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In the opening sentence of her book, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age, Mia Mochizuki reminds us that we often see what we expect to see; consequently, we often readily overlook the unexpected, even when it is right in front of us. The decoration of Dutch Reformed churches, for instance, is typically viewed merely in terms of iconoclastic negation, leaving existing Protestant imagery unnoticed. Although numerous Catholic objects were destroyed in the Protestant war against idols, this did not stop Calvinists from generating new ecclesiastical images, ones that they could call their… Full Review

In Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, Michaela Giebelhausen charts the transformations of religious painting and the “troubled emergence of a unique form of naturalistic religious painting” (2) between the 1840s and the 1860s. Her analysis draws on two types of Victorian text: theories of history painting and biblical criticism. Both were marked by substantial controversies in the decades under investigation and ultimately circled around one unsettling question: What is the nature and reality of the divine? At stake was the very essence of Christianity, and the debates were accordingly fierce. In the battle over the… Full Review

How should we identify our period style? Twenty years ago, that question would have been easy to answer: we are postmodernists. But these days postmodernism is finished—whether because too many competing commentators killed the concept, or because it was too closely linked to modernism, or because we in the early twenty-first century require our own period style. And so the goal of the sequence of essays given at a University of Pittsburgh-sponsored conference during the 2004 Carnegie International and collected in Antinomies of Art and Culture is to offer a way of identifying the characteristic features of art made today… Full Review

Most historians of Japanese art are likely familiar with the generous exhibition and publication grants given by the Blakemore Foundation. Older print scholars and collectors may have shopped in the 1960s and 1970s at the Franell Gallery in Tokyo, or used the book Who’s Who in Modern Japanese Prints, published by Weatherhill in 1975. Some may have heard that the person behind these diverse enterprises was a woman named Frances Blakemore. Before the publication of Michiyo Morioka’s biography, however, it is unlikely that anyone knew much about the fascinating life and artistic career of Frances Wismer Baker Blakemore (1906–1997)… Full Review

Who wouldn’t want to be an art historian? We spend our days looking at and thinking about beautiful and interesting things, confronting the past and present through works made by individuals, groups, tribes, nations. In museums, libraries, and on the internet, we encounter images from humanity’s earliest history and works that were made yesterday. In everyday life, we are barraged with the visual evidence of human creativity, from vernacular architecture to the arts of fashion and merchandising. We want to probe the motivations of those who created each work and understand the impact each had at the time of its… Full Review

In 2001 the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered as the very last work in its large, enormously popular exhibition Vermeer and the Delft School a small painting of a young woman seated at a virginal (a keyboard instrument of the seventeenth century). Presented without fanfare by curator Walter Liedtke and not included in the catalogue, this picture was familiar to specialist scholars: as the final image in Lawrence Gowing’s seminal 1952 monograph on Vermeer, the work had claims to authenticity, but has since encountered doubts. On public view for the first time in half a century, this tiny work sparked… Full Review

Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona open their fascinating book on the Arena Chapel by citing both Dante’s famous description in the Inferno of the notorious usurer Reginaldo Scrovegni, and the epitaph from the tomb of his son Enrico (d. 1336), who was buried in the Arena Chapel—the chapel in which Giotto, commissioned by Enrico just after 1302, painted in fresco events from the lives of Anna, Joachim, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, along with a monumental Last Judgment. Derbes and Sandona highlight the radically different opinions offered by these two sources about the fate of usurers in the Scrovegni… Full Review

In the field of Japanese woodblock prints, monographs on single artists, as opposed to catalogues, by academically trained authors—rather than collectors or dealers—are still a relative novelty: Julie Nelson Davis’s is only the third, all appearing in the last decade. But hers has significantly raised the bar. Her study is meticulously researched and documented and has a clear and well-framed thesis and approach. She benefits, of course, from the superlative catalogue by Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark for the 1995 Utamaro retrospective at the British Museum (Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, London: British… Full Review

In 2006, Tate Britain, in collaboration with the Louvre, organized a major exhibition of William Hogarth’s work which travelled to Paris and Barcelona. The exhibition was a hit at the Tate, but its success in drawing both crowds and critical attention to this canonically English artist among continental audiences was unprecedented. Co-curators Mark Hallett and Christine Riding’s accompanying catalogue, Hogarth, reflects the dual purpose of many Tate catalogues, providing a summa of recent research in the fertile field of Hogarth studies for academically inclined readers, while serving as an accessible introduction to the artist for a wider audience, including… Full Review

In an unpublished 1966 lecture on the centennial of Aby Warburg’s birth, Max Adolph, Aby’s only son and at one time his designated successor as director of the Warburg Library, remarked that his father had embodied like no other the virtue Chancellor Bismarck sorely missed in his fellow citizens, namely, Zivilcourage: “Had there been more Germans like this German Jew, we might have been spared the horrors of Nazism and our second war.” The chief merit of Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism, first published in Germany in 1998, is to have drawn renewed attention to this side of Warburg’s… Full Review