Recently Published Reviews

Can sex be a muse, a creative stimulus for art? This question forms the basis of James Grantham Turner’s evocative Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity, a book that examines the erotic revolution that swept across the Italian art world between 1500 and 1563. The leaders of this movement are a group of well-known artists, writers, and patrons who sought pleasure in variety, delighted in matters of the flesh, and broke traditional boundaries for the sake of novelty. Rather than the loyal bonds of marriage, this book is dedicated to the exciting thrill of concupiscent love or sexual desire… Full Review

The British Library is home to one of the world’s most important collections of manuscripts from Southeast Asia. Buddhism Illuminated focuses on the library’s holdings from the Buddhist traditions of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly in the area that is today Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. The book presents nearly two hundred high-quality reproductions from this deep and varied collection and describes Buddhist teachings, values, and practices in the region. This book is a significant landmark in Southeast Asian Buddhist manuscript studies. Its reproductions make it an essential reference source for scholars and, with its plain-spoken text, a rich and engaging overview… Full Review

Fakes, pastiches, deceptive restorations, and outright forgeries have been a persistent problem in the study of art and antiquities since the Renaissance. Understandably, few museums are willing to release the number of such false pieces in their collections, but conservative estimates have long suggested 40 percent of works in museums are not what they claim to be. However, recent investigation at San Francisco’s Mexican Museum, for example, have shown some institutions—and some collections within them—have significantly higher statistics. While the average museumgoer may give little thought to the authenticity of what is on view, the polluting influence of fraudulent… Full Review

From the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1830s, the brick row house became one of the most common urban building forms in the British Atlantic world. Artisan builders erected thousands of these rows of classically proportioned and ornamented town houses in the new streets, squares, and crescents of expanding cities as well as in smaller market and port towns in Great Britain, Ireland, and America. Built for a speculative market, town houses with broad frontages and elaborate ornamental details were designed to attract an elite aristocratic and gentry clientele. Dwellings of narrower widths and fewer embellishments were constructed… Full Review

In 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art marked the centennial of its Department of Prints (later the Department of Prints and Photographs and today the Department of Drawings and Prints) with an exhibition and publication celebrating the museum’s first two print curators, William M. Ivins (1881–1961) and A. Hyatt Mayor (1901–1980). Familiar to print specialists for their respective authorship of the seminal studies Prints and Visual Communication (1953) and Prints and People: A Social History of Printed Pictures (1971), Ivins and Mayor spent a combined fifty years developing the Met’s initial print holdings of a few thousand works into a… Full Review

On August 7, 1981, a senior staff member at the Yale Center for British Art wrote an internal memorandum recommending the sale of ten works in the center’s collection by a little-known artist named Agostino Brunias (ca. 1730–1796). Among the reasons he gave were that the Italian-born Brunias “is not English and very, very minor,” and that his paintings, which depict scenes of life in the British West Indies, bore only “tenuous connection with British Studies.” Suggesting that the works might be of interest to Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center or Peabody Museum of Natural History, he concluded, “I do not… Full Review

Sharon Hecker’s recent monograph on Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) situates this all-too-often marginalized sculptor within the field of the international avant-garde. Often considered as either a slightly mysterious three-dimensional Impressionist or as an inspiration to movements such as Futurism, Rosso has rarely received sustained attention as a figure in his own right. Hecker makes a significant effort to counter this by placing him at the center of a key modernist concern: the tension (as suggested by the book’s title) between the momentary and the monumental. “A moment’s monument” was the description given to Rosso’s sculpture Ecce Puer (Behold the Child, 1906)… Full Review

On the top floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Mary Corse’s (b. 1945) expansive canvas Untitled (White Inner Band) captivated with a subdued brilliance. Its pale vertical bands shimmered in response to ambient light. A seasoned art viewer new to the experience of Corse’s work could draw comparisons with analogous minimal painters like Agnes Martin or Robert Ryman. However, such comparisons dissolved as the vertical bands appeared and disappeared relative to one’s mobility. An awareness of light as a material presence and its ties to subjective experience came to mind instead. This is the essence of Corse’s impressive… Full Review

In recent years, scholarship has shown a growing interest in the art and person of Paolo Caliari, called Veronese (1528–1588), who for too long was considered essentially a mere decorator, a lesser figure compared to the more intellectual Titian and the volcanic Jacopo Tintoretto. Between 2013 and 2014, a few international exhibitions (Sarasota, London, Verona) honored this artist from Verona. Recent publications have likewise begun to change our perception of the master, especially the previously neglected aspects of his production and working practice. It is within this new context of interest in the artist that the present book should be… Full Review

The idea of writing a “cultural biography” of the Serpent Column is brilliant. Over the 2500 years of its history, this monument stood in the center of two of the most significant environments of the ancient world: the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi and the Circus of Constantinople. It witnessed their transformations, and it underwent important alterations itself, both in its physical appearance and in the meanings associated to it. After a first chapter dealing with the history of its discovery and tentative reconstructions, seven more chapters narrate the life of the column, dealing with its different locations (§ 1… Full Review

Craig Clunas opens the introduction to Chinese Painting and Its Audiences with a monumental understatement: it is a book that some might feel has “a narrow focus, but it has somewhat wider aims” (1). The published form of the 2012 A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences is neatly structured into six chapters. It starts with an introductory “Beginning and Ending” that confronts the reader with the prospect that Chinese painting, as an ontological entity, is a fabrication, a subjective construction determined by an outsider’s perspective, and follows with chapters centered on five internal… Full Review

Of the principal areas of study constituting Latin American art history, i.e., ancient, colonial, modern, and contemporary, the nineteenth century remains under examined. Situated precariously between the Spanish viceregal period and modern nationhood, this turbulent yet pivotal stage in Mexico’s history has lagged in terms of scholarly attention, particularly in art history. Art historians in Mexico, such as Jean Charlot, Justino Fernández, Fausto Ramírez Rojas, Esther Acevedo, and Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama have done much of the heavy lifting in terms of writing about art in nineteenth-century Mexico. Meanwhile, in the United States, Stacie G. Widdifield has led the way, with… Full Review

In recent decades, specialists of both American and Japanese arts have turned their attention to the history of these two countries’ artistic interactions from the nineteenth century through the present. Scholars of Japan have also explored twentieth-century avant-garde Japanese arts. Concurrently, art history has increasingly expanded to embrace a field more aptly termed “visual culture studies,” which incorporates the analysis of mass-market commercial products. These efforts have resulted in fresh insights into the ways in which American and Japanese cultures have intersected through their visual materials. The exhibition catalogue reviewed here reflects these new scholarly directions. It enlarges upon the… Full Review

In 1839, shortly after publishing “Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves without the Aid of the Artist’s Pencil,” William Henry Fox Talbot sent a letter along with thirty-six examples of photogenic drawings to Antonio Bertoloni, a botanist in Bologna, Italy. Talbot undoubtedly desired to alert colleagues to his invention in the wake of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s announcement of his own photographic process on January 7th that year, and Bertoloni dutifully assembled the materials into an album for posterity, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New… Full Review

Representations of war and soldierly actions have assuredly fascinated entire generations, especially during fragile political contexts such as revolutions and governmental changes. Rarely, however, has military imagery been dealt with from a critical art historical perspective. Military imagery has typically been understood in terms of its official ideological role and its capacity as a tool for the state to guide public opinion. Katie Hornstein has managed to invert this tendency. Her book on war imagery in the first half of the nineteenth century in France provides not only a brilliant discussion of the diversity of visual resources and references that… Full Review