—first concerning political issues and then theological matters—followed by a collection of transcribed letters relating to Salmon's attempts to discover a remedy for the king's illness. A second, slightly later version of the text also includes a lengthy treatise on virtues and… Full Review

A temptation with formal analysis is to detach the object of study from larger life, to concentrate on its properties that inhere in similar objects, and to restrict art's importance to art itself. Analysis of form is David Van Zanten's strength, but by narrowing his perspective, it leads to questionable conclusions. For example, the point where this stimulating book begins to unravel is when the authors claims that "Sullivan's Houses are as Important as His Banks," almost the title of Chapter 4. Sullivan's houses are as important as his banks only if we regard them as primarily design exercises, which… Full Review

Given this book's title, it bears asking what comprises the new media? Lev Manovich enumerates them early on: "Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality (VR), multimedia, computer games, interactive installations, computer animation, digital video, cinema, and human-computer interfaces" (8-9). What, then, is the new media's "language"? By language, Manovich intends both the diverse conventions used by new-media practitioners to organize data and structure the user's experience, and the various discourses that surround the new media. Grounded in an analysis of the ways in which new media have appropriated the forms and conventions of older art and communications media, Manovich's central… Full Review

Good things come in small packages. Diebold's book should join the ranks of other petit books that have made a large contribution not only to their field of specialization but also to a wider audience. Word and Image: An Introduction to Early Medieval Art has found a place on my personal bookshelf alongside Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage (1909) and Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (1971). Diebold offers a fine, lively text—free of inhibiting scholarly apparatuses—that students and novice readers can enjoy. Based on his classroom lectures, Word and Image explores many of the key issues… Full Review

Janet Ward's Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany offers a rich, ambitious, and theoretically acute analysis of this subject and its legacy in our own time. In this book, Weimar visual culture emerges in its various guises—architectural, cinematic, and consumerist—to reveal the transition from the modern to the postmodern and the merging of high and low culture. These developments in turn prefigure our own current state of saturation with regard to the visual codes of consumerism. In its promotion of a pervasive urban spirit—and cult of surface that extended into the visual arenas of fashion, architecture, advertising, film… Full Review

The series of erotic pictures known as I modi, or The Positions, from which this book takes its allusive title, acts as a catalyst for a study of the erotic in Renaissance culture that makes an unprecedented attempt to determine—in terms untainted by modern day squeamishness or purulent curiosity—the origins, proliferation, and circulation of erotic and obscene material in early sixteenth-century Italy. Bette Talvacchias painstaking reconstruction of the fluctuating borders between that which was considered an acceptable representation of the erotic (and therefore appropriate for wide circulation) as opposed to that which was decreed obscene and… Full Review

As Francis Haskell reminds us in this meticulously researched book, the idea of a permanent collection of paintings is slowly becoming a thing of the past. The collecting, arranging, and display of art works in museums reflects an increasingly ephemeral experience determined by the needs of museums and galleries to prove their worth in a world of accountability. In a witty introduction, the author reminds us that as jets are ferrying their precious cargo to blockbuster exhibitions throughout the world, curators work like harassed nibelungen to ready paintings for fast-approaching deadlines. In The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master… Full Review

In cities and towns across the United States, museums and galleries stage countless art exhibitions in the course of a season. Direct mailings and advertisements may lure us in, but it is often a critic who persuades us to go or stay home. Revered or reviled, art critics have an effect on our actions and opinions. And to whatever extent we agree or dispute with these critics, we read their reviews. Or do we? That question haunts Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826-1925, for difficult as it might be to determine who read reviews and how much… Full Review

With the collection of nineteen essays in Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, Paul Corbey Finney promises to provide a revisionist account of the relationship between Calvinism and the visual arts by challenging the presumed, prevalent view that Calvinism had either no impact or a purely negative effect on the development of the visual arts. Rather than focus on acts of Reformed iconoclasm, Finney calls his readers to examine the positive contribution that Calvinism made to the visual arts. Discovering the gift offered, however, remains a daunting task, for according to the editor, the nature… Full Review