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The Art Historian CD-ROM set is designed to supplement art history courses. This review addresses questions about function and educational value rather than details of interpretation or information. How does the product enhance learning beyond slide lectures or standard textbooks? How does the CD-ROM take advantage of digital technologies to present art-historical material? Can faculty construct digital lectures from the CD? How easy is the software to use? Scope A comprehensive CD set that paralleled the scope and depth of textbooks would serve the needs of students and instructors. Students could purchase the CD instead and… Full Review

In The Color of Angels, Constance Classen celebrates the richness of all that is unseen. More this-worldly than its title suggests, the book explores how the so-called "lower" senses (smell, touch, and taste) have shaped the religious and cultural imagination. Thus, Classen combines what one might call a "hidden history" of the other senses in European culture with a proposal for a broader sensory experience of the plastic arts. As with all hidden histories, there are culprits; and in this case the villain is modern Western culture's love affair with all that is visual, from advertising and television to the… Full Review

Ingrid Rowland's new book is an ambitious attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of cultural developments in Rome in the years around 1500. Her principal focus is humanism—antiquarian scholarship and Latin rhetoric—but she is able to integrate this recondite material with a consideration of politics at the papal court, the world of finance, and the visual arts. All this is set, in turn, against the turbulent, colorful background of everyday life. Rowland combines impressively wide-ranging erudition with a lively prose style, and the result is wonderfully readable: the way in which high scholarship is seasoned with amusing anecdote is reminiscent… Full Review

John Sallis is a philosopher whose extensive writing has focused on figures in the "continental" tradition, such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. In an earlier book, Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), he wrote of the artistic power of stone, with reference to several of these thinkers, using them as voices to explore such forms as Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, Gothic cathedrals, and the Jewish cemetery in Prague. In Shades Sallis continues to draw especially on Hegel and Heidegger, whose thought offers constant points of reference in Stone. This book will probably be of most immediate interest to… Full Review

Those familiar with Thames & Hudson's World of Art series can predict the tone and format of this volume, which is a pioneering effort worthy of considerable attention and praise. It is certainly no easy task to codify and condense a region as complex and scattered as the Caribbean. The author, Veerle Poupeye (according to the Thames & Hudson publicity blurb) is a Jamaican-based art historian, critic, and curator, trained in Belgium. I wish I knew how much fieldwork and archival work the author accomplished, doing actual interviews rather than relying on the cited sources. This might help explain the… Full Review

Over the course of the modern era, literary representations of the city stretch far beyond the physical and social fabric of cities. Poetry and prose build on the architectural and commerical contours of urbanity, at times outfitting streets in tuxedos, at other times paring them into rotten furrows. Take the case of London, the city in the world possessed of perhaps the most extensive literary representations. William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot both wrote powerful and disturbing descriptions that reconfigure the vast changes taking place in London during its long engagement with modernity and the Industrial Revolution. In Wordsworth's The… Full Review

On September 3, 1889, James McNeill Whistler wrote a letter from Amsterdam to the Fine Arts Society in London describing, with an undercurrent of Whistlerian sarcasm, his most recent artistic activity: "I find myself doing far finer work than any I have hitherto produced—and the subjects appeal to me most sympathetically—which is all important. . . . I have begun etchings here—that already give me great satisfaction—I shall therefore go on, and I will produce new plates—of various sizes—The beauty and importance of these plates you can only estimate from your knowledge of my care for my own reputation… Full Review

The lively ceramic traditions of ancient West Mexico are well-known: bold, painted warriors, women, and animals, including the famous Colima dogs; small painted house models and village scenes in which humans feast, play ball, and dance. Much of this work was created in the era between 200 B.C. and 300 A.D., the Late Formative phase of Mesoamerican cultural history. Although visually familiar, this work has never been well understood. It has seldom been studied on its own terms, but seen merely as a pale country cousin to the larger-scale visual traditions of the Maya, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican "high cultures."… Full Review

In this study, Mary Warner Blanchard re-reads the American aesthetic movement as a broad-based, popular enterprise that produced a vibrant, female, public culture through the medium of the decorative arts. Her goal is to rescue important "female visionaries" of the movement from the oblivion that befell them through most of the twentieth century. (pp. xiv-xv) Blanchard selects four fascinating and underrated figures for reevaluation: textile designer Candace Thurber Wheeler, poet Celia Thaxter, potter Mary Louise McLaughlin, and art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer. Each of these women richly deserves study, and Blanchard has made a substantial contribution in giving them… Full Review

Among European publishers of books on environmental art, largely American, there seems to be a consensus that the representation of projects encompassing such extensive terrain demands oversize display. The sizes of printed pages, illustrations, and often fonts, are jumbo, sheets are thick, pages in great number, overall, the tomes hefty. Thus Gilles Tiberghien's Land Art, published by Editions Carres, Paris, in 1993, and in an English translation by Princeton Architectural Press in 1995, measured 12 by 10.5 inches and weighed five pounds. Now weighing in at four pounds (back pages are in lighter, uncoated stock), identical height and just a… Full Review