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How is the critical language of art different for the women artists of sixteenth-century Italy than for the men? In a history of art dominated by male artists, how did writers from 1550 to 1800 differentiate the female capacity for creativity from that of males? In particular, what did it mean to be called a virtuosa, a term reserved for few women artists during the cinquecento? The author addresses these and other important questions in this provocative and illuminating study. Jacobs begins with an extraordinary statistic: Half of the forty women artists of cinquecento Italy have no surviving works.… Full Review

Mianyan zhi wei: zouxiang yishushi zhexue (Dimensions of Duration: Toward a Philosophy of Art History) is the first comprehensive introduction of the methodology of Western art history to a Chinese audience. Ding Ning, professor of art history at the National Academy of Art in Hangzhou, has focused on the revisionary writings on the theory and practice of art history that were published for the most part between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s in the Anglo-American world. The revisionist key is reflected in the author's borrowing of the 20th-century French philosopher Henri Bergson's time concept durée (mianyan) in the title of… Full Review

All visitors to San Gimignano remember the vividly colored and enigmatic fresco decoration of a small tower room in the Palazzo Comunale, now a museum. A series of narratives in reds, pinks, and greens decorate the walls, notable both for the fancy dress of the characters and for their occasional lack of dress in what appear to be compromising situations: in bed, in the bath, and in various monetary transactions. Jean Campbell's study recalls much of the wonder and pleasure that accompanies a first encounter with the frescoes. Indeed, the book is the first comprehensive consideration of these frescoes (discovered… Full Review

Both of these books deal extensively with printed and painted pictures made during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), commonly designated as part of the late imperial era. Clunas and others, however, refer to the years 1500-1800 as China's early modern period, in part to challenge Eurocentric definitions of modernization and modernity, but also to recognize global connections linking the economy of China with the economies of Europe, the Americas, and other parts of the world at this time. Craig Clunas is an art historian who has written extensively on Ming dynasty discursive practices regarding various arts. Superfluous Things: Material… Full Review

When I first opened this book, the spine broke, a premonition of things to come. But let me start with the book's strengths, for certainly there are some. Benoy Behl is a photographer who enjoys the challenge of working in low-light conditions such as those of the rock-cut shrines that form the Buddhist monastery of Ajanta. His photographs bring out the extraordinary richness of Ajanta's paintings and capture details that I have failed to see or to see in the lush fashion that his photographs capture. It is too bad, however, that the book's many color plates represent details… Full Review

Ilay Cooper's text is sumptuously illustrated with photographs mostly by Barry Dawson. His focus on traditional buildings is apparently based on anthropologist Milton Singer's long-accepted but now challenged notion that Indian culture could be divided into two dichotomous strands, the great tradition and the little tradition. Indeed, Cooper's definition of traditional architecture "as architecture without architects," by which he means architecture built by local and often skilled craftspeople but without the guidance of "a sophistical urban professional" (p. 10), seemed to fall into Singer's little tradition category. Reading further, however, it became clear that the text is marred by outmoded… Full Review

This volume gives an interesting sample, though not a survey, of current scholarship on the art of early medieval Europe. Its editor, Lawrence Nees, has given it shape and balance that clearly reflect his own approach to the material. Nees has long been constructing bridges over the divide between Western "medieval" and "Byzantine" art, an enterprise indebted to the example of Ernst Kitzinger, to whom this book is dedicated. Geographical boundaries are facts of American academic life, both in the courses we teach and in the conferences we attend (usually either the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo or… Full Review

The subject of this monograph is the Netherlandish book illuminator whom Friedrich Winkler named the Master of the Dresden Prayerbook in 1914 after a Book of Hours—not a Prayerbook—in the State Library of Saxony (ms. A.311). Although some thirty ascriptions to the artist have been made in the eighty years since Winkler's pioneering essay, Brinkmann is the first scholar carefully and systematically to examine the painter's entire output. Brinkmann has enlarged that output to fifty-two manuscripts, four groups of cuttings, and two incunabula. All of the works are individually examined, the majority in chronological order; most of the… Full Review

If quizzed to name two sculptors of early Netherlandish wooden altarpieces, many of my colleagues and I would not pass or would do so only with considerable searching the depths of our memories. Even if we relaxed the rules and permitted the use of the standard introductions to Netherlandish art by Charles Cuttler (1968), James Snyder (1985), or Craig Harbison (1995), these yield just four examples, two of which are given as by anonymous artists. Jacques de Baerze is known primarily because at a slightly later date Melchior Broederlam, one of the "pathfinders" of early Netherlandish art, painted exterior wings… Full Review

For decades the rich, dense heritage of medieval and Renaissance Venice has offered historians, art historians, and social scientists an array of subjects and an evolving methodological arsenal for their analysis. Building on the work of previous generations, recent scholars have expanded our understanding of the manner in which a society can use its visual culture to construct a variety of identities: civic, religious, class, familial, and even individual, conveying messages that were normative as well as informational. Yet despite intense activity, monuments such as the thirteenth-century mosaics of San Marco have awaited the application of approaches that reach beyond… Full Review