Recently Published Reviews

In this absorbing yet brief book, Stephen Houston, a noted Maya epigrapher and archaeologist, seeks to map out one of the core issues of the anthropology of art—materiality—within the ancient Maya context. The volume highlights in particular native attitudes toward the spirits or energies that reside within certain materials with which the Maya fashioned their visual culture. Over three main chapters, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence outlines varied dimensions of ancient Maya materiality, employing close visual analysis of artworks, interpretations of hieroglyphic texts, and ethnographic comparisons. The scope of visual culture addressed largely pertains to… Full Review

Recent scholarship has eschewed the fashion for broad, thematic exhibitions in favor of probing specific makers and more local examinations; the exhibition and publication Cincinnati Silver, 1788–1940 was an example of this trend. Cincinnati produced a treasure trove of decorative arts during the nineteenth century, and the silversmithing trade, established by 1795, was evidence of the city’s prowess. Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Amy Miller Dehan acutely situated Cincinnati’s role in the rising American silver industry of the nineteenth century. Dehan’s exhibition followed ten years of research, which prompted previously unknown makers, production methods… Full Review

Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews With “Reflections on Digital Art History,” caa.reviews inaugurates a new field of coverage, since our future is now. In fact, immediately prior to drafting these remarks, I noticed a headline on Hyperallergic.com asking, “Can an algorithm determine art history’s most creative paintings?” I was only curious enough to skim a paragraph or two, yet surely many of us sympathize with the convergence it represents. On the one hand, popular imagination and political rhetoric have increasingly figured the humanities as superfluous to the needs of civilization. On the other, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and… Full Review

Art history would seem to be a discipline that could and should generate digital visualization projects—if only for the simple reason that the objects of study are already and easily found in digitized form. As evidenced by the number of workshops and conferences and the general buzz on the subject, the attention given to this type of project has intensified in the past few years; but there are still very few operational sites in the field. A close consideration of one such site, “What Jane Saw” (visited May 2015), raises important questions facing project developers and users of digital art-history… Full Review

What did Wassily Kandinsky mean by “the spiritual in art”? In his long-canonical treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Melerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), the artist does not quite say, though he clearly conceives it in some opposition to the creeping materialism that he assails as the defining feature of the modern world. Scholars, seeking a tighter definition, have often seized on a short, early passage in the text that explicitly evokes Theosophy, even as they have also linked the painter to Eastern mysticism and diverse… Full Review

“Photography is not an Art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative art.” So Alfred Stieglitz provocatively proclaimed in his article “Is Photography a Failure?” printed in New York’s The Sun on March 14, 1922. For Stieglitz, a photographic image was a “picture” (rather than a mere “photograph,” which was the generic term he used to describe anything “drawn by the rays of light”) when it had succeeded as a work of art. Interestingly, almost half a century later… Full Review

As one walks down Oxford Road, the central artery of the University of Manchester’s campus, the imposing Gothic revival structure of the Manchester Museum creates a powerful impression of the ambitions of Victorian science. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum goes inside Alfred Waterhouse’s building to interrogate the history of the institution as seen through the display of its specimens. In so doing, Alberti’s stated aim is to overlay a traditional approach to museology—that of focusing on a single institution—with an examination of the political and cultural forces at work. For Alberti… Full Review

This important collection of essays originated in a symposium entitled “The Muse in the Marble: Plastic Arts and Aesthetic Theories in the Seventeenth Century” held at the American Academy in Rome in 2004. Anthony Colantuono, one of the two organizers, had the original idea to publish the papers. In 2008, he enlisted the help of Steven F. Ostrow, and the project gradually expanded, with several new essays commissioned from leading scholars. As the editors state in their preface, they aimed to create a volume that “would engage issues concerning the theory and production, reception, and interpretation of early modern Roman… Full Review

A museum exhibition on nineteenth-century chromolithography and the landscape of the American West must negotiate its way through key challenges. When the discipline of art history routinely emphasizes the innovation and novelty of artistic developments, imagery of mountains and natural wonders can strike scholars and museumgoers as familiar territory and therefore unworthy of attention. Moreover, in an era that celebrates globalization, the western landscape might bear a whiff of provincialism, complicated by questions about how the United States, under the spell of Manifest Destiny, invested the terrain with now unfashionable cultural meanings. In these circumstances, prints risk becoming mere images… Full Review

The surfaces of John Zurier’s spare, abstract paintings are breathtaking—thin washes of icy blue, brushy layers of deep aubergine, swathes of opaque electric orange—but the edges are where the action is. Sometimes color runs over the side of the picture plane and is folded around the back of the stretcher bars; other times it stops just short, leaving a sliver of raw jute exposed. In Votilækur (2014), for example, a few strong vertical lines lie beneath a cool aqua pigment washed over a tall canvas. The veil of color seems to cover the entire surface, but it is not a… Full Review

The “Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” the Vienna School of Art History, hardly needs an introduction today, as anyone interested in the history of academic art-history writing will have come across at least some of the recent literature in several languages, mostly devoted to one or other of the school’s chief protagonists, be it Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr, or Ernst Gombrich. Julius von Schlosser’s account, still the most useful brief introduction, is now available in English (Julius von Schlosser, “The Vienna School of the History of Art” (1934), translated by Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 1 [December 2009])… Full Review

This Is War! Graphic Arts from the Great War, 1914–1918 joins a number of exhibitions taking advantage of the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I to explore this conflict and its representations. The Portland Art Museum focuses its contribution on the graphic arts, as the museum’s rich collection of prints, posters, and works on paper, along with a number of recent acquisitions, has enabled it to stage a comprehensive exhibition that demonstrates the great variety of graphic representations of the war. While marquee artists are represented by very good, even excellent examples, their works hang alongside… Full Review

Scholarship across the disciplines on death and commemoration in the early modern era is rich. A significant new contribution is Minou Schraven’s Festive Funerals in Early Modern Italy: The Art and Culture of Conspicuous Commemoration. The volume focuses on the development of funeral apparati—ephemeral decorations for the celebration of requiem masses on behalf of ecclesiastical princes and heads of state—in sixteenth-century Rome, which evolved into increasingly spectacular displays. These formal changes paralleled new attitudes regarding commemoration and devotion as well as shifts in ideological and institutional claims of the papacy. Funeral apparati encompassed a wide range… Full Review

At least since Plato’s claim that it is the foundation of true knowledge, light has been identified by the Western philosophical canon as the source of universal wisdom. It is this implied connection between physical light and rationality that prompts Dag Petersson to assert in The Art of Reconciliation that photography is the visual counterpart of dialectical logic, because dialectics and photography both are forms of light-writing. In order to substantiate his view of photography as the “self portrait” of dialectics (xv), Petersson’s first move is to explain that dialectics is a rigorously symmetrical mode of reasoning that… Full Review

Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby’s The Cult of St Clare of Assisi in Early Modern Italy is a broad survey and analysis of materials documenting the extraordinary life and robust cult of St. Clare of Assisi (1193–1253) in Italian visual culture. Drawing on diverse representations of St. Clare, ranging from medieval reliquary cabinets, seals, tapestries, and frescoes to monumental baroque sculpture and altarpieces, Debby maps shifts and transformations in the iconography of St. Clare in the service of religious and political initiatives across early modern Italy. She focuses particularly on the diffusion of images of St. Clare as a model for Catholic… Full Review