Browse Recent Book Reviews

In his latest publication, Gainsborough’s Cottage Doors: An Insight into the Artist’s Last Decade, Hugh Belsey highlights the spirited independence and skillful professional maneuvering of the artist he has researched for most of his career. More specifically, Belsey points out how Thomas Gainsborough’s attitudes and decisions, especially in relation to his rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the Royal Academy, clarify the creation of the celebrated Cottage Door (ca. 1780) painting in the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and two subsequent similar versions. Indeed, the book coincides with the exhibition of all three canvases together for… Full Review

With the publication in 1778 of A Guide to the Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire, antiquarian, writer, and ordained Jesuit priest Thomas West (1720?–1779) contributed to and capitalized on the growing interest in exploring the aesthetic significance of British landscape. The first edition was a success, but West died before seeing the book go into a second, which was expanded and made “decently perspicuous and correct” by the writer William Cockin (1736–1801) (reprinted in 4th ed., London: W. Richardson, 1789, 90). Despite the Guide’s initial success, Cockin included in the preface a curiously belittling description of the… Full Review

Within modern East Asian art and visual culture the politics of beauty have revolved around two notable archetypes: the “Modern Woman” and the “Traditional Woman.” The Modern Woman—also known as the “modern girl” or “new woman”—was identifiable by her bobbed haircut and flapper dress and embodied the flamboyant lifestyle of the self-motivated working girl. The Modern Woman challenged social mores by publicly asserting her sexuality, intelligence, and individualism. In contrast, the Traditional Woman, or “good wife, wise mother,” was based on a Confucian model of womanhood in which moral education and homemaking skills, rather than wage employment, cultural and intellectual… Full Review

By rights, a book about temporary Georgian festival architecture should be the very definition of scholarly navel-gazing. But in our modern era of tablescapes, wall treatments, chalk art, digital holograms, and laser light shows, this illuminating survey of eighteenth-century event planning feels perversely contemporary—as relevant as it is revelatory. In Georgian England, extravagant decorative and architectural effects were employed for large-scale public displays and elite private entertainments alike. Frequently, these one-off installations celebrated momentous events such as military victories and royal birthdays. “All these decorations were in their time an integral part of a culture rich in visual… Full Review

In 2013, the names of Malian portrait photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibé may be familiar to the art-viewing public in Europe and the United States, but this was not always the case. In fact, it was a little over twenty years ago that Keita’s studio portraits were first shown in the United States in the Museum for African Art’s exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991). The timing of that appearance coincided with significant intellectual shifts taking place in the study of African art, and subsequently the field of African photography grew as an area of scholarly pursuit… Full Review

Social media networks like Facebook make us anticipate the moment we turn into objects under another person’s gaze. Yet this experience of becoming a spectacle, and organizing our lives accordingly, is hardly new. Nor is the very small size that our portraits will usually take in these types of media: as Hanneke Grootenboer points out in Treasuring the Gaze, the format of a photo on a smartphone screen is remarkably similar to that of the pre-photographic portrait miniature. In her new book, Grootenboer focuses on a short-lived subgenre of the portrait miniature, the so-called eye miniature or eye portrait… Full Review

Sharon Gregory’s Vasari and the Renaissance Print lays out in orderly fashion the story of prints as told by, and used by, Giorgio Vasari. The strength of the book is its wide-ranging inclusion of all types of print interactions, along with a catalogue of prints mentioned in the Lives. Acknowledging her debt (8) to Patricia Rubin’s landmark book, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Gregory focuses attention on Vasari’s inclusion in his second edition (1568) of a history of printmaking embedded in the life of Marcantonio Raimondi. She carefully traces Vasari’s mentions of prints… Full Review

Italian Renaissance Art by Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole provides a new textbook alternative for those who teach the Italian Renaissance, joining established texts like John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke’s Art in Renaissance Italy and the venerable History of Italian Renaissance Art by Frederick Hartt and David G. Wilkins. While all of these texts are written by leading scholars and largely cover the same material, they do so in distinct ways. History of Italian Renaissance Art, which was first published in 1976, taken over by Wilkins in 1994, and is currently in its seventh edition… Full Review

Perhaps what one first notices about Journeys to New Worlds are its lavish production values. Art history books from Yale tend to be large format, but Journeys sets a new standard, with pages ten inches wide and twelve inches tall. It will tower over and project beyond the other books on the shelf. The interior illustrations are in glorious color, with catalogue photos taken especially for the volume and essay images a mix of new photos and scans from prior publications (the latter having a charming checkerboard moiré). The volume as an artifact, then, is testament to the golden age… Full Review

Archaeological sites that afford a view of several layers of human history, unfolding in chronological succession, capture the imagination of the specialist and the non-specialist alike. Excavation and analysis of such sites as the Parthenon in Athens or the Pantheon in Rome have all afforded clear views of the ways in which structures influenced the shape and function of the edifices that followed. The volume under review is the second in a series of four volumes that collectively constitute the published results of the Florence Duomo Project. As one of the major archaeological campaigns of this generation, the aim of… Full Review