Recently Published Reviews

The anamorphic skull that cuts an unsettling path across the foreground of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1533 double portrait, The Ambassadors, has struck modern interpreters of the painting as a fundamental disruption of the ordered world of the two young men portrayed amid the books and instruments of liberal learning. For Jacques Lacan, the skull signifies the annihilation of the Cartesian subject. For those more inclined to historical interpretation, it signifies the undoing of a confident Renaissance humanism. Against perspectival coherence, the skull offers fragmentation; against a dream of comprehensive knowledge, it offers a melancholy reminder of death. In… Full Review

Andrea del Verrocchio is generally overshadowed by his famous pupils—particularly Leonardo da Vinci—a trend that began with Giorgio Vasari’s negative treatment of the older master in his book Lives of the Artists (first published in 1550). In response to this characterization, Christina Neilson seeks to “reassess Verrocchio’s accomplishments” in her book, Practice and Theory in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Verrocchio and the Epistemology of Making Art (9). By examining Verrocchio’s unusual practices of making and their intended meanings, Neilson convincingly situates him as one of the most important sculptors working between the eras of Donatello and Michelangelo. The author presents… Full Review

In the last few decades, scholars have dedicated a great deal of effort to documenting and analyzing the impact of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist planning ideologies throughout the world. While most ideologies were firmly rooted in a benevolent desire to improve deeply chaotic and oppressive urban environments, some—largely forgotten or ignored—deployed urban planning and architecture as racially motivated social-engineering projects. Nearly twenty years ago, Oren Yiftachel mused, “Far less attention has been devoted to the ability of planning to promote goals of an opposite nature, such as social repression, economic retardation or environmental degradation” (“The Dark Side of… Full Review

This elegant and information-packed volume, Venice Illuminated: Power and Painting in Renaissance Manuscripts by Helena Katalin Szépe, is the fullest statement we have to date of the importance placed on the holding of public office by high-ranking patricians of the Venetian state. The book presents a study of a particular category of Venetian state documents collectively referred to as ducali (dogali in Venetian dialect), prepared in large part by the ducal chancery for newly elected holders of the top three offices of the republic. These were high-quality manuscripts containing the oaths, rules, and regulations attached to each office. Over… Full Review

Daniel M. Unger’s new monograph on “eclecticism” in early modern Bolognese painting has the undeniable merit of drawing attention to a much-neglected and foundational concept within Baroque art theory: the “synthesis of styles” described by Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693). It has been almost half a century since Charles Dempsey published his combative Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style (1977). In this short but powerful book, Dempsey opposed Denis Mahon’s influential opinion that the “eclecticism” of the Carracci family was a historical misinterpretation. Perusing Malvasia with acuity, Dempsey redefined Malvasia’s synthesis of styles, demonstrating its full validity in understanding… Full Review

Veramente il mare, a “veritable sea,” was what the courtyard of Florence’s Palazzo Pitti looked like according to Simone Cavallino on the occasion of the naumachia (mock naval battle) organized in 1589 to celebrate the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine. This expression, used in Cavallino’s official description of the festivities and quoted by Felicia M. Else (165), is paradigmatic of what her book aims to demonstrate. According to Else, bringing the sea to landlocked Florence, making it visible, and reproducing it in the city of the Arno was a goal of three… Full Review

Opening in time for Epiphany 2020, the exhibition Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art at the Getty Center in Los Angeles was the first exhibition at a major museum to examine the portrayal of the youngest of the Three Magi, Balthazar, as a black African king. (The exhibition adopted the phrase “black African” in acknowledgment of racial diversity across Africa. Medieval European terms were in contrast often vague, inaccurate, or pejorative.) Balthazar begins with a question: why, if early medieval legends describe Balthazar as a black African man, does it take nearly a millennium for him… Full Review

