Recently Published Reviews

Showing it to be wholly a creature of the enlightenment, W. J. T. Mitchell has connected what would appear to be all the implications offered by the image of the dinosaur. In this regard, The Last Dinosaur Book is continuous with his more narrowly art-historical work on the landscape as a cultural construction. While some might think that an image ubiquitous to the bedrooms of America's children would be worth at least one book by an American cultural theorist, Mitchell has been accused of making too much of his topic. He anticipates this question (p. 183), but apparently to no… Full Review

The very name of the collection containing many of the depictions of sex discussed in John Clarke's Looking at Lovemaking—the "secret room" (il gabinetto segreto ) in the Museo Nazionale, Naples—suggests the challenge this material presents to interpreters of Roman visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated study, Clarke sets out to consider these coyly closeted objects in context, in order to analyze a cultural construction of sexuality that is markedly different from that of the late twentieth century. After addressing the Greek and Hellenistic background, he devotes three chapters to the Augustan-Julio-Claudian period—one on male-to-male sex featuring the Warren… Full Review

Poststructuralist theory has taught us to distrust a language that purports to represent its subject transparently and innocently, for words do not just present a value-neutral world for our consideration and use. Rather, such words as "woman artist," for example, give us both the thing and its meaning. If we accept this theory as correct, all language is suspect, but some forms of writing, such as biography, are capable of more mischief than others. Although biography claims to be nothing more than an account of a person's life supported by facts and dates, the choice and arrangement of those facts… Full Review

Call this a time when translations of Michelangelo's notoriously difficult poetry have entered into their own in English, and be grateful for the heroic labors of so many first-rate translators. John Frederick Nims's fine new rendition of Michelangelo's complete poems is the fifth major one to appear since 1960. In that year Joseph Tusiani offered the first rendition of the entire corpus in appropriately elevated, energetic, often enigmatic verse. Three years later Creighton Gilbert produced a marvelously exact, tonally accurate, scrupulously scholarly translation. In 1987, George Bull produced a documentary version with useful notes and apparatus. 1991 brought… Full Review

In 1983, Bennard B. Perlman met, by chance, one of the grandchildren of Arthur B. Davies. As a result of this meeting, Perlman was given access to the Davies family archives, a rich collection of records and remembrances about an artist who, in his lifetime, tried his best to conceal the details of his complicated and somewhat sordid existence. It is not every artist who marries a woman who murdered her first husband, and then goes on to live a double life—one with his wife and two sons and another with a mistress and her child—while along the way playing… Full Review

Although drawn from such disparate fields as art history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of science and technology, the nineteen essays of this collection revolve around a central theme: how art and science have distinguished themselves—in practice and product—from one another, or how each has been shaped through its perceived relation to the other. Construed in one fashion, the question of how art and science are related has been of rather longstanding concern. In recent history, the concern with that relation animated the debates over C. P. Snow's controversial The Two Cultures, entered into the works of… Full Review

The scene that adorns the cover of this book, a detail from Giovanni Maria Butteri's late sixteenth-century painting The Return from the Palio, is recognizable to anyone who has experienced Florentines when they have stepped outside to be at home in their city. It resembles the hour of the passeggiata, the last marketing moment of the day, or the assemblage of diverse citizens for a festival. The scene is a street of which two sides are lined by palazzi that form a kind of canyon ready-made for a perspectival exercise. Only the irregular height of the buildings, each with its… Full Review

One of the salient features of eighteenth-century art that has historically inhibited its incorporation into the canonical curriculum of art history is its resistance to stylistic categorization and the lack of a period designation such as Renaissance, Baroque, or Modern. And even within the field of eighteenth-century visual culture, some artists are more "canonical" than others because they can be made to fit into such existing stylistic categories as Rococo and Neoclassical. The immensely talented and productive painter Hubert Robert has been relatively neglected in recent studies of French painting of the Ancien Régime, partly because he, like the century… Full Review

The Art Historian CD-ROM set is designed to supplement art history courses. This review addresses questions about function and educational value rather than details of interpretation or information. How does the product enhance learning beyond slide lectures or standard textbooks? How does the CD-ROM take advantage of digital technologies to present art-historical material? Can faculty construct digital lectures from the CD? How easy is the software to use? Scope A comprehensive CD set that paralleled the scope and depth of textbooks would serve the needs of students and instructors. Students could purchase the CD instead and… Full Review

In The Color of Angels, Constance Classen celebrates the richness of all that is unseen. More this-worldly than its title suggests, the book explores how the so-called "lower" senses (smell, touch, and taste) have shaped the religious and cultural imagination. Thus, Classen combines what one might call a "hidden history" of the other senses in European culture with a proposal for a broader sensory experience of the plastic arts. As with all hidden histories, there are culprits; and in this case the villain is modern Western culture's love affair with all that is visual, from advertising and television to the… Full Review

Ingrid Rowland's new book is an ambitious attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of cultural developments in Rome in the years around 1500. Her principal focus is humanism—antiquarian scholarship and Latin rhetoric—but she is able to integrate this recondite material with a consideration of politics at the papal court, the world of finance, and the visual arts. All this is set, in turn, against the turbulent, colorful background of everyday life. Rowland combines impressively wide-ranging erudition with a lively prose style, and the result is wonderfully readable: the way in which high scholarship is seasoned with amusing anecdote is reminiscent… Full Review

John Sallis is a philosopher whose extensive writing has focused on figures in the "continental" tradition, such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. In an earlier book, Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), he wrote of the artistic power of stone, with reference to several of these thinkers, using them as voices to explore such forms as Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In Shades Sallis continues to draw especially on Hegel and Heidegger, whose thought offers constant points of reference in Stone. This book will probably be of most immediate interest to… Full Review

Those familiar with Thames & Hudson's World of Art series can predict the tone and format of this volume, which is a pioneering effort worthy of considerable attention and praise. It is certainly no easy task to codify and condense a region as complex and scattered as the Caribbean. The author, Veerle Poupeye (according to the Thames & Hudson publicity blurb) is a Jamaican-based art historian, critic, and curator, trained in Belgium. I wish I knew how much fieldwork and archival work the author accomplished, doing actual interviews rather than relying on the cited sources. This might help explain the… Full Review

Over the course of the modern era, literary representations of the city stretch far beyond the physical and social fabric of cities. Poetry and prose build on the architectural and commerical contours of urbanity, at times outfitting streets in tuxedos, at other times paring them into rotten furrows. Take the case of London, the city in the world possessed of perhaps the most extensive literary representations. William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot both wrote powerful and disturbing descriptions that reconfigure the vast changes taking place in London during its long engagement with modernity and the Industrial Revolution. In Wordsworth's The… Full Review

On September 3, 1889, James McNeill Whistler wrote a letter from Amsterdam to the Fine Arts Society in London describing, with an undercurrent of Whistlerian sarcasm, his most recent artistic activity: "I find myself doing far finer work than any I have hitherto produced—and the subjects appeal to me most sympathetically—which is all important. . . . I have begun etchings here—that already give me great satisfaction—I shall therefore go on, and I will produce new plates—of various sizes—The beauty and importance of these plates you can only estimate from your knowledge of my care for my own reputation… Full Review