Browse Recent Book Reviews

As befits a study of the appearance of documents, Jessica Berenbeim’s Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England is beautifully designed and richly illustrated. It also makes an important contribution to the study of medieval manuscripts, breaking out of traditional disciplinary categorizations to offer new insights that will be of relevance to both art historians and historians. Indeed, the form and function of medieval documents has become an interdisciplinary blind spot. Art historians are often tempted to focus on illumination, at the expense of questions about the overall design of charters or books, and sometimes ignore the… Full Review

When one thinks of architecture in the contemporary Middle East, a mosque is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Today, critics and journalists are more focused on the starchitect museums of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island or the record-setting towers of Dubai and Kuala Lumpur than on places of communal worship. In her volume The Transnational Mosque, however, Kishwar Rizvi counters this perception and contends that mosque architecture is equally a space where the sociopolitical dynamics of the region can be observed and evaluated, especially considering religion’s comeback in social discourse around the world over the past… Full Review

Few college instructors or students of art history today are likely to be unfamiliar with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expansive Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. With over one thousand thematic essays written by experts in the field, as well as more than 7,600 pages featuring artworks from the Met’s collection, the timeline is a formidable and immensely popular online resource.[i] Parallel to its larger rebranding efforts in 2016, the Met launched its new edition of the timeline, featuring a brand-new, ultra-clean interface designed by the New York–based firm CHIPS. The timeline now offers a user experience… Full Review

The Inca Empire, its art, architecture, and culture, often serves as a benchmark for scholarly and popular understanding of ancient Andean culture. For better, and often for worse, scholars are reliant upon the records, and therefore the cultural lens, of Spanish conquerors to interpret those they conquered. Each chapter of Art and Vision in the Inca Empire begins with a Spanish author’s observation written about key moments of the encounter at Cajamarca, a northern city far from Cusco, the Inca capital in the highlands, where Atawallpa was encamped on his march north to conquer those who had been resisting subjugation… Full Review

This magnificent exhibition and its corresponding catalogue, Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas, are the product of a dedicated four-year research effort that gathered scholars from Latin America and the United States. The exhibition presents approximately three hundred objects that come from fifty-seven museums in thirteen countries. In addition to the prestige of the Getty and the Met, the worldwide recognition of the conscientious scholarship of the curators Pillsbury, Potts, and Richter helped to elicit the trust of a number of international institutions. This made it possible to feature many uniquely important and often recently excavated artifacts that… Full Review

“Our task is not to invent but to continue,” Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres reputedly decreed. The sentiment takes vivid expression in his Apotheosis of Homer of 1827, in the Musée du Louvre. The painting features an immobilized assembly of icons—from Plato to Poussin, from Menander to Mozart—at the foot of the Greek bard, worshipful congregants in the church of classicism. Equating artistic greatness with subservience to ancient precedents, the work advances a vision of classicism that has remained remarkably entrenched in Western imaginations. Enter Classicisms at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. This delightfully iconoclastic… Full Review

In Drawing and the Senses: An Early Modern History, Caroline Fowler investigates how the printed drawing manual of the early modern period marked an important shift in European artistic pedagogy, not only by making drawing lessons available to a larger audience through the medium of print but by proposing a new course of study that centered upon the representation of the human sensory organs. Thus a page from a 1608 drawing manual by Odoardo Fialetti demonstrated how an artist could generate a representation of an eye through the successive addition of lines: first the eyelid, then the cornea, and… Full Review

Who owns antiquity? Opening with this deceptively simple question, Zeynep Çelik introduces the core project of her complex and wide-ranging book: to investigate the question from the origins of archaeology as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century. A historical perspective on this question then informs its continued invocation in current international debates regarding ownership of antiquities. More than merely passive witnesses of past human achievement or economic resources to be levied, “antiquities, the material artifacts of the discipline [of archaeology], became charged with meanings associated with empire building, global relations and rivalries, power struggles, definitions of national and cultural… Full Review

In June 2008, The Rossetti Archive “closed,” although the site remains accessible. What can a “closed” site reveal to scholars today? Much. As digital scholarship gains purchase in the field of art history, we should learn from pioneering projects such as The Rossetti Archive. Edited by literary scholar Jerome McGann, the archive began in 1993 at the moment of public access to the worldwide web and when McGann’s home institution, the University of Virginia, founded the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The project aimed to make the work of Victorian poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti… Full Review

From its first pages, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities asserts itself as a sophisticated, well-written, insightful, and important contribution to masculinity studies and studies of japonisme and East-West exchange. Christopher Reed guides his reader through a variety of spaces and times, including an examination of the Goncourt brothers and other japonistes in Paris in the late nineteenth century, Ernest Fenollosa and the circle of collectors and curators interested in Japan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston, and Mark Tobey and his peers in Japan and Seattle in the 1940s and 1950s. This wide-ranging grouping is diverse in terms of aesthetic values… Full Review