Recently Published Reviews

In this finely produced monograph, Jennifer Borland offers a compelling case study of medical illustration and bookmaking in the later Middle Ages. This case consists of seven deluxe manuscripts of a French-language medical regimen, all bearing initials richly illuminated with scenes of medicine and domestic life. These initials provide Borland with evidence for the active part of women in caregiving and domestic management. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ places this seven-manuscript corpus at the center of its investigations and expands outward from there, from the finely wrought design of historiated initials to… Full Review

Ikat is one of the most ancient and important traditional textile dyeing techniques connecting East and West, and in recent years has been growing in recognition. Ikat has a distinctive look with shaggy edges and shifted skinny lines. Commercially printed ikat-inspired designs are sold for such items as curtains and cushion covers as people enjoy the aesthetic of ikat in their living rooms. However, many people may not know about real ikat weaving processes. Ikat: A World of Compelling Cloth, beautifully conceived and installed by curator of African and Oceanic art Pamela McCluskey, provides an important sense of the… Full Review

Painted Cloth offers a new dimension to the study of the Spanish Americas by asking how colonial subjects used fashion and fabric—painted, sculpted, woven, and worn—to think productively about the social and spiritual worlds around them. This stunning exhibition catalog showcases a selection of artworks and artifacts from primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru and was the result of fruitful collaboration with private collections worldwide. Thoughtfully curated and edited by Rosario I. Granados, Marilynn Thoma associate curator for art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum, the catalog marks the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of… Full Review

Michaelina Wautier and ‘The Five Senses’: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to the Brussels-based female painter who, despite her unmistakable artistic talent and successful career, fell into obscurity after her death. Only recently have experts rediscovered and revalued the oeuvre of Michaelina Wautier (1604­–1684), mainly thanks to the scholarship of Katlijne van der Stichelen, professor in art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium. A pioneer in the study of female artists, Van der Stichelen began researching Wautier after she… Full Review

In 1783, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner posed a question to the Berlinische Monatsschrift’s readers: “What is the Enlightenment?” One year later, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, responded with an aphorism: “Sapere aude!” or “Dare to Know!” Kant went on to define the Enlightenment as the “resolution and courage” to use one’s own reason to comprehend the world, unrestricted by prejudice and the guidance of others. Two hundred years after Kant’s response, Michel Foucault called attention to the temporal structure of this question. Zöllner and Kant, Foucault argued, described the Enlightenment in the present tense… Full Review

When Eike Schmidt left the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) in 2015 to become director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, he did not forget his old institution. The connection paid off for the former’s audiences this fall and winter as forty-six treasures from the Uffizi came to Minneapolis. There, joining with a dozen objects from MIA’s own collection (and one from a Chicago private collection), they represented the flowering of the Renaissance in the quattrocento. The exhibition scored high marks for showmanship, with spaces and ideas unfolding in a thrilling, almost cinematic sequence. Though… Full Review

In the penultimate paragraph of my Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester University Press, 2018), I admitted—with no small degree of shame—that not until I came to the very end of the project did it ever even occur to me to ask, “What did the brown and black women working in Sir William Young’s plantation home see in Brunias’s canvases?” (233). Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery makes such questions the very focus of its inquiry. In doing so, this important book at once advocates for and models a critical recentering… Full Review

Susan Taylor-Leduc begins with a question that readers in the field of eighteenth-century studies may have already wondered: why another book dedicated to Marie-Antoinette (12)? Taylor-Leduc answers by sidestepping overworked themes in the rococo queen’s world: explorations of Marie-Antoinette’s biography, examinations of garden aesthetics, and correlations between royal patronage and contemporary politics. Instead, she creates an interdisciplinary framework that unites garden history with spatial, anthropological, and cultural memory studies to reassess Marie-Antoinette’s pivotal role in defining the French picturesque garden style at the Petit Trianon. Moreover, Taylor-Leduc traces the lasting effects of the queen’s garden legacy across three generations of… Full Review

Abstract Expressionism still holds a mythic power over art historians, curators, and museum directors as the most “American” style of painting. Critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, enshrined the movement’s artists and their canvases covered in pours and drips as expressions of personal freedom and a peculiarly American subjectivity. Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1945–1975 provides a welcome disruption. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb are present in the catalog texts and didactic labels, but none of their works hang on the walls. Action/Abstraction Redefined is the first in-depth presentation of how contemporary Native artists intersected with Abstract… Full Review

Few early modern European ruling dynasties generate such fascination as the Spanish Habsburgs. In particular, the figures of Charles V and Philip II are well-known as monarchs who understood how architecture could be employed to propagate an image of empire and did so by patronizing such works as El Escorial, the Alcázar de Toledo, the Alcázar de Madrid, and Charles’s palace at La Alhambra, while Philip reimagined Madrid as the empire’s capital city. Turning away from these figures, in Jesús Escobar’s new book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy, the author focuses on the period from 1620 to… Full Review

As the twenty-first century progresses, imperial ties continue to loosen, but not without controversy and protest: the recent coronation of Charles III, for example, was greeted with enthusiasm by many—but not all—of his British subjects, and around Britain’s former imperial territories has prompted critical reflection on the legacies of British governance, including invasion, violence, slavery, and many other cultural practices and institutions now more universally recognized as exploitative and oppressive. The proposal that loyal subjects everywhere pledge their allegiance out loud to the King was greeted with particular astonishment, although some welcomed this as a participatory and inclusive new… Full Review

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music is “the first exhibition devoted to the role of music in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988),” and situates his origin story in lockstep with the explosion of cultural creativity that was happening around (and through) him in 1970s and 1980s New York. After an overview of the artist as a music lover, collector, and maker, the curators lay out the exhibition’s framework, stating in a wall text that “the extent to which Basquiat’s use of music reveals his engagement with the legacy of the African diaspora and the… Full Review

Brigitte Buettner explores the cultural significance of gemstones in the European Middle Ages in her brilliant and eagerly anticipated book The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture. Medieval inventories of people’s belongings demonstrate that the majority of the net worth of elite individuals often was tied up in gold and silver plate and in jewelry set with sumptuous rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls. The inherent value of these objects tempted owners throughout the centuries to melt them down whenever a financial crisis arose, so only a small percentage of goldsmiths’ gem-laden masterpieces that once existed… Full Review

In the last five years, Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has received increased attention in terms of exhibitions and scholarly publications, as well as a resurgence of interest in her work in the art market. In 2019–20, the Museo del Prado hosted the exhibition A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana and this year, the National Gallery of Ireland will unveil Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker. Both shows are accompanied by substantial exhibition catalogs; in addition, a handful of articles and volumes have been devoted to Lavinia Fontana, including Un apice erotico di Lavinia Fontana by Enrico… Full Review

With the rise of the early modern maritime trade, seashells became marine objects of curiosity and desire across regions. Conch and nautilus shells appeared in Dutch still life paintings among sumptuous exotic objects, were finely carved to become ornamental drinking cups in southern China, and entered European cabinets of curiosity as specimens, curios, and mounted pieces of art. How can we comprehend the multivalent thingness of shells as they straddle and cross the boundaries of nature and culture, material objects and visual representations, Europe and China, land and sea? What are their values and significance in early modern Eurasian visual… Full Review