Recently Published Reviews

This latest volume in the Cambridge Companion series is, at its best moments, at the cutting edge of the state of research on the most famous and fabled personality of the early Renaissance in Italy, Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1337). A team of authors was assembled by editors Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona—themselves both important contributors to Giotto studies—to address two formidable challenges: to capture the verifiable shreds of documentary evidence of this artist’s life and career and to encapsulate the massive critical record on Giotto as an artist. Derbes and Sandona are to be commended for their bravery, especially… Full Review

Best known as the architect of the sprawling Villa d’Este at Tivoli and the charming casino of Pius IV on the grounds of the Vatican, the sixteenth-century polymath Pirro Ligorio has not—until now—been the subject of a general-purpose biography. This is surprising considering the range of his accomplishments; beyond architecture, landscape design, and painting, Ligorio’s talents included cartography, the restoration of antique ruins and sculpture, and collecting (his set of ancient medals and coins was said to be one of the very best in mid-Cinquecento Rome). David Coffin, who spent more than half a century studying Ligorio and published the… Full Review

It is perhaps not surprising that the exhibition of the still lifes of Pieter Claesz. at the National Gallery in Washington is the first monographic show devoted to this artist. As a friend commented on paging through the catalogue, “His works are rather all of a piece, aren’t they?” It is very likely that more than one curator has turned away from the idea of such a show out of concern that the public might find the work too much alike to sustain interest. It is undeniably true that Claesz. devoted most of his career to painting still lifes marked… Full Review

In nineteenth-century England, the artistic Rossetti family gave the world poet-painter Dante Gabriel, poet Christina, and William Michael, an art critic and career civil servant. The bohemian Dante Gabriel has inspired numerous biographies and other anecdotal histories, and his sumptuously painted female “stunners” frequently grace the pages of coffee table books and calendars. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a book complementing the 2003–04 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, is the latest publication on this Pre-Raphaelite artist. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is a picture book and exhibition catalogue given a scholarly gloss through essays by… Full Review

In this well-illustrated and impressively documented volume, Patricia Fortini Brown presents a new kind of history of the Venetian Renaissance home. Unlike most prior studies of domestic architecture, furnishings, and the decorative arts (not often discussed together), this volume reunites architecture with lived experience, form with function, and aesthetic choices with their broader societal implications. Fortini Brown is a masterful social as well as art historian, and her analysis of what it meant to be noble in sixteenth-century Venice prepares the reader for a highly nuanced reading of the palaces that line the Grand Canal. Alert to the paradoxes inherent… Full Review

In this exhibition, Klosterneuburg’s Essl Collection—dedicated since 1995 to the dissemination of contemporary art—brings the Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies and the Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer together for the first time, thereby creating a unique encounter between their respective oeuvres. Conceived by collector Karlheinz Essl, whose collection contains most of the ninety-plus works on display, the exhibition was curated by Jean Frémon, a co-director of Paris’s Galerie Lelong and a long-time follower of both artists’ careers The exhibition sets out to explore the echoes and convergences, not necessarily intentional, between the two artist’s oeuvres and their lives. Formal relationships and echoes… Full Review

Hiroko Johnson has produced the first English-language monograph on the small group of elite men from Akita who, in the free and open days of Tanuma Okitsugu’s period as shogunal chief counselor, embarked on the challenge of integrating Western art practice into that of Japan. Her book is beautifully produced, with the lavish use of photographs and plates associated with Hotei Publishing. Johnson tells the story thoughtfully and intelligently, and even those who consider themselves informed on the subject will still find a great deal of new information here. Johnson has gone through all available publications, and examined all the… Full Review

Why did spectacular representations of recent history become all the rage in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century? How did this new approach to picturing the past help the fractured French nation to forge a unified identity? And why did cultural critics of all political persuasions, including Realist novelists such as Balzac and Stendhal, find the trend so troubling? Maurice Samuels, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, offers persuasive answers to these and related questions in his compelling first book Although its subtitle emphasizes contributions to the field of French literature, The… Full Review

When Giorgio Vasari wrote in the 1568 edition of the Lives that Michelangelo had surpassed the ancients, art, and nature itself, he codified a familiar characterization that had already been current in critical commentaries and published letters for decades. Michelangelo was, of course, the hero of Vasari’s history, and it was therefore inevitable that in his construction of the progressive perfection of art, Michelangelo represented an exemplar of inimitable perfection. But, however politically and ideologically motivated Vasari’s Lives may be as a work of critical theory and literary biography, there is also a great deal of truth in what he… Full Review

Ever since the American artist DeWitt Peters started the Centre d’Art of Port-au-Prince in 1944, Haitian art has attracted major European and American artists and collectors. Decades after Haitian art admirer André Breton called the landscape of the tropics the landscape of Surrealism, generous art donors and collectors with connections to the Midwest have raised the commercial value of Haitian art while establishing three major regional collections—at Iowa’s Waterloo Center for the Arts and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Organized by the Ramapo College of New Jersey, the exhibition Odilon Pierre: Atis d’Ayiti allowed… Full Review

For much of the last half-century, the few North Americans interested in the extraordinary ecclesiastical architecture erected during the 1500s south of the U.S. border had to depend on just two monumental tomes in English: George Kubler’s Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948) and John McAndrew’s The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965). Perhaps because the scholarship of these works was so weighty, gringo aficionados didn’t deem it necessary to add anything further. Moreover, the colonial arts of Latin America were receiving little attention in general after World War… Full Review

Agnes Martin and Jackson Pollock were both born in 1912, but Pollock had died by the time Martin moved from New Mexico to New York in 1957 to establish herself as a painter. Martin came at the behest of Betty Parsons, one of many women artists whom Parsons took under her wing as the fervor of Abstract Expressionism faded. Many of these women deferred their artistic careers until midlife, after families or more traditional careers—Martin herself was a teacher. Throughout her life, Martin maintained a principled independence as an artist, existing outside the politics and ideologies of the art world… Full Review

The exhibition Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819 sprang from a collaborative enterprise between the co-curators Chiyo Ishikawa and Javier Morales Vallejo, with the support of three participating institutions: the Patrimonio Nacional of Spain, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. Their efforts are sumptuously represented in the catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition. The catalogue’s seven essays each explore a different aspect of the exhibition's thematic interests, including the idea of Spain and its empire, Spanish spirituality, cross-cultural encounters, and the role played by science in the Americas and Spain… Full Review

On January 23, 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to his friend William Allingham with regard to illustrations for a new volume of Alfred Tennyson’s poems, explaining he would pick those verses “where one can allegorize on one’s own hook on the subject of the poem, without killing for oneself and every one a distinct idea of the poet’s” (George Birkbeck Hill, ed., Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897, 97). The desire on the part of the young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members to stake out new territory for the illustrator—providing commentary rather than… Full Review

The thematic core of this exhibition was built around two vastly different but compelling unofficial portraits, Pontormo’s Alessandro de’ Medici (1534–35) and Bronzino’s Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus (ca. 1537–39), each in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Augmented by about fifty works selected from American and European collections, the exhibition explored the contribution of these two masters to the development and transformation of portraiture during the tumultuous era that witnessed the replacement of Florentine republicanism with autocratic Medici rule. It also traced the artistic debt between two painters mutually bonded through both art and personal… Full Review