Browse Recent Book Reviews

Kristin B. Aavitsland’s Imagining the Human Condition in Medieval Rome examines a cycle of late thirteenth-century frescoes discovered in 1965 at the Cistercian abbey of Tre Fontane outside Rome. Found on the outside of the eastern wall of a medieval dormitory, at the time used as a terrace, the cycle was in poor condition. Their discovery was a revelation, countering the prevalent idea that the iconoclastic Cistercians eschewed figural imagery. The cycle is in fact the earliest known figural monumental decoration in a Cistercian setting. During a restoration in 1970–71, the frescoes were mounted on canvas and moved, which left… Full Review

Dorothy Metzger Habel is unafraid to take the road well traveled by her academic forebears, even such renowned ones as Richard Krautheimer. This was true of her 2002 book on the urban development of Rome under Alexander VII (The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII, New York: Cambridge University Press), and it is equally true of her new book, “When All of Rome Was Under Construction”: The Building Process of Baroque Rome. What makes her latest study so exciting is that she offers a fresh perspective on the architectural and urban history of… Full Review

Richard Neer’s latest book, Greek Art and Archaeology: A New History, c. 2500–c. 150 BCE, takes a refreshingly contemporary approach to the study of ancient Greek material culture. As the title suggests, the textbook surveys over two millennia of Greek history, from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period. While the purview is hardly unique, Neer aims to present a “new history” of the discipline through his broad, inclusive understanding of the Greek world and the significance of its artistic production. The strengths of this volume lie in its highly practical format, nuanced treatment of the material, and interdisciplinary… Full Review

Scholars are fortunate to now have a convenient new edition containing all of Irving Lavin's numerous articles on the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Published under the collective title Visible Spirit: The Art of Gianlorenzo Bernini, the third and final volume is Bernini at St. Peter's: The Pilgrimage. Unlike the preceding volumes, it represents a single monograph unto itself, printed in a much larger format with a great deal of unpublished material and excellent color photography. Lavin's thesis concerning the many works of art that he subjects to detailed visual and historical examination is that "Bernini's career at… Full Review

Lorenzo Pericolo’s Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting is part of a recent trend in Caravaggio studies focusing on the artist’s narrative technique and the intentionally ambiguous meaning of his paintings. Prominent examples include Valeska von Rosen’s Caravaggio und die Grenze des Darstellbaren. Ambiguität, Ironie und Performativiät in der Malerei um 1600 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), and, to a certain degree, Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), along with Itay Sapir’s Ténèbres sans leçons: esthétique et épistémologie de la peinture ténébriste romaine 1595-1610 (Peter Lang: International Academic Publishers, 2012). … Full Review

Georges Bataille’s writings on prehistoric art are known to the English-reading public mainly through two major books: Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art (trans. Austryn Wainhouse, Milan: Skira, 1955) was one of the earliest presentations of Lascaux to be illustrated with lavish color photographs; and The Tears of Eros (published posthumously in French in 1961, and in English in 1989 [trans. Peter Connor, San Francisco: City Lights]) started with a meditation on Paleolithic female figurines. It is less known that Bataille’s complete works in French include many other writings on the subject, ranging from book reviews to notes… Full Review

With Bernini: Art as Theatre, Genevieve Warwick has produced one of the most significant contributions to the recent surge of literature on Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Her fascinating book is articulate and thoughtful, its arguments sound and convincing. It incorporates a wide body of scholarly literature and mines archives and primary sources to provide new looks at well-known objects. Warwick presents an innovative understanding of the aesthetic culture of seventeenth-century Rome, reconstructing the visual expectations of Bernini’s audience and the settings in which his objects were made and displayed. Bernini’s art has often been described somewhat dismissively as theatrical, suggesting… Full Review

Richard Taws’s The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France makes a compellingly original contribution to the study of the visual and material culture of the French Revolution. This book takes as its subject a body of objects that have traditionally failed to garner sustained interest within the discipline of art history, which has preferred to focus on exemplary practitioners such as Jacques-Louis David and works of art made in the durable medium of oil painting. The Politics of the Provisional asks what might be learned about the French Revolution if attention is turned from singular masterpieces… Full Review

Daniel H. Magilow’s The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany and Sarah E. James’s Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain investigate photography in its serial form, recruiting case studies from twentieth-century Germany to explore their claims. Counter to the rather substantive body of research on photomontage that interrogates the semiotics and somatics of juxtaposed, cropped, found, and staged photographs, these recent contributions to the history and theory of photography explore the meanings and subject positions engendered by pictorial succession. More emphatically than the montage of photographs on a single plane, the structure of photographic… Full Review

Anthony White’s monograph on Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana is a long overdue intervention in the literature on Italian and South American twentieth-century abstraction. Correcting for a longstanding lacuna in the scholarship, White departs from the tendency on the part of what scant accounts do exist to focus only on Fontana’s post-World War II production, the punctures (Buchi) and slits (Attesse) he famously made up to his death in 1968. Looking at the entirety of the artist’s development, from his early years of training at the Brera Academy in Milan during the years in which Italian Fascism… Full Review