Browse Recent Book Reviews

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

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

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

The concept of interdisciplinarity seems increasingly unavoidable in modern academia—but then, who would want to avoid it? As the relevance of the humanities is more and more frequently questioned, and cash-strapped universities are creatively reorganizing liberal arts departments in ways that might indeed encourage a widespread unification of intellectually contiguous disciplines such as art history, literature, and history, one has everything to gain in joining forces with colleagues across the disciplines. Art historians (especially in the field of Renaissance art) have of course been engaged for more than a century with interdisciplinary inquiry involving an integration of sources, contexts, and… Full Review

For Westerners in the nineteenth century, and even for some today, art and architecture of ancient and far-flung peoples stood as evidence of cultural sophistication upon which to pronounce a global hierarchy of culture, from “primitive” societies of colonized peoples to their own advanced civilizations. The artworks considered most significant in determining that hierarchy were those classified as “monumental,” that is, elaborate architecture and stone sculpture. It was in this environment that Pre-Columbian arts gained scholarly attention. Explorers trekking through dense forests in Central America encountered awesome ruins of the stone and stucco Classic Maya cities, their plazas filled with… Full Review

In her introduction to Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History, Leslie Webster states that “the aim of this book is to give an accessible overview that covers the entire Anglo-Saxon period, placing it within a broader cultural and historical context, and incorporating the new discoveries and new thinking of recent years” (10). For an intended audience of beginning students and the interested public, Webster takes a thematic approach, with chapters entitled “Reading the Image, Seeing the Text”; “Rome Reinvented: The Early Inheritance”; “Rome Reinvented: The Impact of Christianity”; “Celtic Connections, Eastern Influences: Sixth to Ninth Centuries”; “Art and Power: From… Full Review

Robin L. Thomas’s elegantly written and richly illustrated account of the urban transformation of Naples during the reign of Charles of Bourbon (1734–59) highlights the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’s place on the map of eighteenth-century Europe. Although other major European cities have received ample attention from scholars of early modern architecture, Naples has suffered from relative scholarly neglect despite its status as one of Europe’s largest and most culturally vibrant capitals. Furthermore, the few historical accounts of early modern Neapolitan architecture have tended to focus on questions of style rather than on the city’s participation in… Full Review

So much attention has been given to the spiritual aspect of Indian art that it may seem a cliché to search for the sacred in its diverse and many works, yet an important element of Parul Pandya Dhar’s recent book, The Torana in Indian and Southeast Asian Architecture, is how it makes a compelling case for just such quests. This is not, however, because the author makes “meaning” to be the most important criteria of her study. Rather, it is Dhar’s careful and wide-ranging consideration of the forms of toranas, which she defines as arched portals or festoons… Full Review

Any review of Anne Leader’s The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery should begin with the fact that it is physically impressive at more than three hundred pages with over two hundred high-quality color photographs. In this beautiful setting Leader sets out to explain the early quattrocento changes that occurred in the oldest Florentine monastic foundation, the Benedictine abbey known for centuries simply as the Badia. She does this by considering three different aspects of the Badia’s history between roughly 1420 and 1440: the arrival of the Portuguese Abbot Gomezio di Giovanni and the impact of… Full Review

Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) lived through the tumultuous transition from Imperial to Republican China while uneasily jostling no fewer than five different personal profiles: a knowledgeable reformer who pushed for the Chinese adaptation of foreign methods in agriculture and education by editing newspapers and book series between 1896 and 1910 that promoted these ideas; a classical scholar who understood the importance of the recently discovered Dunhuang images, texts, and artifacts, along with new archaeological finds in the form of inscribed oracle bones to shift the text-focused traditional connoisseurship to the new disciplines of “archaeology” and “art history”; a businessman who financed… Full Review