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The intriguing and misunderstood Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) is receiving a much-needed reappraisal in current scholarship. Michael W. Cole’s anticipated Cellini and the Principles of Sculpture is a valuable addition to this effort and indeed to Renaissance studies as a whole. Cole focuses on Cellini as an artist rather than a personality and provides a revealing study of how a sixteenth-century sculptor functioned in his larger cultural milieu in order to “understand the sculptural act” (3), as the author writes in the introduction. Taking the formal and thematic conceptualization of Cellini’s works as his subject, Cole explores the complex social and… Full Review

The Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) has been enjoying a renaissance during the past fifteen to twenty years as scholars have attempted to recover the production of European women artists. Famous in her own day for her portraits, altarpieces, and history paintings, Fontana was capable of drawing greater fees than the Carracci, and for a period she was on a par with Anthony Van Dyck and Justus Sustermans. Of all woman artists, she has the largest body of surviving work before the eighteenth century (150 works known), and her oeuvre will doubtless grow since her paintings circulated through Italy, Germany,… Full Review

Ad Quadratum: The Practical Application of Geometry in Medieval Architecture is the first publication in the Association Villard de Honnecourt (AVISTA) series, Studies in the History of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art. The goal of this series is to provide a publication venue for interdisciplinary studies in the fields of medieval art, architecture, science, and technology. The eleven essays included in the inaugural volume, edited by Nancy Y. Wu, address the geometry and systems of measure that were used to determine the design and construction of medieval buildings. United by their focus on the mathematics and metrology underlying medieval building… Full Review

The study of post-Tridentine art in Italy has, over the past two decades, enjoyed a kind of renascence, with the publication of a number of books, exhibition catalogues, and articles on—inter alia—the most important papal projects of the period, the leading historical figures of the Catholic Reform and their art patronage, Oratorian and Jesuit art of the period, the emergence of early Christian archaeology and its impact on visual culture, and Counter-Reformation art theory. These publications have gone far in illuminating the conjunction of art and post-Tridentine liturgy, new iconographies, and, most generally, the ways in which the… Full Review

When art-history students read about Greek vase-painting, it is often a struggle for them to learn the unusual names of vase shapes, of the artists who made them, and of the mythological figures and stories represented on the vessels. Indeed, many surveys of Greek art concentrate on issues of chronology, style, and typology, a necessity for a body of material that has little in the way of external documentation. What is often lost in this process is an appreciation for the cultural and social context that produced the vases, that these works of art are also artifacts that were part… Full Review

Few statues are more familiar to students of Greek art than the korai from the Athenian Acropolis. From this important study of the korai and other Acropolis votive statues of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., we learn that we do not know them as well as we thought. Catherine M. Keesling takes a rigorously contextual approach to the Acropolis dedications, considering not only the statues themselves but also their inscribed bases and evidence for bronze dedications on the Acropolis, now lost, in an attempt to “rebuild on paper what the Persian invaders destroyed” (xiv). In… Full Review

Richard Ettinghausen once wrote of the Indian art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947): “[t]here are few scholars … whose publications cover a wider range …[:] philosophy, metaphysics, religion, iconography, Indian literature and arts, Islamic art, medieval art, music, geology, and, especially, the place of art in society” (Ars Islamica 9 (1942): 125). With the help of Coomaraswamy himself, Helen Ladd compiled a partial bibliography of his work in that same issue. Roger Lipsey published two volumes of Coomaraswamy’s Selected Papers and a biography in the Bollingen Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) that include a list of Coomaraswamy’s publications… Full Review

Jane Hawkes has become one of the leading iconographers of Insular, more particularly Anglo-Saxon sculpture, and the volume under review does nothing to disappoint. The Sandbach Crosses: Sign and Significance in Anglo-Saxon Sculpture clearly demonstrates the depth of Insular scholarship from the last twenty-five years, something of which the art-historical establishment remains willfully oblivious. Introductory textbooks present Insular art as though nothing had been written since Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy in 1908, while Fred Orton’s blithe assumption that theory conquers all insults those who sweated interdisciplinary blood for years to reach a deeper understanding. Insular art demands attention to… Full Review

A growing literature has emerged describing and analyzing the production and reception of art objects as well as the institutions supporting artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recent book, the published version of Thomas Schmitz’s 1997 doctoral dissertation (University of Düsseldorf), is a thoroughly researched and cogently analyzed account of one of Germany’s unique institutions, the Kunstvereine (art unions). Additionally, he discusses the relationship of Kunstvereine to issues of class identity and cultural self-representation. He has no aesthetic or ideological ax to grind and therefore quite objectively discusses the art unions’ major features, including their strengths and weaknesses… Full Review

This informative and elegantly illustrated catalogue appeared in association with the exhibition Magnificenza! The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (in Italy, L’ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l’arte a Firenze, 1537–1631). The impressive scope of the catalogue covers works of art produced during the reigns of four Medici Grand Dukes: Cosimo I (r. 1537–74), Francesco I (r. 1574–87), Ferdinando I (r. 1587–1609), and Cosimo II (r. 1609–31). The curators of the exhibition, Marco Chiarini (Scientific Exhibition Commissioner for Italy, Florence), Alan P. Darr (Detroit Institute of Arts), and Larry J. Feinberg (Art Institute of Chicago), collaborated… Full Review