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Given the strong religious tenor of the last two decades of culture wars and the expansion of the "new art history" into visual culture, it seemed to be only a matter of time before the scholarly field took on the artifacts of religion for the work of academic debate and interpretation. In the preface to their fine anthology, editors David Morgan and Sally M. Promey point to a relatively widespread lack of scholarly discussion of religious imagery by North American art historians and religious historians alike. While the former has seen the onslaught of ideology and belief as eclipsing aesthetic… Full Review

Although more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), the ability of that groundbreaking study to stimulate new ways of considering monumental works of Renaissance culture has hardly diminished. Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art is a collection of essays inspired by Greenblatt's work that attempts to extend his concept of literary self-fashioning to a wide array of examples in the visual arts. Fashioning Identities contains fifteen essays: the introductory first chapter by Joanna Woods-Marsden, which provides both a summary of and… Full Review

The current explosion of critical and art-historical writing on "Conceptual Art," like the discursive production of "postmodernism" of the 1980s and early 1990s that preceded it, posits that the art production of a particular group of artists, by means of critical attack and strategic engagement, extended the development of visual modernism into what has been termed a "critical postmodernism" of the late twentieth century. Therefore, we are at this moment witnesses to the slow process of canonization that often characterizes the discourse of art history. It comes chronologically on the heels of American and European exhibitions that have attempted to… Full Review

This book advertises itself as a simple republication of the book-length essay, "Leonardo's Last Supper," that first appeared in the Art Quarterly in 1973 (Art Quarterly 36, no. 4, 1973: 297–410). Steinberg interlards the introduction with italicized passages; the first mentions Jonathan Crary's invitation, in 1997, to republish the essay as a book, and another begins: "At this point, I might as well reprint the rest" (13). But the book is far from a reprint: The majority of paragraphs are revised, there are wholly new pages, the notes altered and the chapters renumbered and rearranged, and the catalogue of… Full Review

Introducing himself as an "ardent searcher after the purest form in art," a young Parisian artist, Robert Pouyaud, wrote in 1924 to the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes, asking him to correct the "error" of his art education. Gleizes responded by inviting Pouyaud to join in the collective exploration of his compositional exercises with his two Irish pupils, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett. Thus commenced a master-disciple relationship that soon had other consequences. In 1927, Pouyaud was a founding member of Moly-Sabata, a quasimonastic, rural art community established by Gleizes to unite urban artists with the soil. As Peter Brooke observes… Full Review

"The great advantage of a hotel," states the waiter in George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell, "is that it's a refuge from home life." In the 1950s, however, as an increasingly wealthy American middle class began to travel a world whose boundaries were largely defined by the Cold War, hotels could find considerable advantages in open links to the familiarity of home life. Consider, for example, the seventeen massive Hilton hotels built on foreign soil between 1949 and 1966. By piping ice water into each air-conditioned room, by serving milkshakes at a lobby soda fountain, or by setting… Full Review

While broad art-historical interest in the conditions of artistic production and the use of specific materials can now be said to date back more than a generation, there exists a rich body of literature describing detailed artistic practices that is much older still. Indeed, hundreds of surviving medieval manuscripts contain instructions, sometimes hasty and at other times meticulously detailed, relating to the preparation of pigments, inks, and varnishes. And yet, as Mark Clarke notes in this useful volume, there is no extant index that fully surveys the technologies of medieval painting, illumination, and related crafts. His aim is to fill… Full Review

Readers glancing at Erica Cruikshank Dodd's book on the frescoes in the Syrian Monastery of Moses the Ethiopian will not find ready evidence of the "new art history." Unfashionable terms like "influence" and "Oriental" abound, and nowhere does one come across references to "the gaze" or the construction of gender. More careful examination, however, will soon show that Dodd indeed participates in current debates about the visual culture of the Mediterranean in the period of the Crusades. She does so in two principal ways: by bringing to scholarly attention a virtually unknown painted church program from Muslim-controlled Syria, and by… Full Review

For those unfortunate enough to have missed the handsomely mounted Correggio and Parmigianino drawings exhibition, a collaborative effort by the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its equally handsome accompanying catalogue conveys its pleasures in that first virtual reality--a slim, illustrated book to be opened and examined at leisure. Although most, if not all, of the drawings on view in the exhibition and reproduced in its catalogue have been previously exhibited and published, the show provided opportunities to encounter afresh "old friends" looking fit, and I found myself as engaged as the gaggle of middle-school children a few… Full Review

The late seventeenth-century series of paintings of the Corpus Christi procession in colonial Cuzco, Peru, housed at the Archbishop's Museum of Religious Art in that city, appears at first sight to be an ethnohistorian's dream. Portraying the devotees of Cuzco's indigenous parishes in procession with their patron saints, these canvases depict individuals in Inka dress, suggesting their exceptional value as ethnographic documents of the pre-Columbian past. In fact, such use of colonial visual materials has been the rule among Andeanists from most disciplinary backgrounds. Carolyn Dean has, however, forced us to rethink the significance of colonial Peruvian art in her… Full Review