Recently Published Reviews

If only Giorgio Vasari were as clear and straightforward as Nicolas Poussin. When the French theorist Paul Fréart de Chambray petitioned the artist for his definition of painting, Poussin replied: “It is an imitation made with lines and colors on some surface of everything that is seen under the sun, its end is delight (délectation)” (Lettres et propos sur l’art, Anthony Blunt, ed., Paris: Hermann, 1989, 174). Poussin’s response was deceptively simple, perhaps even coy in answering his somewhat pedantic interlocutor. Both doubtless understood delight to encompass, beyond sensual delectation, the goals of instruction and edification that had… Full Review

Over the last decades, historians of Seljuk and Ottoman art and architecture have paid increased attention to the ideological implications of their scholarship; many have worked hard to dispel Orientalist, nationalist, and various other outdated paradigms. Among these, one may count: the need to demonstrate artists and patrons’ Turkish ethnicity in the service of the image of a homogenous Turkish nation-state; the idea that one single genius-artist can represent a nation’s essence; the notion that after the “golden age” of the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) experienced decline in all aspects of life; and the repulsion of outside influences… Full Review

Karsten Harries’s commentary on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” opens with the interesting suggestion that the key to reading Heidegger’s influential essay is found in its epilogue. What makes the epilogue crucial for understanding the project’s underlying motivations is the manner in which Heidegger evokes Hegel’s famous pronouncement of the death of art. Harries encourages readers to understand “The Origin of the Work of Art” in view of Heidegger’s response to Hegel; in approaching the text this way, i.e., beginning from its end, an illuminating historical twist is given to Heidegger’s ontology. As Harries… Full Review

Eclectic and challenging, What’s the Use of Art? Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context seeks to illuminate, through interdisciplinary inquiry, the relation between the functions and objectification of art made in Asia. The expansive intellectual foundations of the book began in discussion of a possible panel proposal for the Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting, and were developed through calls for participation posted to online discussion forums. The result is a provocative book characterized by unusually diverse authors and topics. The specialist reader, accustomed to texts of more narrow chronological and geographical focus, might find the book daunting. Yet… Full Review

Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform by Christine Göttler is an important contribution to the study of Jesuit-sponsored visual culture in the aftermath of the Council of Trent. The artistic style associated with the Counter-Reformation (or the Catholic Reform), usually called the Baroque, was long linked to the Jesuits, so much so that it was dubbed “the Jesuit style” in nineteenth-century German and French art history as a pejorative reference to its propagandistic character. Göttler investigates this issue of control in her study, specifically the question of who is in control of the viewing… Full Review

This long-awaited study of the marginalia in European manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, directed by Jean Wirth, follows on half a century of intense research on images in the margins by many prominent scholars of medieval material culture, much of it inspired by Lilian Randall’s publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In dealing with this perplexing material since the 1980s, interpretive strategies and theoretical frameworks have become as significant as source hunting and social context. Memorization and punning, laughter and fear, have been evoked as reader responses in varied circumstances. Those scholars, such as Michael Camille, whose interrogation… Full Review

These three books on Istanbul are welcome additions to an emergent field that it might be possible to call “Istanbul Studies,” with new research centers dedicated to the study of the city, and an increasing number of doctoral students working on Istanbul in Turkey and abroad, mostly at U.S. programs. The ascension of Istanbul into the ranks of global cities must be credited for arousing general interest in the city, both popular and academic. Yet, the number of scholarly works on the architectural urban history of the city, especially in English, does not match this rising interest. Thus, together these… Full Review

Caricature still has the power to inflame. In the last five years, several incidents—from the Danish satires depicting Muhammad to the racially tinged caricature of Barack Obama as a crazed chimp published by the New York Post early in his presidency—have shown that caricature can still spark rage as well as pleasure. Developed in tandem with modern conceptions of identity, caricature is a quintessentially modern visual language. Caricature paradoxically reveals the truth of a person’s interior through the deformation of her or his exterior, thus making the invisible visible and satisfying a cultural desire for transparency and the unmasking of… Full Review

Since the early 1980s, there has been a small but steady stream of publications on the cultural, historical, and artistic importance of postcards. Some of the most academically rigorous discussions on postcards have dealt with themes of colonialism, tourism, and representations of cultural and racial otherness. Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb’s edited volume Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1998) stand out as two notable examples. Other publications by collectors and historians in the 1980s and 1990s honed in on specific… Full Review

Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 began by turning a spotlight on its viewers. A robotic beam shone from above, following its subjects across the first floor atrium of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through a series of improvised tests: small circles, long strides. Its operators were invisible because they were absent. Anonymous spectators selected targets remotely using their own computers and a streaming feed. ACCESS (2003) by Marie Sester turned the museum’s most open space into an eerily gentle panopticon: a place where one feels watched but cannot confirm the feeling or identify the… Full Review

Sheila Dillon’s Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles does not attempt to present a comprehensive history of Greek portraiture, but focuses on anonymous portraits that cannot be definitively associated with any historical individuals. Dillon neatly eschews vexing questions of specific identity, and the resulting volume is a compelling exploration of formal, theoretical, and contextual issues fundamental to the very genre of portraiture itself. In effect, Dillon disengages from previous preoccupations with individual identification and effectively rescues these mostly anonymous portraits from the general scholarly obscurity in which they have long languished. Dillon rigorously applies methodologies derived from … Full Review

This seminal exhibition, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before traveling to the National Gallery, London, was the first devoted to Jan Gossart in the United States and the first major monographic exhibition anywhere since 1965. The accompanying catalogue, which serves as a catalogue raisonné of the entire oeuvre, re-shapes the contours of this important early sixteenth-century artist and illuminates key questions about his working habits, patronage, and the themes and functions of his art. The exhaustive catalogue entries are prefaced by eight richly informative essays devoted to Gossart’s historical and cultural milieu, his work as an architectural… Full Review

The architecture of the Amun temple holds an exceptional significance in the study of ancient Nubia. As in Egypt, kingship in Nubia was strongly associated with the Amun cult; yet, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, the Amun temples of Nubia were consistently built of friable sandstone, frequently located in regions of much higher rainfall, and often inscribed in a Meroitic language not yet intelligible to modern scholarship. As a result, deductions about a given Nubian locale’s political and economic role within the state have often been based heavily upon its public architecture, and the function of that architecture has in… Full Review

It is customary to think of European art between the First and Second World Wars in the plural—as defined by competing forms of abstraction, divergent realisms, and assorted returns to tradition. The principal goal of Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 was to assert an underlying unity to the period between the Armistice of 1918 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936. The chaos and mechanized destruction of World War I, the exhibition and its catalogue affirmed, generated a yearning for the timeless stability embodied by classical art. This provoked a widespread rejection of the formal innovations… Full Review

With the Culture of Diagram, John Bender and Michael Marrinan have written a complex and ambitious study examining the transformation of perception and cognition over the past two hundred and fifty years. How do we describe our world, they ask, and how has that process of description changed since the mid-eighteenth century? While Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, provides the starting point for their investigation, Bender and Marrinan examine subjects including the development of French history painting, theater design, linguistics, descriptive geometry, Cubist drawings, and quantum mechanics. This partial list of their dizzying… Full Review