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The last book of wide reputation written on Rembrandt in English and intended for a general audience was Christopher White's Rembrandt in 1984. Given the rate of change in the world of scholarship, the sixteen years that separate White's and Mariët Westermann's books counts as a generation. Thus, Westermann's book has been widely anticipated as a text that could fulfill many roles—an assigned textbook for students in art history courses, an accessible introduction to the artist for laypeople, and a quick refresher for art historians. The book does not disappoint any expectations, for it satisfies all of… Full Review

Historically, self-portraiture has been a problematic genre for many artists because of the necessity both to reveal and to conceal. For this reason, it can tell us things about artists that we otherwise would not know. The genre also provides scholars with a broader context for speculation about artists' personal lives, their creative motivations, professional ambitions, and psychological fears. John J. Ciofalo's book on Goya's self-portraits gives admirable scope for scholarly speculation from a highly informed perspective. The book is admirably researched, exceptionally well written, and profoundly provocative. Indeed, many of the author's readings of Goya's eternally fascinating paintings will… Full Review

Much has been written about the place of women in male-dominated professions, but systematic research and documentation of the architectural and design professions have been few and far between, with most such publications covering the subject in the United States and Western Europe. Annmarie Adams and Petra Tancred's 'Designing Women': Gender and the Architectural Profession is thus a welcome addition that focuses on a Canadian context. In more than one way, it is a unique contribution, going well beyond highlighting concepts of restriction and marginalization imposed on women's professional lives by the architectural profession. The book,… Full Review

Like their European counterparts, first-generation modernists in the United States depended on the word—in manifestoes, catalog essays, and "little magazines"—to advocate and advance their art. The Alfred Stieglitz circle, for instance, enlisted the journal Camera Work and the critical writing of Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld to explicate their aesthetic goals to a public in need of instruction. This art movement was, moreover, engaged with literary modernism, as writers were prominent figures within its ranks. Camera Work published the early work of Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams and D.H. Lawrence were admired by the Stieglitz group and in turn… Full Review

Prepared for an exhibition that originated at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, this catalogue richly illustrates and analyzes the multivalent visual culture of American Orientalism from the post-Civil War Holy Land paintings of Frederic Church to the Hollywood movie celebrity Rudolph Valentino, who starred in The Sheik (1921). The catalogue comprises five interpretive essays by scholars from different disciplines as well as contextually detailed catalogue entries for a diverse array of art objects and artifacts, including paintings and the decorative arts, advertising, photography, film, fashions, and documentary ephemera. Curator and catalogue editor Holly Edwards writes… Full Review

In his sustained and enlightening meditation on Michelangelo and the figure of the dead Christ, Alexander Nagel has persuasively repositioned the artist’s work within a climate of historicism and reform. He has also achieved much more than this. Long before Vasari, as Nagel reminds us, artists had been mindful of art’s own history. Their definition of change—whether stylistic or iconographic—and their attitude toward it, embodied the highest kind of self-consciousness. With respect to art in the High Renaissance, Nagel wishes to revise the seasoned art-historical narrative in which change, conceived as innovation, assumes the nature of an identifying… Full Review

Dürer to Veronese is the second out of a series of four planned volumes exploring the function, meaning, and making of European paintings in the collection of the National Gallery, London. Unlike the first volume, Giotto to Dürer, covering two hundred and fifty years of pictorial production and published in 1991, the present volume focuses upon one century alone and does not include separate entries on individual paintings. The new book, written by the restorer Jill Dunkerton; the curator of early Netherlandish, German, and British painting, Susan Foister; and the Keeper and Clore curator of Renaissance Art, Nicholas… Full Review

Guy Delmarcel's recent book is a survey of tapestries produced in what is now Belgium and Northern France from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Flemish Tapestries is a luxuriously illustrated book, including numerous tapestries which have not been reproduced previously. Published almost simultaneously in French, Dutch, and English, the book was financed by the Ministry of Flemish Culture. In contrast to some of his earlier specialized and minutely documented contributions to tapestry history (among many others, his study with Clifford M. Brown, Tapestries for the Courts of Federico II, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzago: 1522-1563, or his catalogue with… Full Review

In his new book, Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael, Walter Gibson takes the reader on an extensive wandeling that explores the diverse pleasures the seventeenth-century Dutch took in from images of their own familiar countryside. The book spans from the sixteenth-century "origins" of the "rustic" landscape in Antwerp to late seventeenth-century discussions of the picturesque, but developments associated with Haarlem are central. In the words of the author, "The rustic landscape born in Antwerp, came of age in Haarlem." The subject—rustic landscape—is very broadly conceived, and Gibson draws on a rich trove of historical evidence… Full Review

A cold, wintry, and grey afternoon in London might not be the best environment to begin thinking about whether and how beauty matters, or about what are the matters that form our definitions of Beauty. However, the eerie bleakness of the weather around me coincided with the need initially to consider one form of reaction to beauty: namely, our differing responses and reactions to nature. This question was considered in Marcia M. Eaton's discussion of "Kantian and Contextual Beauty." When she considers her own admiration for a flower growing on the banks of a lake, its purple form against the… Full Review