Recently Published Reviews

Stephen F. Eisenman’s vivid, compact study of artistic visions of animals in the modern era integrates historical, philosophical, and ethological research with an incisive political critique of capitalist exploitation of labor and life. Learned and wide-reaching, the book is written in a clear, jargon-free style that could make it accessible to general readers concerned about the relations between human and nonhuman animals in our world today as well as to specialists of Western art and cultural history. Focusing principally upon the era of the animal rights movement in Europe and the United States—the later eighteenth century to the present—Eisenman nevertheless… Full Review

The critical fortune of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s art has suffered in the last centuries: first, because of the unfair assumption that it was the last gasp of Gothic art in Florence; and second, because Ghiberti was the subject of Richard Krautheimer’s influential monograph (with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), the effect of which was largely to foreclose further discussion. Ghiberti’s second set of bronze doors for Florence’s Baptistery, known as the Gates of Paradise, represent a watershed moment in Renaissance art history. Their recent restoration and cleaning (lasting thirty years) mean that viewers may now… Full Review

At a moment when popular opinion has us living in a “post-truth” world, it is revealing, and indeed imperative, to review the contested nature of past truth claims. In Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain, Anne Helmreich examines the truth to nature edict that resonated through artistic and scientific discourses in the mid-nineteenth century. She then traces the transformation of truth to nature from its initial reliance on inductive reasoning—the development of general theories from close observation and experimental investigation—to its early twentieth-century focus on sensation, flux, and subjectivity. Throughout the book, Helmreich combines meticulous research… Full Review

The 2016 anthology The Civil War in Art and Memory, edited by Kirk Savage, assembles fifteen essays presented in the symposium of the same title, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in November 2013. The conference paralleled the exhibition Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial, curated by Sarah Greenough and Nancy Anderson, which took place from 2013 to 2014 at the National Gallery. Both the exhibition and symposium honored the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President… Full Review

Wyatt Gallery’s beautiful collection of photos documenting Jewish artifacts in the Caribbean elegantly eliminates people as it dwells in an elegiac past. It should, as a result, continue vigorous debates on the meaning and ethics of human representation in sites prone to romanticization. Do the islands, long the subject of colonial gazing, continue to serve as a place of others’ historical imaginations (as Krista A. Thompson suggests in her 2007 book An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque [Durham: Duke University Press]) or as a site of human presence in its own complex terms? Gallery’s… Full Review

In Enchanting the Desert: A Pattern Language for the Production of Space (http://www.enchantingthedesert.com/home/), the inaugural Interactive Scholarly Works publication from Stanford University Press, geographer Nicholas Bauch “revives” as a layered digital map a forty-three-photograph slideshow of the Grand Canyon assembled and narrated by commercial photographer Henry Peabody in the first decades of the twentieth century. Originating in Bauch’s “deep sense of wonder about the landscapes depicted in the photographs” (“Motivation for Enchanting the Desert”) and integrating archival research with theoretical approaches to the production of space, the project addresses and historicizes the ways that images of the… Full Review

One of the defining facts about the Medici court in Florence in the late sixteenth century is how, despite the richness of its artistic culture and the depth of its collecting, it remained essentially a bystander in the exploration, colonization, and mercantile exploitation of the New World. The Tuscan state nonetheless saw value in conceptualizing the effect of the expansion of the globe as a matter of local concern in a series of carefully curated artistic projects, often tied to objects gathered from lands far beyond the local domain. Lia Markey’s new book, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence… Full Review

In the opening pages of Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale, Elizabeth Alice Honig describes Jan Brueghel as a cataloger of nature’s variety, an analogy of the artistic process that is a leitmotif of the volume. Honig’s own engagement with the foundational, yet far from fashionable, scholarly practice of cataloging poetically echoes this reading of Brueghel’s work, for the book relies on the online database created by Honig and a team of technical and art-historical specialists (www.janbrueghel.net), an ongoing critical catalogue of over 750 paintings and 350 drawings by, after, or attributed to Brueghel. The decade-plus… Full Review

In summer 2016, on the five hundredth anniversary of Jheronimus Bosch’s death (ca. 1450–1516), the Museo Nacional del Prado staged an impressive, well-researched monographic exhibition on the highly original and imaginative Netherlandish artist. Curated by Pilar Silva Maroto, head of the departments of Flemish and early Spanish painting at the Prado, who also edited the hefty scholarly catalogue that accompanied the show, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view the majority of Bosch’s works together for the first time. Its emphasis on the works themselves, on their materiality and technique, provided a fresh insight into Bosch’s oeuvre, which has… Full Review

La Ofrenda 4 de La Venta is an edited volume of seven scholarly essays on Offering #4, a group of sixteen small stone anthropomorphic figures and six jade celts recovered in the 1955 excavations by Philip Drucker, Robert F. Heizer, and Robert J. Squier at the Middle Preclassic (1000–400 BCE) Gulf Coast Olmec site of La Venta. As noted in the preface and first essay of this treatise, the offering is one of the most spectacular, iconic discoveries of small stone sculpture in the history of Olmec archaeology, long meriting an in-depth analysis as presented in this monograph. This… Full Review

In presenting the work of Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994), curators Jens Hoffmann and Claudia J. Nahson (with Rebecca Shaykin) and the Jewish Museum have expanded the range of exhibitions on architecture and design to include not only a designer from Latin America but one whose primary medium is the most difficult to capture and express museographically: modern landscape architecture. While the focus is on the landscapes he designed, Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist shows that his production was multidisciplinary and included everything from paintings, tapestries, sculptures, and maquettes, to decorative objects and jewelry. Works by international contemporary artists influenced by… Full Review

In 1985, Lucy Freeman Sandler began her examination of a corpus of illuminated manuscripts created for the noble English Bohun family in the second half of the fourteenth century. A very rich study of manuscript patronage and production, her Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family is the culmination of thirty-five years of valuable research, analysis, and scholarship. The volume is densely illustrated with predominantly high-quality color images and includes essential reference materials, including an appendix of the manuscripts and the Bohun family tree. The… Full Review

In his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, the show’s curator Richard J. Powell writes, “Like Richard Wright, the Chicago painter Archibald J. Motley offers a fascinating glimpse into a modernity filtered through the colored lens and foci of a subjective, African American urban perspective” (110).This statement establishes the primary aim of the exhibition: to present Motley as a prominent voice of American modernism. Building upon previous studies of Motley’s life and art such as Amy M. Mooney’s monograph Archibald Motley Jr. (Petaluma: Pomegranate, 2004) and Jontyle Theresa Robinson and Wendy Greenhouse’s The… Full Review

In his long-awaited book, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire, Ahmet A. Ersoy provides an in-depth analysis of Usul-i Mi’mari-i Osmani (The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture, hereafter the Usul), a crucial initial scholarly volume about the history, theory, and compositional principles of Ottoman architecture, prepared as part of the exhibition representing the empire at the 1873 World Exhibition held in Vienna. Ersoy astutely uses the Usul to embark on a meticulous exploration of the various contexts of which it formed a part. In the process, he reconstructs… Full Review

Villard de Honnecourt’s drawings and accompanying commentary (BnF MS fr 19093) have generated tremendous interest since they first came to scholarly attention in the nineteenth century. Despite a century and a half of scrutiny, however, their purpose remains elusive. Initially thought to be a Gothic architect, Villard himself has fallen in status as modern studies have questioned his architectural knowledge. Following the work of Carl F. Barnes, Jr., the idea that Villard was not an architect has, as Jean Wirth notes, become virtually dogmatic among medievalists (10). As the title of this book signals, Wirth disagrees. He sets out, through… Full Review