Recently Published Reviews

What to do with Paolo Soleri (1919–2013)? For the last half-century, the work of the Italian-born architect has seemingly refused to conform to the stylistic and theoretical concerns of the times. That is, until recently, when Cosanti, the foundation he established, began making efforts to transform the general perception of his work from one of an arts-and-crafts practice to that of visionary sustainable design. For the discipline of art history, however, Soleri’s legacy is important, not for his attempts to create efficient urban structures, but for his refusal to deny the significance of the aesthetic component of any human environment… Full Review

Organized by Koenraad Jonckheere in collaboration with Peter Carpreau, senior curator at M – Museum Leuven, this important, thoughtful, and beautiful exhibition aims to enshrine Michiel Coxcie among the select group of northern masters—Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Frans Floris—who visited Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century and engaged inventively with the art of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as with their ancient sources, both sculptural and architectural. The exhibition and its Dutch- and English-language catalogues (which slightly vary in content) constitute a robust response, four hundred years after the fact, to the ambivalent… Full Review

Many periods in the history of art are subject to anachronistic or pejorative names that have somehow stuck, yet few have been so controversial as the term “baroque.” Is baroque a style? If so, what are its characteristics and how to account for the countless exceptions? Is it a period? When does it begin or end? What are its geographical boundaries? Is it a concept? Due to its historical anachronism, pejorative connotations, and, not least, the sheer difficulty in defining it as a style or a period, art historians have in recent years shied away from the term. Cultural critics… Full Review

Richard Wrigley’s Roman Fever: Influence, Infection, and the Image of Rome, 1700–1870 is a thought-provoking look at Rome—and, it should be noted, also at its wider environs—from an unlikely point of view: the filthy public sanitation and insalubrious atmospheric conditions of the city and outlying areas, and how these factors, together with the evidence surrounding the Roman phenomenon of mal’aria (bad air or climate), affected the “making and viewing of art” by artistic pilgrims sojourning there. Borrowing his title from the 1934 short story “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton dedicated to the sentimental and physical dangers of Rome’s deadly nighttime… Full Review

The star of colonial Latin American art is ascendant. Though some museums, like the Denver Art Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art, have long had important collections in this area, others have recently begun to take more than a passing interest in the period and region. Just last year the Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art held major colonial Latin American exhibitions. This was the second show of such scale at Philadelphia in recent history. Their 2006 exhibition, Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, after traveling to Mexico City, went on to the Los Angeles… Full Review

Renata Ago’s Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome is an English translation of Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento, first published in Rome in 2006 (Donzelli Editore). The translation is by Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen. Findlen also contributes an important foreword that analyzes in detail the Nota delli musei, librerie, galerie et ornamenti di statue e pitture, ne’ palazzi, nelle case, e ne’ giardini di Roma, a list of collections in the houses, palaces, and gardens of Rome that was published in 1664 and… Full Review

Roman Architecture in Provence, by James C. Anderson, Jr., is a welcome contribution to the literature on architecture in the Roman provinces. Anderson focuses on the ancient cities of modern Provence, Roman Gallia Narbonensis, surveying urban development and offering detailed studies of monumental types and individual structures. The book is divided into a brief introductory chapter and still briefer conclusions framing two longer, substantive chapters. In chapter 1, “Historical Overview: Roman Provence, ‘Provincia Nostra,’” Anderson begins with a brief account of history and geography, highlighting the early and close relationship between Rome and Gallia Narbonensis, or… Full Review

Though it is a far-reaching critique of the kind of historicism that contents itself with studying the past without regard for the present, Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History is not an attempt to liberate us from history. On the contrary, it is a critique of historicism in the name of history, and it never loses sight of the urgent issues that have fueled historicism, especially in the last century. In the final chapter of the book, for example, Moxey argues that art historians adopted historicist distance after the Second World War as a means of guarding against… Full Review

Beginning with the title—Moche Art and Visual Culture in Ancient Peru—Margaret A. Jackson frames her first book as a comprehensive new approach to Moche visual arts. She proposes to address the corpus of Moche visual culture from an innovative theoretical perspective that “challenges conventional opinions” and “tests operative paradigms” about incipient writing systems in the Americas (10–11). Jackson argues that the perceived visual complexity of Moche iconography may be understood as “neither strictly linguistically informed nor purely pictorial” (149), but rather as an intermediate category, which she describes variously as “semasiographic,” “systematized notation,” and “hybrid presentational syntax.” The… Full Review

Tom Henry’s The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli looks to the past and the future. The product of the author’s decades-long engagement with the artist, the book is unabashedly an artist’s biography that aims “to embrace Signorelli’s humanity” (xiv). When Henry writes, “A man's work is, after all, the most satisfactory and reliable document for those who take the pains to decipher it—the autobiography which every man of genius bequeaths to posterity” (17), he echoes the first book in English on Signorelli, written by Maud Cruttwell and published in 1899, Luca Signorelli (London: Bell), a volume in the “Great… Full Review

Alex Potts’s ambitious new book, Experiments in Modern Realism, attempts to decenter and reconfigure dominant notions concerning the nature of art production in one of the liveliest periods in the history of art, roughly 1945–1968. At nearly five hundred pages and with numerous chapters and subheads, the book has the broad scope and episodic feel of a textbook, but it also has some of the rich texture and nuance of a volume with more specialist concerns. If Potts’s last book, the brilliant The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) (click here for review… Full Review

In the fall of 2013, scholars, artists, collectors, and art aficionados gathered in Washington, DC, for a two-day symposium to consider the role of Africa and its diaspora in the development of art in the United States (available as a webcast). Welcomed by Elizabeth Broun of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Johnnetta Cole of the National Museum of African Art, the event consisted of two days of panels interspersed with comments from respondents and complemented by the insightful opening remarks of the eminent art historian David Driskell. In short, the seventeen distinct papers reflected the breadth and depth… Full Review

The subject of this collection of eleven essays (plus two introductions) is exceedingly broad: in the words of co-editor Marcia B. Hall, it is "the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period" (1). Broadening the subject even more is her immediate qualification that "here 'sensuous' refers to the dictionary definition of the term: of, related to, or derived from the senses, usually the senses involved in aesthetic enjoyment" (1). In other words, this is not merely the "sensual"—that is, the sexually titillating—whose problematic presence in early modern religious… Full Review

It is a long way from the Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro to the sumptuous interior of the Frick Collection, where six of the panel paintings by the famously enigmatic Piero della Francesca for the high altar of Sant’Agostino were reunited. Yet the preciosity of these mid-quattrocento works in oil and tempera, some resplendent with gold leaf and fictive jewel-encrusted fabrics, was deceptively compatible with the luxurious neo-classical setting. That the secular venue and Piero’s religious images share a monumental imperturbability belies, however, the radically different ways in which the paintings would have been seen and understood by their… Full Review

Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome by Barbara Wisch and Nerida Newbigin is a rich, interdisciplinary study of the visual and material culture of the Confraternity of the Gonfalone, the largest and most prestigious lay brotherhood of Renaissance Rome. Focusing on the confraternity’s lavish art and architectural patronage, Wisch and Newbigin bring the spectacular public ceremonies, liturgical devotions, and broad charitable initiatives of the community vividly to life. Their study spans a tumultuous century for both church and city (1495–1584) and illuminates the sodality’s resilience and phenomenal growth in the wake of urban renewal, papal… Full Review