Browse Recent Book Reviews

Martin Bressani’s Architecture and the Historical Imagination brings psychological unity to the life and work of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the nineteenth-century French architect, restorer, and theorist whose numerous and diverse activities continue to enthrall and perplex historians. In the groundbreaking 1980 catalogue of an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris commemorating the centenary of Viollet-le-Duc’s death, Bruno Foucart (who supervised Bressani’s 1997 dissertation) argued that the “paradox of Viollet-le-Duc” is that he was both “delirious and rational” (“Viollet-le-Duc, cent ans après,” in Bruno Foucart, ed., Viollet-le-Duc, Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 14). Contradictions like this are… Full Review

Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy addresses important issues concerning the material and economic history of sculpture, and explores the ways in which mobility, physicality, materiality, collaborations, costs of materials, and technologies had an impact on how the works were conceived and made by their authors and perceived by the public. As editor Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio articulates in the introduction, “practical issues as durability and modes of transport were of enormous importance” (1), and artists had to deal with the limitations of materials and scale, often taking such issues into account while making formal and stylistic choices. … Full Review

Netherlandish art was a standard feature of art collections large and small throughout early modern Europe, and many masters from the Low Countries took their techniques, styles, and themes abroad. Historians have acknowledged this international dimension, from Horst Gerson’s monumental Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Amsterdam: Israël, 1942) to the 2013 volume of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art (Leiden: Brill) devoted to migration. Two new books offer welcome nuances to an understanding of the movement of artists, artworks, and their viewers. Gerrit Verhoeven’s Europe within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grand Tour… Full Review

Ancient images produced in contexts from which no written records survive present a formidable challenge to iconographers. Vernon James Knight Jr. argues that studies of such imagery are particularly vulnerable to specious claims based on intuition and superficial analysis, a problem he addresses in Iconographic Method in New World Prehistory. In response to what he describes as a lack of methodological rigor in “a field of study that is still in search of academic respectability” (xiv), Knight proposes a method for iconographic analysis consisting of seven ordered and discrete phases that is a synthesis of what he deems to… Full Review

My dad remembers being lifted up by my grandfather into the bay window of a large, white bi-level ranch house in the suburbs of New Jersey. It was the spring of 1968, and this house was one of three standing in the new development surrounded by farmland, only a twenty-minute drive outside of Newark. His slim, nine-year old body fit through the window, and he walked down into the foyer to unlock the front door from inside. My grandfather entered to inspect the house he had purchased that fall for only $25,000. His father was with him—three generations of urban… Full Review

In Singular Images, Failed Copies, Vered Maimon investigates William Henry Fox Talbot and his connection with early photography. After H. J. P. Arnold’s, Gail Buckland’s, and Larry Schaaf’s monographic works and studies on Talbot—first published in the 1970s and making essential original sources accessible—a renewed interest in Talbot and early photography has occurred. On the one hand, this could be linked to Schaaf’s online research project on Talbot’s correspondence (http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk) or more recently his work on a catalogue raisonné. Also, there are newly acquired Talbot records such as photographs, notebooks, and ephemera purchased in 2006 by the British Library… Full Review

Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900–1950 is a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalogue containing seven essays by art historians, literary scholars, and poets, as well as an introduction by the exhibition’s co-curators. With its wide range of stimulating perspectives and insights, the catalogue offers a substantive conversation among the authors who consider the works and the legends of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). The group’s paintings, and those of Maynard Dixon, are the focus of the book. The spirit of scholarly collaboration and cross-pollination is perhaps its greatest strength. The relationship between the museums began, according… Full Review

For many years, Jeffrey Hamburger has been interested in the artwork of the manuscripts of the Middle Ages, and with Script as Image he has published a deeply engaging book, or rather a lengthy essay, on the “double page” in the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. In it Hamburger approaches illuminated manuscripts from the apparent “classical” theme of the relationship between text and image. In certain ways, one could say that Hamburger’s Script as Image continues a line of thought developed several decades ago by Meyer Schapiro on the same subject, but here seen from all artistic media, including… Full Review

Stephanie Porras has written a smart, important book on Pieter Bruegel the Elder. She offers a carefully considered take on his notion of the Netherlandish past as it manifests in the peasants who cavort and carouse their way through his oeuvre. While this is familiar terrain, Porras’s study redirects focus from the once-heated debate about Bruegel’s peasants as either moralizing signifiers of excess or amusements for urbane viewers. Instead, by citing Netherlandish humanism’s interest in reconciling classical antiquity with the local Batavian past, Porras builds on Bruegel’s unassailable status as the most gifted interpreter of Hieronymus Bosch’s pictorial idiom to… Full Review

How do African cultural traditions circulate and influence global contemporary art? Many artists and scholars have argued for the importance of African art (or what they have understood as African art, regardless of authenticity or provenance) in the development of European and American modernism, typically without much consideration for African artists themselves. Pamela McClusky and Erika Dalya Massaquoi, curators of Disguise: Masks and Global African Art and authors of the catalogue of the same title, argue that the artists of “global Africa” have begun to address this issue, changing how we understand African art. McClusky writes that “global African art”… Full Review