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The beautifully produced catalogue of the exhibition that opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and will have its second venue at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is devoted to the re-evaluation of the art of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, making known to a wider public the work of artists that preceded the great flowering of Spanish painting in its Golden Age, specifically during the period between the death of Philip III’s father, at the end of the sixteenth century, and the accession to the throne of his son, Philip IV, in 1621… Full Review

This is an excellent book. Its virtues are that it offers an overview of the painting, sculpture, architecture, and luxury arts of Iberia; furthermore, it is highly reliable. Between the footnotes and the bibliography, it contains a trustworthy list of existing publications on Spanish and Portuguese art, a list that registers the history of Iberia with depth and balanced judgment. For example, Trusted does not carelessly assert that in the sixteenth century Muslims fled Spain for the Americas, where they created Islamic-derived ceilings, tiles, leather hangings, and carpets. Instead she wisely notes that the artists who created these items may… Full Review

Federico Zuccaro documented the troubled early life, apprenticeships, and rise to fame of his older brother, Taddeo, in a series of twenty drawings acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1999 from Christie’s New York. An exhibition of these drawings, created in the 1590s, coincided with the publication of this book in which the drawings and accompanying poems are illustrated and placed in the historical and artistic context of sixteenth-century Rome. Two major themes recur throughout the volume. One is the prominence of not only Taddeo (1529–1566) as a central player among Raphael, Michelangelo, and Polidoro da Caravaggio in… Full Review

There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (a) those who look deeply at the artifacts' formal qualities (design, shape, iconic references . . .), and (b) those who look at how the artifacts are used (circulated, displayed, collected, narrated . . .). Let's try again. There are two kinds of anthropologists of art: (i) those who focus on relatively autonomous material objects (on the analogy of painting and sculpture), and (ii) those who focus on understanding aesthetics, cosmologies, and sensibilities, which generally works against imagining objects as autonomous. Hmmm. There are two further camps: (1) those who believe the… Full Review

There are far too few general books available on topics in Japanese art, and those who are intrepid enough to write them are insufficiently applauded for the difficult task. Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art, 1600–2005 is an excellent example of an overview of Japanese Buddhist art done exceedingly well. It does a laudable job of surveying Japanese Buddhist arts from the early modern period continuing into the present, discussing an important body of visual materials that until now has been largely overlooked. The intention of the book, Patricia Graham states, is to “suggest new directions for research and… Full Review

Scholarly texts, from David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990) to Carl Schorske’s Fin-De-Siecle Vienna (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), have played a pivotal role in theorizing culture, and specifically art, as a means by which to withstand and overcome the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernity in the West. In the past decade, the field of East Asian Studies has found itself undergoing a much-needed methodological shift whereby the intersection between culture, the economy, and nationalist politics is carefully analyzed. Through works that weave historical narratives with critical theory, such as Harry Harootunian’s Overcome by Modernity… Full Review

This edited anthology is the result of a symposium held in Chicago in 2005. It includes seven essays that “explore how and why people bought, sold, donated, and received works of art in the Edo period (1600–1868)” (i). The book is a much-needed addition to the growing literature on collecting and material culture in early modern Japan. The essays deal mainly with the acquisition of prints and paintings, but omit other collecting practices entirely. For example, the volume’s lack of attention to one of Japan’s most important cultural practices—the ritual culture of tea (chanoyu)—is astonishing, as tea was… Full Review

Things—from soap bubbles to works of art—have a voice of their own. This is the audacious claim of a collection of essays that brings together distinguished scholars in the history of science and art history. The contributors insist that “things,” the objects that surround us, are endowed with agency that goes unnoticed because of our compulsion to fill the world with meaning. In our concern to make sense of our surroundings we fail to notice that we are not the only ones responsible for shaping the order we impose on the world. Things cry out for our attention and decisively… Full Review

These two publications represent opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to art history today and are clearly intended for different audiences. While Maria Loh approaches Padovanino’s “remaking” of Titian’s compositions in the early seventeenth century with the stated goal of “wrenching the writing of art history from a discourse that secures privileged seating for its ‘great masters’” (14), Peter Humphrey’s volume is the first in a series projected by Ludion called the “Classical Art Series,” with forthcoming volumes on Bruegel, Vermeer, Velasquez, and Van Eyck. Loh’s focus is on copies or repetitions (of compositions by Titian and his contemporaries)… Full Review

When describing The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life (1855) in a letter to a friend, Gustave Courbet notoriously quipped, “It’s pretty mysterious. Good luck to anyone who can make it out!” Art historians have long grappled with the ambiguities of Courbet’s oeuvre, and recent books by Linda Nochlin and Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, as well as an online publication by the Getty Museum, demonstrate the ever-present allure of works that in spite of many fine formal, socio-historical, and psychoanalytical analyses continue to exude an aura of mystery. Both Nochlin and Chu… Full Review