Recently Published Reviews

According to Witold Rybczynski's Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986), private spaces in households are a Dutch seventeenth-century invention, despite their commonplace nature today. A serious new exhibition and a handsomely produced accompanying catalogue set out to explore this premise by showing Dutch representations of household interiors, as well as actual period furnishings. The exhibition organizer and catalogue supervisor, Mariët Westermann, is far from naïve about the differences between sanitized, conceptual representations and the contemporary actualities; after all, this tension within "Dutch realism" lies at the heart of any interpretation of such pictures. Westermann… Full Review

The late seventeenth-century series of paintings of the Corpus Christi procession in colonial Cuzco, Peru, housed at the Archbishop's Museum of Religious Art in that city, appears at first sight to be an ethnohistorian's dream. Portraying the devotees of Cuzco's indigenous parishes in procession with their patron saints, these canvases depict individuals in Inka dress, suggesting their exceptional value as ethnographic documents of the pre-Columbian past. In fact, such use of colonial visual materials has been the rule among Andeanists from most disciplinary backgrounds. Carolyn Dean has, however, forced us to rethink the significance of colonial Peruvian art in her… Full Review

In the 1530s, word of a new palace in Mantua, begun in the middle of the previous decade, had already spread north to Bavaria and south to Rome, where it figured in the dialogues of Francisco de Hollanda. But by the eighteenth century, the Palazzo Te, created by Giulio Romano for Federico II Gonzaga, was abandoned, abused, and in disrepair. Miraculously, this suburban complex has survived relatively intact (even after several restorations, some more drastic than others), and its slipping triglyphs and Camera dei Giganti have become textbook images of "Mannerist" art and architecture. The Palazzo Te in Mantua… Full Review

Published to accompany an exhibition at New York's China Institute Gallery, this lavishly illustrated catalogue deftly contextualizes a group of extremely appealing small-scale works of painting and calligraphy that were made by or for the Southern Song court in Hangzhou (called Lin'an at the time) during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Situated in a fertile and temperate region near the center of China's east coast, Hangzhou was a beauty spot famed for its West Lake and scenic mountains dotted with Buddhist and Daoist monasteries. In addition, from 1138 until 1276, it was also the supposedly temporary capital of a dynasty… Full Review

Following the crushing defeat of Japan in World War II and the devastating destruction of its major cities by conventional and atomic bombing, the United States occupied the country for many years. It had a prolonged presence and deep effect on Japanese culture; at the same time, Japanese culture became prominent in the U.S., partially as a result of servicemen and women returning home after the war. Bert Winther-Tamaki's Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years addresses one aspect of this intersection: the changes in aesthetic culture or high art in Japan… Full Review

The idea of viewing the art and culture of the Silk Road by focusing on archaeological finds from the northwestern region of China (the Gansu and Ningxia provinces) offers an excellent opportunity to consider the process of cultural and ethnic interaction between the Han-Chinese and other cultures. As the only section of the Silk Road within China proper in the early medieval period from the fourth to seventh century, Gansu and Ningxia played an important role as a melting pot where exotic and indigenous traditions intermingled and cross-fertilized. Previous Western scholarship on China and the Silk Road paid more attention… Full Review

1. Theory Something called "theory" has been a leading feature of American intellectual and academic life for some thirty years now, and it would no doubt be a great comfort if we had some strongly shared sense of what theory is, what its prominence means, and what difference it makes. Both of these books argue, correctly I believe, that we are more or less hopelessly muddled on all of these questions. Since the history of art, at least in the United States, is a relatively late arrival at the party, it has perhaps a particular interest in… Full Review

The publication of Chinese Art and Culture should be welcomed by anyone who has an interest in Chinese art, whether or not one also teaches it. Both of the scholars who wrote this book are old enough to have each devoted more than three decades to thinking and practicing in their respective areas (early Chinese art through the Tang dynasty for Robert Thorp, later Chinese art from Song to the present for Richard Vinograd), but are young enough to have spent the bulk of their careers engaging many of the general issues that have helped redefine the field of art… Full Review

Winner of CAA's 2002 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Dale Kent's impressive study of Cosimo de' Medici and patronage culture of the mid-fifteenth century is a welcome addition to Renaissance and Florentine studies. The last serious biography of Cosimo in English, by Kurt Gutkind, appeared in 1938. The Warburg Institute's symposium that resulted in a volume of essays edited by Francis Ames-Lewis, Cosimo "il Vecchio" de' Medici, 1389-1464 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) brought Cosimo studies into the late twentieth century. Now, Kent's book makes further contributions by incorporating an array of contemporary and modern… Full Review

Jonathan Weinberg's new book is comprised of a series of thoughtful, original essays on the workings of fame and desire on the production and reception of a select number of twentieth-century American paintings and photographs. A social art historian writing in the wake of postmodernism, Weinberg remains committed to a modernist faith "in the viability of painting" (xxi), even as his sensitive and erudite readings of particular works test and complicate that faith in light of Pop art and the demise of Greenbergian orthodoxy. Following a brief introduction, the book proceeds in three sections ("Parents," "Autonomy," and… Full Review

Indian painting, especially that of the Mughal dynasty, is often considered among the most magnificent creations of the Islamic world, and is a highly prized commodity to many collectors, including Nasser D. Khalili, whose extensive collections include Indian art, Japanese art, Spanish Damascene metalwork, and Swedish textiles. This sumptuously illustrated volume on Indian painting is the eighth of a projected twenty-seven that documents the massive Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art. Leach provides detailed documentation and description of the seventy-six paintings and manuscripts that compose the Indian portion of the Khalili collection. Most of the works included here come… Full Review

"Until we insurgent architects know the courage of our minds and are prepared to take an equally speculative plunge into some unknown," David Harvey writes in conclusion to his stunning new work, Spaces of Hope, "we too will continue to be the objects of historical geography (like worker bees) rather than active subjects, consciously pushing human possibilities to their limits" (255). Spaces of Hope serves as a fitting capstone to the Marxist geographer's oeuvre of the past two decades. From his The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), in which Harvey first began to explore what… Full Review

As their titles indicate, these two books--both of which originated as academic dissertations at the Universities of Munich and Rome respectively--cover much the same ground. Both provide detailed discussions of Titian's association with Federico Gonzaga, marquis (later, first duke) of Mantua, from their first meeting in 1523 until Federico's premature death in 1540. Both include appendices with transcriptions of more than 300 documents (and in the case of Lisa Zeitz, translations into German). Almost inevitably, both jackets are illustrated with Titian's celebrated portrait of Federico, now in the Prado. Diane Bodart's Tiziano e Federico II Gonzaga is the smaller in… Full Review

Few books in recent memory have articulated so lucidly the nexus of deep interconnections among practices making up the core of the modern culture industry as The Value of Things by London-based artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. This remarkable book project dramatically charts the powerful forces through which the values of things are negotiated and exchanged by intertwining the histories of two exemplary modern institutions--the British Museum and London's Selfridge's department store. As the authors write, "In a seemingly homogenized mass of consumables, nothing has a verifiable 'essence' or a legitimate history. Born into a promotional media, things can… Full Review

Twenty-five years ago, Charles Dempsey's Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style--a small, brilliant, idiosyncratic book--was born as an attempt to review Donald Posner's large, definitive, and indispensable monograph and catalogue raisonné, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Painting around 1590, which had been published in 1971 (London: Phaidon). The present volume is a second edition of Dempsey's book from 1977, to which the author has added a brief Introduction looking back over the developments in Carracci scholarship during the past quarter century. A select bibliography has also been appended, but the original body of the… Full Review