Browse Recent Book Reviews

Julia I. Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell’s From Giotto to Botticelli: The Artistic Patronage of the Humiliati in Florence, a long-awaited study on art related to the Humiliati (“humbled ones”), provides a fresh approach to examining the patronage of religious orders. Originating in the eleventh century near Milan, the Humiliati were officially recognized by Pope Innocent III in 1201 and the male branch suppressed in 1571, following the failed assassination of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo in 1569 that was attempted by its members. Rather than focusing upon a particular moment in the order’s history, the book traces the entire span of… Full Review

Posters have long occupied a paradoxical position in the history of nineteenth-century art. Despite their appearance at the center of many exhibitions and textbook studies of the period, posters remain mostly peripheral to art history’s disciplinary foci. Ruth Iskin’s The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s offers an important antidote to the exclusion of posters from substantive art-historical analysis. As her title asserts, “the poster” merits new consideration as a broad category and as a venue where the domains of “art, advertising, design, and collecting” meet. Rather than simply looking to posters for what they reveal about developments in… Full Review

Anthea Callen, a foremost expert on the materials of French painting, makes one of her core arguments at the end of this important book: “Painting is a craft and a science as well as an art” (266). In addition to craft and science, the book’s emphasis falls—emphatically—upon art as labor (the work of art), and it therefore closely examines the character and connotations of the visible painted mark. She views it as the index of an artist’s working methods and tools, but also the inescapable sign of the painter’s aesthetic, social, and institutional allegiances. The book’s remit thus exceeds the… Full Review

Simon Njami remains a consistent voice in defining and elucidating twenty-first-century art created by African artists. The exhibitions he curates provide insights espoused by art practitioners of African descent with new interpretive criteria. Njami furthers this aim in his latest collaboration with Mara Ambrožič: The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists. This mammoth project is composed of three exhibitions, each dedicated to a realm of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Similarly, the extensive catalogue is organized into three sections that advance Njami and Ambrožič’s aim to enact and encourage contemplative gestures akin to those… Full Review

At first, the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes may appear to be a rather curious pairing as the subject of a book. These two religious narratives are often represented separately and usually have been discussed as distinct topics throughout much of the history of Western art. They are not typically thought of as forming a unit. However, as co-authors Erin E. Benay and Lisa M. Rafanelli reveal, these two events are related. Central to both stories is the resurrected body of Christ and the varying levels of contact with it. Artistic representations of the Noli me tangere and… Full Review

Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, edited by Jaś Elsner and Michel Meyer, makes a case for a prescriptive approach to the understanding of Roman visual culture. This prescription is outlined in Meyer’s preface and Elsner’s introduction. Both propose the model of Aristotle’s tripartite division of rhetoric into speaker (ethos), audience (pathos), and speech (logos) as the framework for the analysis of visual material. The preface defines the distinctive qualities of Roman as being more declamatory than argumentative—as in Greek rhetoric—which then allows for the inclusion of visual material: “Art is a way… Full Review

The volume Chavín: Peru’s Enigmatic Temple in the Andes is a thoroughly researched scholarly complement to the blockbuster exhibition of the same name, held at the Museum Rietberg, Zürich, between November 23, 2012, and March 10, 2013. Edited by Peter Fux, the catalogue presents the work of a group of scholars who seek to reanalyze, reevaluate, and reconstruct the role of Chavín de Huántar in Andean scholarship. Rather than merely summarizing previous research, the articles present new archaeological excavations and new interpretations of material objects, monumental decorations, and plans of excavated sites. The book is noteworthy in that all of… Full Review

Six chapters of this conveniently quarto-sized catalogue examine the history of metalpoint’s use by artists in Italy, the Low Countries, Germany and Switzerland, nineteenth-century Britain, and more recently by U.S. artists as well as Otto Dix, Avigdor Arikha, and Shirazeh Houshiary, whose Shroud (2000; unillustrated) is mistakenly placed in Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery rather than the Tate (237). For those of us who have asserted glibly that metalpoint went out with tempera painting, the sections dealing with the later history of the medium will be of particular interest—not least the detail, revealed in a letter by Edward Burne-Jones… Full Review

What is bling, if not more tightly focused shine? The Oxford English Dictionary defines bling (sometimes reduplicated as bling-bling) as both a material referent and multivalent signified: “A. n. (A piece of) ostentatious jewelry. Hence: wealth; conspicuous consumption. B. adj. Ostentatious, flashy; designating flamboyant jewelry or dress. Also: that glorifies conspicuous consumption; materialistic.” According to the rapper B.G., one of the coiners of term at the end of the last century, bling is also the imaginary sound light makes when it hits a diamond. Bling is key to Krista A. Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic… Full Review

Lienzos are large painted cloths produced after the Spanish invasion of Mexico that relate the territory, historical deeds, and protagonists of local cacicazgos (city-states) throughout central and southern Mexico. Following the style and conventions of Mesoamerican pictography, such as the more famous Mixtec screenfolds, they greatly outnumber their surviving pre-Hispanic counterparts and offer an indigenous view of the changes that occurred in Mesoamerica in the wake of the conquest. The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec is one such document hailing from the Coixtlahuaca valley in northern Oaxaca and now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto. The Lienzo of Tlapiltepec:… Full Review