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Diane Wolfthal’s Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives is a difficult and necessary book to read; indeed, this should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the visual cultures of Western traditions. The author examines a vast body of work through a feminist lens to explore the realities of rape for women—as well as for men—in late medieval and early modern Europe. Informed by her own feminist convictions and a comprehensive knowledge of the material, Wolfthal aims “to recapture the muted or silenced voices of the rape victims, to see the violation from their point of… Full Review

In St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology, Jeffrey Hamburger investigates the complex relationships forged in the later Middle Ages among art, mysticism, and visionary experience. In so doing, he continues the stimulating work he began in earlier, groundbreaking studies such as The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland ca. 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998). The specific task Hamburger sets for himself in this newest effort is to… Full Review

Women Who Ruled: Queens, Goddesses, Amazons in Renaissance and Baroque Art contributes to the growing body of interdisciplinary research on women’s power in early modern Europe (or gender and power, more broadly), in practice and in imagery. Written to accompany an exhibition organized by the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the book features an introduction and four topical essays by a cadre of scholars who represent different disciplinary approaches. Groups of images, accompanied by captions and brief comments, follow each essay. Appropriately acknowledging the gender ideologies affecting women and their representation in various cultural forms during this period, Women… Full Review

Feminist art history is now a well-established subfield of Western art history, but until quite recently those studying gender in pre-Columbian art had to rely on a slim bibliography. Today, several contributions focusing on the pre-Columbian and early colonial world have appeared, including one on women throughout the ancient Americas (Karen Bruhns and Karen Stothert, Women in Ancient America [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999]), another on gender in Mesoamerica (Rosemary Joyce, Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000]), and two volumes on Maya women (Traci Ardren, ed., Ancient Maya Women [Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira… Full Review

Yet another Count. After Balthus (Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola by his own naming), we read that Wolfgang Paalen called himself “Count von Paalen” before selling his title in an impoverished moment in Paris. According to Amy Winter, Paalen—Count or not—authored the supposed monograph about himself in 1946, said to be by one Gustav Regler. That is already an obfuscation. Here is the story. In his autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, Regler enthuses in no uncertain terms about the artist: I went to his studio to look at his pictures. There was something of Moby Dick in the lofty … Full Review

For many American art historians, Spain’s fifteenth century is a murky period better known for its religious oppression and explosive colonialism than for its manuscripts. With Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo: The Mendoza and the Iglesia Primada, Lynette M. F. Bosch introduces Anglophone readers to the era through an assiduously detailed study of two-dozen illuminated liturgical manuscripts produced in fifteenth-century Toledo. Until now, these lavishly decorated books, commissioned between 1446 and 1495 by the prominent Toledan prelates Archbishop Alfonso Carillo y Acuña and Cardinal-Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza, have been only scantily published and were available almost… Full Review

“Unless our reading takes us far away from the pictures, it will not lead us properly back to them.” So Edgar Wind (1900–1971) reflected in an early and abandoned draft of his introduction to Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). Wind aptly encapsulated his method, which, it is sometimes forgotten, derived much of its Olympian energy and original character from deep attention to the language of form. “Iconography,” he continued in his draft, “is nothing if not what Focillon regretfully called un détour. The divergences should be pursued, the convergences distrusted… Full Review

Xu Bing is arguably the contemporary Chinese artist best known to audiences outside of China. Winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and the subject of several one-person shows at small museums around the country, he has received worldwide recognition and has been the subject of several critical essays. Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing brought together several periods of the artist’s work for the first time in a major American museum exhibition. Like many Chinese artists living and working in a postmodern, global art world, Xu has had to engage with the question of shifting and multiple audiences for… Full Review

This book is the product of two interconnected developments. First, contemporary Mexican artists moving in the international art world are enjoying a lot of success, and while Mexican art is now no longer represented solely by the muralists, figures such as Santiago Sierra, Carlos Amorales, Minerva Cuevas, and Gabriel Kuri are reinventing the avant-garde of social intervention. This development has been paralleled in art history in Mexico by the emergence of a socially engaged, contextualizing approach. Some of this new work has been “social art history” based on thorough research of primary sources, but central to it all… Full Review

Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe hold an exceptional status as two of the most prominent figures in twentieth-century American art. Notwithstanding the shared distinction of their canonical positions, their art could not be more different. While Hopper produced striking iconic images of the American scene, O’Keeffe’s paintings are associated with the modernist, abstracted aesthetics of the first American avant-garde. In their own day, the artists themselves moved in distinct professional circles that did not overlap. Yet when viewed comparatively, Hopper and O’Keeffe’s images exhibit some surprising thematic commonalities, particularly concerning issues of gender and embodiment, intimacy… Full Review