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The collecting practices of Martinique-born Marie-Josèphe-Rose de Tascher de Pagerie might have held little art-historical significance were it not for her second marriage, in 1796 at the age of thirty three, to General Napoléon Bonaparte. Instead it might be argued, as Eleanor DeLorme has in Joséphine and the Arts of the Empire, that Joséphine’s collecting practices, or more specifically her personal taste, shaped what has come to be known as Empire style. DeLorme is certainly no stranger to her subject, having published, among other things, the biography Joséphine: Napoléon’s Incomparable Empress (New York: Harry N. Abrams) in 2002. In… Full Review

In her essay for the monumental catalogue accompanying the exhibition The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, Clara Bargellini writes, “The mere thought of attempting to comprehend in some sort of unified way all of the art, or even only the painting of colonial Latin America, provokes a sense of exhaustion” (322). Whereas most recent exhibitions of colonial art have taken what curator Joseph Rishel calls a “vertical” approach by focusing on a single nation, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue aim for horizontal coverage, addressing the Spanish viceroyalties and the Portuguese colony of Brazil. The material likewise transcends boundaries… Full Review

Some of the most perplexing problems in the history of the reception and recovering of antiquity come down to timing and silence. Why, for instance, did the Parthenon not solicit more description from Vitruvius or Pausanias? Why did the temples of Magna Graecia, especially those at Paestum, attract so little attention before the 1760s? Why was it not until the nineteenth century that people could accept the idea of a painted classical temple? Why, moreover, did James “Athenian” Stuart cling to such sun-bleached ideals even after he himself had observed the presence of pigment on ancient structures? In terms of… Full Review

This is a grand work by a distinguished scholar in the field of aesthetics, and as such, deserves the attention of art historians, theorists, and artists in addition to the book’s more predictable audience of philosophers. The scope of the phrase “world of art” is ambitious and extensive: Nehamas is as comfortable assessing ancient Greek art as he is rubbing elbows with the eighteenth-century man of taste, theorizing the gaze of Manet’s Olympia, and judging John Currin’s women to be beautiful bodies in ugly paintings. Historical highlights are amply celebrated as Nehamas explores the place of beauty in… Full Review

In 2006 Yale University Press published an English translation of Manfredo Tafuri’s last book—fourteen years after the Italian original and twelve years after the death of its author. Why? Admittedly Tafuri (Rome, 1935–Venice, 1994) was both famous and controversial in the Anglo-Saxon world. Famous because of the incredibly wide range of his knowledge and his refined scholarship, controversial because of his Marxist views and his preference for urban development over individual works of architecture. In Europe Tafuri was mainly known as a notoriously “difficult” author whose theoretical and historical essays were equally dark and impenetrable. Said an Italian architect: “Tafuri… Full Review

John Pedley has conceived Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World as a college-level introduction to Greek sanctuaries and their place in ancient Greek society. Particular emphasis is given to the natural and built appearance of sanctuaries, to the works of visual arts populating those spaces, to the visual experiences of visitors, to the ritual activities, and to the transformations of sanctuaries over time, from their origins up to the present. After outlining the main themes of the book, Pedley sketches a general introduction to the nature and development of sanctuaries from the Geometric period to the… Full Review

Le rocaille, le goût pittoresque, le petit goût, le goût moderne. During the eighteenth century these terms were used in equal measure to describe artistic production now categorized as rococo, a locution perhaps most famously coined in the “Van Loo, Pompadour, rococo” rallying cry of the students of Jacques-Louis David. Indeed just as the designation rococo was imposed upon the visual culture of an earlier era by those who later rejected its charms, so too was its theorization completed by its detractors, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alike. In titling her book Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher… Full Review

The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Vaast at Arras was founded in the mid-seventh century and dedicated to the first bishop of the combined dioceses of Arras and Cambrai, Vedastus (d. 540). Its early years are obscure, but it enjoyed a certain flowering in the Carolingian period, illustrated by the abbacy of Rado (808–815), whose name has been tentatively associated with the production of a modestly illuminated pandect Bible, now preserved in Vienna (ÖNB lat. 1190). In late Carolingian times, the Franco-Saxon style of book illumination seems to have held sway at Saint-Vaast, though it was perhaps not the principal center from… Full Review

Something we call “the image” flickers oddly in and out of art history. Sometimes it appears at what we often take to be the margins of the discipline—it can, for example, seem definitive of visual culture after “the end of art” or prior to “the era of art.” When it appears in these places, it can suggest the need to redefine art history in ways that not only remove explicit art—aesthetic art, art from the Renaissance through some moment of the recent past—from the center of the field but that tend also to transform what we’ve taken as importantly historical… Full Review

The cover of Phoenix: 21st Century City invites the viewer to fly into the Valley of the Sun: PHX is printed in large letters against a blue sky and a plane is visible at a distance. One’s introduction to Phoenix continues inside the cover with a series of boldly cropped photographs of upscale shopping centers, car dealerships, desert cacti, hipster skateboarders in front of the futuristic Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse, and classic 1960s neon signs advertising laundromats, car dealerships, and florists. The photographs are linked together by swooping, aerodynamic white lines. The bold layout continues inside. The… Full Review