The field of Spanish colonial art, to use a widely known if contested term, has enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence in the United States in the last decade or so. More and more universities are offering classes in the area, and an increasing number of museums are making serious overtures to establish collections. Perhaps mirroring these efforts, institutions in Europe are also starting to take a fresh look at the field and consider the region’s rich artistic output as part of the larger history of the Iberian world. To be sure, this growing interest in the field goes hand in… Full Review

In her new multidisciplinary monograph, Sonja Drimmer asks a “deceptively simple” question (15): “Who is Geoffrey Chaucer?” An author? Narrator? Pilgrim? And who, for that matter, is John Gower? Or John Lydgate? The very identities of these first Middle English poets, Drimmer argues, presented an ontological challenge to the limners, or illuminators, portraying them and illustrating their texts. Drimmer contends that limners helped shape late medieval ideas about authorship, political history, and royal identity. They did so via the “art of allusion,” which Drimmer likens to the writing practices of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English authors; that is, the… Full Review

Sanja Savkić and Hannah Baader offer a fine collection of edited essays dedicated to the question of aesthetic practices in the cultural traditions of indigenous America. The volume seeks to participate in “the praxeological turn” across “a plurality of fields” in the humanities and human sciences: its intention is to explore “the emancipatory capacities of aesthetic experience” and the “practical reflection” occasioned by artistic experience (429). The collection’s overall vision amalgamates continental theories of practice (Pierre Bourdieu, Theodore Schatzki) with “the biography of objects” (Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Thomas) and object-agency (Alfred Gell, Timothy Ingold, Ian Hodder), although this characterization is… Full Review

The centennial of the Bauhaus in 2019 was marked by an explosion of public interest, much of it fueled by the German government’s substantial investment in new museum buildings in Dessau and Weimar and in a program of exhibitions and conferences that ringed the globe. Such widespread attention to a topic often exposes the substantial gap between public perception and scholarly understanding. Simply dismissing popularly held notions as unscholarly can miss the point, for their endurance demonstrates their utility. For instance, the Bauhaus remains a symbol of a democratic Germany open to artistic experimentation, although the publication of Winfried Nerdinger’s… Full Review

Within the past five years, art historians and others interested in the intersection of race and representation have benefited from several noteworthy publications examining the role of visual culture, both current and historical, in the construction of American identity. To this list—which includes John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (Liveright, 2015), Sarah Lewis’s edited issue of Aperture entitled “Vision & Justice” (Aperture 223, 2016), and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019)—must be… Full Review

Among premodern artists, Michelangelo is by far the most written-about individual. Through books, articles, and popular culture we are inundated with information and interpretation about him. While the onslaught of literature will and must continue, it is rare when a book offers a fundamentally new way of considering the artist. Christian K. Kleinbub’s book Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies does just that. It offers meaningful and original investigations into Michelangelo’s sense of self and the meaning of his art. Kleinbub seeks to turn Michelangelo and his art inside out. Rather than looking at surfaces and outward appearance, Kleinbub investigates how Michelangelo might… Full Review

After closing for two years to undergo extensive renovations, the Seattle Asian Art Museum reopened in early February with Boundless: Stories of Asian Art—an exhibition that reimagines its existing collection and presents a timely intervention into the field of Asian art. Boundless foregoes curation based on linear histories, geography, and national borders, turning instead to a thematic approach that makes space for a more expansive conception of Asia. Criticisms of curating based on national, regional, or civilizational designations have often been lodged in art historical discourse on Asia; however, alternative approaches have been rarely realized. Historically, museums and exhibitions… Full Review

For a few decades now, immigration has been at the center of societal debates and political programs, at least in the Global North. Migrant artists are rarely mentioned in these discussions, perhaps because professional artists make up a relatively negligible segment of the total immigrant population. Conversely, however, it seems likely that nowadays a high percentage of those making a living by making art are migrants; the same goes for art historians. Marije Osnabrugge, the author of this timely book, for example, is a Dutch scholar working on a subject requiring long research stays in Italy, professionally based in Switzerland… Full Review