Recently Published Reviews

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (“the squinter”), was born in 1591 in Cento, a small town between Ferrara and Bologna, and died in Bologna in 1666. Born a generation after the Carracci, whose works influenced him, Guercino soon developed a personal style noteworthy for combining naturalism with dramatic chiaroscuro effects. From Cento, he produced paintings for such patrons as Cardinal Jacopo Serra, papal legate to Ferrara; Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua; and Cosimo II de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Guercino was enticed away from Cento only when his patron Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV… Full Review

In her chapter on Emilia Francis (later, Lady Dilke), Colleen Denney writes that “Victorians were guilty for delighting in the saucy details of the scandal at the same time as they projected an outward shell of moralistic judgment” (86). The protagonists Denney selected for her perceptive narrative about “scandalous” women were born into the rapidly expanding middle classes: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Lady Dilke (1840–1904), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), and Sarah Grand (1854–1943). This decision (which is unexplained by the author) excludes a figure like Frances Evelyn "Daisy," Countess of Warwick, author and activist, referred to in the press as… Full Review

Curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco use a metaphor of alchemy to describe the contemporary works they brought together for The Dissolve, their title for the SITE Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial. The ingredients for the new global media practice they highlight are bodily gestures, advanced digital technologies, and inspirations from early twentieth-century motion picture experiments, resulting in, as the exhibition catalogue states, “new hybrid forms where the homespun meets the high-tech” (20). The six-year process of choosing the final thirty works—twenty-six contemporary and four historical—and conceiving of the spatial and textual accoutrements that would do them justice… Full Review

During the past twenty years the understanding of representations, subjectivities, and societies has been transformed by the proliferation of cultural studies, human rights discourses, activist practices, and interdisciplinary fields. Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum makes an important contribution to each of these areas in its integration of disability studies with museum studies. Editors Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson have assembled a volume intended to not only raise theoretical questions, but to serve as a catalyst for change and reform. The vigorous activist agenda of the collection is refreshing, and appropriate, given the subject matter and… Full Review

I have become increasingly uneasy about writing book reviews. We need them, and I read them, but when I sit down to write one, I begin to squirm. To write a book review is to climb into the cheapest of judgment seats. Although a book may receive several reviews, each reviewer operates singularly—with a voice from on high—in rendering judgment on the book and its qualities. In addition, the qualifications for writing a book review in the humanities are minimal. Many reviewers are graduate students or young scholars who have not yet written a book and have no direct experience… Full Review

Elissa Auther’s String, Felt, Thread provides a revealing case study of the specificity of an artistic material and the mutability of that material’s significance in the art world. She follows Glenn Adamson’s insight that “craft” is an idea, not a particular material or practice (Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft, London: Berg, 2007, xxix). Accepting that principle, however, Auther does not abandon material specificity but, rather, explores the historically shifting resonances of one material typically associated with the idea of craft, namely, fiber. What she discovers is that fiber’s meaning shifts, but it nearly always determines an artwork’s “proper”… Full Review

The artist’s book Sanctus Sonorensis by Philip Zimmermann is straightforward in content yet complex in associational meanings. Through image and text it refers directly to the New Testament, the Sonoran Desert landscape, and illegal immigration, and also to religious pilgrimages and recent Arizona immigration laws. As a book it calls attention to its objectness with mass and weight—a thing with its own set of meanings. The figure/ground relationships are unambiguous in design yet complicated in translation. To fully engage Sanctus Sonorensis, one must read the words, the images, and the object, and let the mind travel through implied paths… Full Review

Scholars interested in using works of art to understand the lives of individuals and groups in the past can only be discouraged by the realization that so many of the works we study were created at the instigation of elites as demonstrations of wealth and power. While we might want to understand how these works related to members of diverse levels of society, the surviving evidence is generally restricted to information about the motivations and responses of members of the upper classes. This means that in our scholarly lives historians of the Renaissance are consigned to study the Medici, the… Full Review

A grey-green architectural screen with an arcaded view of late medieval Florence—an enlarged detail of the fourteenth-century fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia in the Loggia del Bigallo—drew visitors to the Mount Holyoke Art Museum and into the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Gallery where they encountered the realm of the sacred. Twenty objects dated from ca. 1385 to ca. 1475 comprised The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy, including two sculptures and a cassone. These were installed on and against subdued jewel-toned walls of blue and red. The works were arranged… Full Review

The 2008 exhibition that this catalogue accompanied was instigated by the British Museum's acquisition of an important drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mary Hamilton (1789). Cover-girl of the catalogue and an astonishing tour-de-force by the gifted nineteen-year-old artist, this work reminded authors Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan of just how ubiquitous miniatures and portrait drawings were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—particularly at the Royal Academy—and how central they were to the contemporary debates on the purpose and significance of portraiture. As Lloyd (of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Sloan (of the British Museum) admit, this publication only begins… Full Review

Ann Jensen Adams begins her book by observing that seventeenth-century Dutch portraits were displayed in a wide variety of contexts; they were “everywhere.” While it would be hyperbolic to declare scholarly studies of early modern portraiture to be everywhere, the last few decades have indeed witnessed an expansion of interest, notably in the portraiture of Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Adams’s book follows the tendency of recent scholars to shift scrutiny away from considerations of style and mimesis, and toward socio-cultural context and viewer response. Yet there is no book on Dutch portraiture quite like Adams’s in the breadth… Full Review

Spain’s Museo del Prado has begun to pay attention to the nineteenth century. Such welcome interest first became evident in 2007, when an ambitious expansion provided space for a comprehensive introduction to The Nineteenth Century in the Prado, an exhibition and catalogue that documented some ninety-five seldom-displayed works from the museum’s collection (click here for review). Sorolla, 1863–1923, an exhibition of 102 paintings by Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla, follows on this success and stands, one hopes, as one of many shows that will bring nineteenth-century Spanish painting to the attention of art historians outside the Peninsula… Full Review

It is nothing new that an exhibition catalogue, such as this one from the Prado, proves to be of academic importance. However, in the field of Golden Age Spanish Art Studies over recent decades a number of catalogues have served as landmarks signalling substantial advances in the understanding of the social, intellectual, and cultural significance of Spanish paintings and sculptures. The genre’s multifaceted approach articulated through a range of essays permits a deeper interdisciplinary study of artworks by a range of scholars. An excellent example of this is another volume accompanying a recent Prado exhibition, the 2007 Velázquez's Fables: Mythology… Full Review

Scholars will be grateful for the meticulous analysis in Cordula Grewe’s Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, which demonstrates that “any real understanding of European art’s development in the nineteenth century must involve an understanding of the Nazarene movement” (1). In 1809, an overtly Catholic group in Vienna, consisting of Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, and four companions, founded the Lucasbund, the Brotherhood of St. Luke. By 1810, the comrades were in Rome and lodged in the former Franciscan cloister of San Isidoro, secularized during Napoleon’s occupation. Others joined them: Peter Cornelius in 1812, Wilhelm Schadow in… Full Review

Where is the discourse now about race and power in museums? More than twenty years ago, the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution set the terms of the debate when it hosted two conferences on “the presentation and interpretation of diversity in museums.” The resulting publications, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Karp, Lavine, and Christine Mullen Kreamer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,1992), brought together papers by curators, anthropologists,… Full Review