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In this book Douglas Nickel explores the density of meaning and cultural significance in the photographs Francis Frith (1822–1898) took during three trips to the Middle East between 1856 and 1860. Nickel evaluates Frith’s images within the context of their production and reception: a short-lived but potent mid-Victorian configuration of aesthetics, conflicts between religious faith and scientific authority, moral improvement and photographic reproduction—all marshaled in support of Orientalist ideologies. In the introduction Nickel sets out his argument for a history of photographic meaning that emphasizes relationships between photographic discourse and broader patterns of Western thought; Frith’s coordinate in this field… Full Review

As the subtitle to Imagining Identity in New Spain indicates, Magali Carrera’s study of race, lineage, and the body in casta paintings and portraiture is much more than a strict art-historical analysis. Students of Latin American art, history, literature, and colonial studies, in particular, will find this book of interest. Carrera’s interdisciplinary approach integrates art history with social and political history and examines their relation through colonial theory. As she states early on, her aim is to consider how casta paintings and portraiture visually express the social and political constructions of the inhabitants of eighteenth-century New Spain. For the informed… Full Review

Anyone familiar with Joseph Leo Koerner’s book on Albrecht Dürer, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), will approach this new work with high expectations. The earlier one offered a philosophical, yet also poetic, interpretation of one of the best-known artists of the Northern Renaissance. With its powerfully articulated thesis—that Dürer’s self-portrait of 1500 was responsible for creating “the age of art”—supported by engaging, erudite, and convincing arguments, this book is a landmark in the historiography. Together with Erwin Panofsky’s monograph on this artist, The Moment of Self-Portraiture constitutes our contemporary understanding of… Full Review

Andrew Watsky is an extraordinary detective, solving the mystery of an exquisite lacquered wooden building hidden inside another older structure on a tiny island in Japan’s largest lake. In explaining how that jewellike hall came to Chikubushima, he provides an in-depth report on aesthetics, religion, politics, and patronage in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Kyoto as well as a thorough discussion of architecture, painting, lacquer, woodwork, and metalwork of that era. Because he treats the hall and its elaborate decorations as an “ensemble,” he is able to decode what has eluded Japanese scholars and visitors for centuries. Evidence on this building is… Full Review

This is a big book—an ambitious, wide-ranging, spirited, learned, and expansive book. It will be of interest to those scholars of Italian Renaissance art especially concerned with the emergence of the modern idea of the artist. In the manner of Michael Baxandall, Martin Kemp, and David Summers, among others, the author explores the lexicon of Renaissance art. Like David Cast, Patricia Rubin, and Catherine Soussloff, Patricia Emison is concerned with the biography of the artist and its broad ramifications. In a similar vein, like Joseph Koerner, she is attentive to the artist’s self-representation. The author has read widely; her bibliography… Full Review

This book examines the use of architectural spolia in the early medieval church interiors of Rome. It begins with a narrative catalogue of some two-dozen churches and their spoliate components (focusing chiefly on columns and capitals) and then continues for another two hundred richly illustrated pages, laying out arguments both formal and interpretive about “the development, characteristics, and ideological or metaphorical significance of the new architectural practice of appropriation” (7). The author’s overarching argument is that in all cases where the fragments’ recycled status was visible in their new setting (usually by virtue of the heterogeneity of the pieces with… Full Review

This edited volume of essays attests to Classicists’ recent engagement with contemporary theory. Despite its foundations in empirical scholarship, the field of Classics has been advanced by feminist thought, along with poststructural critiques of vision and power. Not all Classicists have welcomed these developments, of course, and theory per se still rouses suspicions of trendiness and contributes to a general decline in the discipline, according to those with little patience for the challenges launched by these studies. Some literary scholars have embraced theoretical methods for the study of intertextuality, for example, although Classical art historians and archaeologists as a group… Full Review

As anyone who has ever lectured on early medieval metalwork knows, two of the most frequently questions put to the speaker are “How was it made?” and “What do we know about the lives of the smiths?” The two authors, the archaeologist and art-historian Elizabeth Coatsworth and the silversmith Michael Pinder, address these issues in this book. Its scope is precisely outlined in the subtitle: Fine Metalwork in Anglo-Saxon England: its Practice and Practitioners. There is also some discussion of style and iconography, but these are not the volume’s chief topics. Nevertheless, this book is ambitious… Full Review

From the provocative opening lines of his catalogue essay—which incorporate verses from Ecclesiastes that seem calculated to signal the extent of his commitment as much as to state his thesis—Daniel A. Siedell adopts what he clearly expects to be a besieged position on the subject of the spiritual in art. Carefully chosen, his words implicitly brace themselves for rebuttal. Describing the intent of the catalogue and the exhibition of Enrique Martínez Celaya’s rich and resonant black paintings that it documents, Siedell borrows the idea of a “wager” on meaning from the literary critic George Steiner and thus overtly acknowledges the… Full Review

If you are looking for a book to animate the scholarship on the group later known as the Pictures artists of the 1970s and 1980s, Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia by Richard Hertz could prove to be an essential text. Produced by the editor of Theories of Contemporary Art and Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture (with Norman Klein) as well as the author of the boundary-busting Desiring Machines,[1] the interviews in the volume under review provide surprising and unusual insight into an otherwise closed association of California schoolmates who transplanted themselves to New York… Full Review