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As an inherently heterogeneous practice, installation art presents a challenge to those who would define it and write its history. The task is both to determine its consistent attributes without being too exclusive and to parse the expanding number of works described as “installation art” into categories coherent enough to provide a critical framework. To complicate matters, these generally ephemeral pieces have often been only poorly documented in photographs and first-hand accounts. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that the approaches and potential audiences for the four books under review are so varied: they range from broad surveys to… Full Review

The concluding dozen pages of The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914, spell out two concerns or commitments that underpin, but are not allowed to dominate, the preceding text. First of these is an assertion of the fundamental value of attention to the physical properties of the work of art, to what we actually see, and a renunciation of approaches, notably the social history of art, that tend to look elsewhere. The second is an attack on widespread acceptance of Virginia Woolf’s famous response to Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist exhibition that “on or about December… Full Review

This book is a distinguished addition to a distinguished body of work and an important contribution to studies of the Ming period. By looking at Wen Zhengming’s calligraphy and painting as objects embedded in complex networks of obligation, patronage, and reciprocity, Craig Clunas provides richly detailed new perspectives on familiar events and questions of the period. Although good English-language studies of Wen have been done in the past, this one is a significant advance. It incorporates much recent scholarship in Chinese, including letters and other materials assembled by the contemporary scholar Zhou Daozhen that were not included in the official… Full Review

This deluxe catalogue featuring Islamic ceramics from the al-Sabah Collection in Kuwait is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject. Although a few catalogues of Islamic ceramics collections have been published in the twenty-first century (for example, Géza Fehérvári’s Ceramics of the Islamic World in the Tareq Rajab Museum, London: I.B.Tauris, 2000), the exceptional quality and range of the al-Sabah collection set it apart. In the introductory chapters of Ceramics from Islamic Lands, Oliver Watson broaches questions that other cataloguers of private collections might have avoided, namely fashions in collecting, the gulf between the types of… Full Review

One of the joys of archival research is making a discovery. Would that everyone’s could be as significant as the recovery by Felipe Pereda and Fernando Marías of a manuscript atlas of maps and bird’s-eye views of the entire coast of Spain assembled between 1622 and 1634 by the Portuguese cartographer, Pedro Teixeira (alternately, Texeira as used in the volume under review). The atlas survives at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, home also to the impressive collection of views of Spanish cities made for Philip II between 1562 and 1570 by another foreign subject of the Spanish… Full Review

Elisabeth Fraser’s fine study of the French painter Eugène Delacroix’s early career is as much a work of inventive cultural history as of art history. Reading the paintings that made the artist’s reputation in the 1820s as part of the wider visual culture of post-revolutionary France, she challenges a standard view that equates Romanticism with liberalism and links Delacroix with political opposition to the Bourbon monarchy restored after the fall of Napoleon in 1814. Instead, she highlights his success under royal patronage, and suggests that “Delacroix’s art was as much formed by monarchical rule as it was part of the… Full Review

Two of the latest, and unfortunately among the last, additions to the Cambridge Companions to the History of Art series are devoted to Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Together, the two books trace a trajectory from Bellini’s first documented notice in 1459 to the death of his one-time apprentice and eventual rival, Titian, in 1576. Edited by Peter Humfrey and Patricia Meilman, respectively, The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini and The Cambridge Companion to Titian feature new essays by major scholars in the field. Intended as supplements to the standard monographs, they are of interest to specialists and… Full Review

This latest volume in the Cambridge Companion series is, at its best moments, at the cutting edge of the state of research on the most famous and fabled personality of the early Renaissance in Italy, Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337). A team of authors was assembled by editors Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona—themselves both important contributors to Giotto studies—to address two formidable challenges: to capture the verifiable shreds of documentary evidence of this artist’s life and career and to encapsulate the massive critical record on Giotto as an artist. Derbes and Sandona are to be commended for their bravery, especially… Full Review

Best known as the architect of the sprawling Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the charming casino of Pius IV on the grounds of the Vatican, the sixteenth-century polymath Pirro Ligorio has not—until now—been the subject of a general-purpose biography. This is surprising considering the range of his accomplishments; beyond architecture, landscape design, and painting, Ligorio’s talents included cartography, the restoration of antique ruins and sculpture, and collecting (his set of ancient medals and coins was said to be one of the very best in mid-Cinquecento Rome). David Coffin, who spent more than half a century studying Ligorio and published the… Full Review

In nineteenth-century England, the artistic Rossetti family gave the world poet-painter Dante Gabriel, poet Christina, and William Michael, an art critic and career civil servant. The bohemian Dante Gabriel has inspired numerous biographies and other anecdotal histories, and his sumptuously painted female “stunners” frequently grace the pages of coffee table books and calendars. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a book complementing the 2003–04 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, is the latest publication on this Pre-Raphaelite artist. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a picture book and exhibition catalogue given a scholarly gloss through essays by… Full Review