Recently Published Reviews

For the first half of the twentieth century, Roman art history was dominated by questions of typology, chronology, and iconography as scholars attempted to articulate what was “Roman” about Roman art. The field has since embraced social-historical analyses, and contextual approaches remain a dominate trend. The variety of methodologies and the vast quantity and range of objects included in the category of Roman art have resulted in an extraordinarily diverse body of scholarship, the key themes of which have been summarized in The Art Bulletin state-of-the-field essays by Brunhilde Ridgway on ancient art and Natalie Kampen on Roman art (Brunhilde… Full Review

The Battle of Lepanto, fought off the coast of Greece on October 7, 1571, between Christians and Turks, with Venice as a major participant, is one of the defining moments of Venetian history. Officially proclaimed a victory by Venice, with a huge panoply of celebratory apparatus, the battle—as later events made clear (a humiliating peace treaty with the Turks followed almost immediately)—was the turning point in the dethroning of Venice as a dominant power on the Italian peninsula and in the Mediterranean. Iain Fenlon, a noted musicologist, has made a specialty of research on the battle—the victory that never was—and… Full Review

The linguistic turn in 1960s and 1970s art has presented an ongoing problem of contextualization: to what extent do our readings of this art need to draw on the histories and interpretive conventions of writing generally and literature specifically? Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Marcel Broodthaers, and many other artists produced experimental writing that exploded the dominant genres of artistic “expression,” the artist statement and the essay. Similarly, works from this period frequently challenged the idea that, for artists, writing was a secondary medium that must take on the role of explaining or contextualizing some ostensibly more real art… Full Review

Portraits were ubiquitous in the cities, towns, and sanctuaries of the Roman empire, as public honors for the living and memorials to the dead. Indeed, as Jane Fejfer’s Roman Portraits in Context shows, portrait statues and busts were arguably one of the most important and prominent forms of Roman public art and played a crucial role in constructing and communicating Roman social and political identity. Fejfer’s aim is to focus on the reconstruction of the socio-historical and physical contexts of portraits, rather than on more traditional scholarly concerns of portrait typology, chronology, and stylistic development, although these topics are dealt… Full Review

Eighteenth-century Europe was home to a dazzling array of architectural interiors, from priest-holes designed to hide ecclesiastics from Protestant authorities in England to the home theaters of courtesans in Paris. Diverse characters populated these domains. Bluestockings gathered in a Chinoiserie room while guests waited to be served refreshments before taking in Europe’s premier public collection of ancient sculpture. Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe examines all of these environments and personages, exploring the role architecture and interiors played in fashioning identity in the eighteenth century. The ten essays that it gathers together seek to demonstrate that these spaces served… Full Review

The title of the volume Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism is captivating for an art historian: it promises an inquiry into the visual components of an important strand of Buddhist discourse. Instead, author Andy Rotman offers an interesting and thorough exploration of the “economy of dharma” in the Divyavadana (produced sometime during the first three centuries CE), with special attention to the role played by the act of seeing in the establishment of faith and devotion. Rotman digs deeply into the theoretical fabric of the Divyavadana; however, he does not include much background… Full Review

In Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics, Elizabeth Chang contends that as a place, a product, and an idea China provided a crucial counterexample to emergent modernist trends of visual and literary realism in Victorian Britain. She argues that, “In the century in which realism reached its greatest heights, the persistence with which authors and artists continued to invoke a defiantly antirealist aesthetic that they claimed to be Chinese demonstrates an aspect of realism’s development that has so far received little attention” (5). The use of the image of China as a foil that serves to reinforce Enlightenment… Full Review

In British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy, Douglas Fordham offers an original and provocative re-interpretation of the emergence of public art and art institutions in eighteenth-century Britain. Scholars have long noted that the 1750s and 1760s were marked by increasing concern about the development and institutionalization of a school of British art. “Why,” Fordham asks, “did the visual arts become a pressing national concern at this moment in Britain’s history?” (1) He argues that any answer to such a question must take into account the “transformative place in British culture” (2) occupied by the Seven… Full Review

The art world wants to be deceived. That is certainly the conclusion one comes away with after reading A Real Van Gogh, Henk Tromp’s thoroughly researched, highly readable, fascinating new book, which uses the history of van Gogh authenticity and forgery debates to discuss what happens in the art world when someone cries wolf. It is not a pretty picture for the expert who deigns to proclaim a work inauthentic. Tromp’s book does an admirable job of balancing a text that is rigorous in its academic research (use of primary source documents, copious citations, application of… Full Review

These three recent books explore an eighteenth-century British engagement with classical archaeology during a time when the practice was transforming from an early modern antiquarianism into a modern scientific discipline. Two of the books are monographic studies of the Society of the Dilettanti, an organization that became known for its support of unprecedented archaeological activity in Greece, while a third outlines how British subjects, some of whom were Dilettanti, undertook archaeological excavations on Italian soil and refurbished, sold, and bought the antiquities found there. In some measure, all the authors note this engagement as integral to shaping British cultural identity… Full Review

The opening of Lynda Benglis at the New Museum marked a surprising milestone in the artist’s career: despite having been a fixture of the New York art world since her arrival from New Orleans in 1964, it was her first solo museum exhibition in New York. What took so long? The story behind Contraband (1968), installed in the New Museum’s glassed-in lobby gallery and the first piece encountered by visitors to the show, hints at reasons for Benglis’s absence. It is a prime example of her “fallen paintings,” the vast “spills” of pigmented latex for which Benglis is best known… Full Review

This sumptuously produced and lavishly illustrated volume celebrates the reopening of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Medieval and Renaissance galleries. It is not a traditional catalogue; readers in search of entries on specific objects are referred to the museum’s website. The director’s forward mentions several aims for the book, among them “to provide a stimulating introduction to the material culture of medieval and renaissance Europe” and to stand as a “new and original contribution to the literature on the art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” In these ambitious goals, presumably addressing the casual visitor and the specialist respectively, Glyn… Full Review

Until recently, the printed image in early modern England—the period 1500–1700 covered by Malcolm Jones’s The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight—has been the victim of neglect by scholars, leading to the false impression that early modern English culture was predominantly a textual instead of a visual one. It has been accepted as conventional wisdom that there were very few English prints from this era, and those that do exist are crude when compared to the staggering developments in other Northern European regions such as the German-speaking territories, France, and the Netherlands. Furthermore, English trained art historians… Full Review

Who really was Camille Silvy? This is one of the thorny questions that remains after reading Mark Haworth-Booth’s enthusiastic biography, Photography of Modern Life: Camille Silvy. Like most commercial photographers who set up portrait studios in the 1850s, Silvy combined elements of entrepreneur, charlatan, genius, and hack. French by birth, Silvy lived in London during most of his ten years of photographic activity where he carved out a reputation based on the hundreds of cartes de visite that he successfully marketed to London’s fashionable world and on a couple of landscapes that he exhibited to much acclaim in 1859… Full Review

A golden man clad in church vestments faced visitors as they entered Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe at the Walters Art Museum this spring. Refulgent against the deep blue walls of the entry room, the metallic statue extended his hands in a communicative gesture. His eyes of polished ivory and horn appeared to be alert, seeing. This was not an art installation so much as an interpersonal encounter. A text panel on his pedestal introduced him as the reliquary bust of St. Baudime, who, according to legend, was sent to Gaul by St. Peter… Full Review