Browse Recent Book Reviews

To describe a piece of culture as “mesmerizing” or “electrifying” is so commonplace today that you might, like me, have heard these phrases countless times without giving much thought to how and why they became critical clichés. Mesmerism and electricity both emerged as subjects of scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century—the same period when art criticism itself was coming into existence—so perhaps it is not surprising that this language seeped into the cultural lexicon at the time, to become part of the repertoire of terms that we continue to use to characterize aesthetic experience. But it would be a mistake… Full Review

An exquisite but incomplete stone sculpture of the god Krishna, found at Phnom Da, Cambodia, close to the pre-Angkorian capital city Angkor Borei, was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) in 1973. Krishna is depicted as a vital youth raising up Mount Govardhana with a single arm. In this myth, first articulated in the early centuries of our era, Krishna holds up the mountain for seven straight days and seven nights. Rain and winds lash the landscape all around. Men, women, children, and animals huddle beneath the mountain. Through his effortless strength the boy-god shelters his… Full Review

Romy Golan’s book, Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s, proposes a new methodological approach to thinking about art made during that volatile decade. Rather than a chronological account of the period, Golan puts forth the theoretical and temporal models of the flashback, eclipse, and mise en abyme as a means to draw out the ambiguities and ellipses that characterized its art. Such a strategy reveals, she suggests, suppressed memories of Italian fascism as well as “various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance,” or what the author terms the “political imaginary” of artists, curators… Full Review

Beatrice Kitzinger’s book, The Cross, The Gospel, and the Work of Art in the Carolingian Age, examines the cross as both a concept and an image in northern Europe from the eighth to the tenth centuries. Her book is a welcome addition to the field of early medieval art history because of its innovative approach and because it considers many objects and artworks that have received little attention before now. Kitzinger includes a wealth of materials that have been previously neglected due to their apparently lower quality and artistic skill when compared to the higher-status illuminated productions that have… Full Review

How can one represent the unrepresentable? This question has been at the center of numerous artistic debates in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, parallel to philosophical and semiotic discourses on memory and loss, gaps and erasures, voids and material traces that remain. Reflections on absence and the essence of nothing have enormous creative potential—a fact long recognized in modern and contemporary art—but, as Elina Gertsman argues in her book on lacunae in medieval books, are rarely made fruitful and systematically studied in medieval art. Gertsman aims to challenge the conventional notion of the horror vacui of Gothic decorative art, an… Full Review

Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols’s study marks a fresh approach to Vitruvius’s De architectura (On Architecture, ca. 20s BCE). It is a revision of the author’s 2009 PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge, entitled Vitruvius and the Rhetoric of Display: Wall Painting, Domestic Architecture and Roman Self-Fashioning, whose arguments have been partly presented in other publications. In this important study, Nichols tackles the ten books of Vitruvius’s work on architecture to provide a systematic overview and comprehensive analysis of his authorial persona. She focuses on books six and seven to offer a deeper understanding of Vitruvius’s approach to houses… Full Review

By Her Hand, an exhibition cocurated by Eve Straussman-Pflanzer and Oliver Tostmann at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, brought together works by sixteen Italian women artists from 1500 to the late eighteenth century. Some of these artists are well known to art historians and increasingly to the broader public, particularly Artemisia Gentileschi, whose work was celebrated in a blockbuster monographic exhibition in 2020 at the National Gallery in London. Several others will likely be new to many: Roman printmaker Anna Maria Vaiani or Bolognese painter Ginevra Cantofoli, for instance. After the Wadsworth, the exhibition traveled to the Detroit Institute… Full Review

The year 2020–21 was a banner one for artist Lorraine O’Grady, who earned a long-overdue retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, published an edited volume of her writings, and saw the first scholarly monograph of her work, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language. In this book, Stephanie Sparling Williams offers a timely rejoinder to the artist’s historical neglect, situating O’Grady’s peripatetic practice in her longstanding investment in language—first as a writer, linguist, and translator, and then as an artist.  The book’s interpretive grounding in language—in its conceptual, communicative, and structural dimensions—offers an in-depth complement to… Full Review

This book explores the use of Egyptian objects in the Italian peninsula during the Late Roman Republic (ca. 146–31 BCE) and the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Rather than focusing on production and initial use, the author examines the longer-term use and display of objects, particularly how imports and spoils were curated and received in multiple media. Pearson is interested in the ways these objects were perceived as art; that is, how Romans collected and used Egyptian objects, and how they valued them. The book argues that Roman economics, religion, and understandings of the foreign created a multifaceted sense of luxury that… Full Review

The 1960s are often art historicized as a period when artists began to shift their practices away from materiality and toward forms of abstract thought. According to the economist-turned-art-historian Sophie Cras, it also turns out to have been a decade when financial abstraction came to the forefront, and not just for artists who suddenly found themselves flung from the garret into a boom market, but for the public as a whole, heralding a cultural obsession with inflation, speculation, and arbitrage. Across the Cold War West, and specifically in the France and United States explored by Cras, this was a time… Full Review