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The writing of James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter was occasioned by the bicentennial of Barry’s death, an event commemorated by the exhibition James Barry (1741–1806): ‘The Great Historical Painter’ at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in 2005, and followed by a related symposium in February 2006. This book contains fourteen papers given at that conference, presented by a uniformly capable cross-section of scholars ranging from the graduate student to the seasoned authority. The expressed intent of the collection is to help correct the regrettably scant corpus of scholarship devoted to this Irish painter. The topics of the essays… Full Review

Evelyn Welch’s fascinating Shopping in the Renaissance, now in its second printing, has garnered glowing reviews and awards in the five years since its first appearance. I will not go against this well-deserved tide of opinion; instead (and at the risk of sounding hopelessly old-fashioned), I want to consider how the book intersects with art history and where it might be most useful to students of art. Although Shopping in the Renaissance is beautifully illustrated with images of paintings, prints, and other crafted objects, its subject encompasses shopping for all sorts of things. Indeed, it is striking how little… Full Review

Tucked away in a Nuremberg archive, sixty-one letters have survived as a unique testament concerning the life of a sixteenth-century Birgittine nun. Writing from the pastoral setting of a south German convent called Maria Mai during the years 1517–1533, Katerina Lemmel maintained a lively correspondence with her cousin Hans Imhoff. Imhoff, a wealthy businessman and Nuremberg patrician, was charged with shepherding Lemmel’s financial affairs during her years of monastic withdrawal. These affairs were surprisingly complex because Lemmel was continually requesting funds in order to improve life at her institution. Only the letters written by Lemmel have survived, not those sent… Full Review

The reign and artistic patronage of Philip III of Spain are often overlooked, lost in the long shadows cast by Philip II and Philip IV, and by El Escorial and Diego Velázquez. Yet, Philip III reigned for nearly a quarter of a century and was a significant patron of the arts. Lisa Banner’s The Religious Patronage of the Duke of Lerma, 1598–1621 sheds a powerful new light on Philip III and Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, the Duke of Lerma, and in the process illuminates an important period of royal artistic patronage in early Baroque Spain. With great skill… Full Review

As a measure of the critical changes in scholarship in the field of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism over the last two decades, the revised edition of the catalogue of the Annenberg Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that first appeared in 1989 is disappointing. If consulted in order to check the recent bibliography on one of the paintings, or to get a decent catalogue entry with revised dating and, in some cases, revised attribution and/or scientific examination, accompanied by an excellent color reproduction, the volume is satisfactory. Fifty-five entries on works by some eighteen artists is not a bad deal… Full Review

This compilation of essays comprises the most recent scholarly publication devoted to the eleventh-century embroidery housed in Bayeux and reveals new interpretations and innovative approaches. The essays address, often through a theoretical scope, issues pertaining to gender, authority, materiality, patronage, performativity, and the senses. Before continuing, however, a critical statement must be made concerning semantics and the ascribed title of this celebrated work of art. The editors note in the introduction that some of the contributors to the volume maintain the usage of the term “Bayeux Tapestry,” while other authors, namely Madeline Caviness and Karen Eileen Overbey, have opted to… Full Review

Few institutions have influenced the course of European art or the writing of art history as decisively as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Its pulse animated the visual extravagance of Versailles, the popularity of public art exhibitions, the emergence of art criticism, and the codification of an approach to arts instruction that persists to this day. The Academy’s legacy extends even to the enduring assumption that a centralized system of arts administration distinguishes a functioning nation-state. It is no surprise, then, that the Academy should cast a strong shadow in so many histories of post-Renaissance European art… Full Review

Book artists of all times and types have taken literally the idea that we experience books as buildings. Gutenberg’s first Bible was laid out according to the architectural proportions of the golden rectangle; title pages of many early printed books featured etchings of highly wrought façades. These archways invited readers to step through a manifest “door” and into the imaginary spaces—even entire worlds—that books have always provided. More recently, both architecture and literature have been influenced by the philosophy of deconstruction, and contemporary book artists have been reconstructing the book to give new physical forms to old “volumes.” … Full Review

This densely informative and inspiring book engages two scholarly discourses: namely, the visual histories of the regions broadly known as South Asia (India, Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and the Islamic world (mainly referring to the eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Iran). By moving between these major bodies of knowledge, Finbarr B. Flood demonstrates in a more than usually compelling way that academic specialties are artificial constructs designed by and for the convenience of modern scholars; such specialties are often inadequate to the challenge of treating the fluidly mobile people and things that are, ultimately, the actual subjects/objects of… Full Review

In Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000, Charlotte Klonk traces across three urban centers—London, Berlin, and New York—changing exhibition displays in gallery interiors in relation to shifting aesthetic ideals and their public, as well as larger historical and scientific dialogues. This well-illustrated study seeks to address the phenomenon of the modern gallery space, defined as the white cube, and how it differs from “powerful alternatives” (6) that existed historically. Chapters examine the formation of the National Gallery in London; the German museum reform movement around 1900; German exhibitions in the 1920s; their influence and cooptation in the… Full Review