Recently Published Reviews

Lorenzo Pericolo’s Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative: Dislocating the Istoria in Early Modern Painting is part of a recent trend in Caravaggio studies focusing on the artist’s narrative technique and the intentionally ambiguous meaning of his paintings. Prominent examples include Valeska von Rosen’s Caravaggio und die Grenze des Darstellbaren. Ambiguität, Ironie und Performativiät in der Malerei um 1600 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), and, to a certain degree, Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), along with Itay Sapir’s Ténèbres sans leçons: esthétique et épistémologie de la peinture ténébriste romaine 1595-1610 (Peter Lang: International Academic Publishers, 2012). … Full Review

As this outstanding exhibition on view in Padua demonstrated, Pietro Bembo (b. Venice, 1470; d. Rome, 1547)—humanist, author, lover, courtier, collector, papal secretary, and cardinal—was one of those exceptionally rare people who seems to have experienced at firsthand a large proportion of the great cultural events of his time. When Angelo Poliziano visited northern Italy in 1491 looking for unknown ancient texts for Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine humanist studied alongside the young Bembo, annotating an incunabulum of Terence’s Comedies while also consulting a rare codex by the author (cat. 1.3). During the emotion-laden years in which Bembo wrote his… Full Review

Georges Bataille’s writings on prehistoric art are known to the English-reading public mainly through two major books: Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art (trans. Austryn Wainhouse, Milan: Skira, 1955) was one of the earliest presentations of Lascaux to be illustrated with lavish color photographs; and The Tears of Eros (published posthumously in French in 1961, and in English in 1989 [trans. Peter Connor, San Francisco: City Lights]) started with a meditation on Paleolithic female figurines. It is less known that Bataille’s complete works in French include many other writings on the subject, ranging from book reviews to notes… Full Review

Sicilian Greeks—who adopted a collective identity as “Sikeliotes”—celebrated a decisive victory over the Carthaginians at the Battle of Himera in 480 BCE, by tradition on the same day the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis (Herodotus 7.166). In 212 BCE Marcellus sacked Syracuse and brought Sicily under Roman domination. Sicily: Art and Invention between Greece and Rome, curated by Claire Lyons and Alexandra Sofroniew, focuses on this key period, when Sicily, situated geographically at a pivotal intersection between Greece, Italy, and North Africa, experienced a spectacular golden age of cultural productivity. Rather than the traditional Athenocentric narrative, which begins… Full Review

Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia was a small exhibition with a big ambition. Roughly twenty objects including drawings, paintings, prints, costumes, and illustrated books were arranged in two galleries to suggest a comprehensive outlook of how Asia was conceived by Europeans in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Special attention was given to Man in Korean Costume (ca. 1617), Peter Paul Rubens’s famed drawing owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first section of the exhibition focused on how European missionaries encountered and viewed Asia—China, in particular—and how Rubens’s depictions helped to transmit such views as the… Full Review

With Bernini: Art as Theatre, Genevieve Warwick has produced one of the most significant contributions to the recent surge of literature on Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Her fascinating book is articulate and thoughtful, its arguments sound and convincing. It incorporates a wide body of scholarly literature and mines archives and primary sources to provide new looks at well-known objects. Warwick presents an innovative understanding of the aesthetic culture of seventeenth-century Rome, reconstructing the visual expectations of Bernini’s audience and the settings in which his objects were made and displayed. Bernini’s art has often been described somewhat dismissively as theatrical, suggesting… Full Review

Richard Taws’s The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France makes a compellingly original contribution to the study of the visual and material culture of the French Revolution. This book takes as its subject a body of objects that have traditionally failed to garner sustained interest within the discipline of art history, which has preferred to focus on exemplary practitioners such as Jacques-Louis David and works of art made in the durable medium of oil painting. The Politics of the Provisional asks what might be learned about the French Revolution if attention is turned from singular masterpieces… Full Review

Daniel H. Magilow’s The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany and Sarah E. James’s Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures across the Iron Curtain investigate photography in its serial form, recruiting case studies from twentieth-century Germany to explore their claims. Counter to the rather substantive body of research on photomontage that interrogates the semiotics and somatics of juxtaposed, cropped, found, and staged photographs, these recent contributions to the history and theory of photography explore the meanings and subject positions engendered by pictorial succession. More emphatically than the montage of photographs on a single plane, the structure of photographic… Full Review

Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 was a momentous undertaking, an assembly of over one hundred works, most created for Florentine religious institutions. There is a hefty catalogue that will become an essential resource, not only for beautiful plates but for scholarly commentary. The bold title promised a panoramic vision. Even allowing for the customary hyperbole of exhibition titles, it did not disappoint. A primary objective of curator Christine Sciacca and her team was to argue on behalf of a view of trecento painting that extends beyond panels and frescoes to include paintings in… Full Review

In an era of constant discussion about climate change, rising sea levels, land degradation, energy use, and competition for land rights, the National Museum of African Art show Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa takes on a topic of urgent public interest. Curator Karen Milbourne has broken the exhibition into different conceptual approaches to “earth”— as a source for art materials or material wealth, the home of both human and ancestral realms in many cosmologies, and a place for geopolitical debates about ownership, identity, and belonging. The result is a show that asks many… Full Review

The past several years have seen the increasing incorporation of digital reproductions and mediations of artworks into exhibitions of premodern Chinese art. Perhaps most spectacularly, sculptural fragments removed from Xiangtangshan in the early twentieth century were virtually restored to their places of origin within the “digital cave” included in Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan (click here for review). More recently, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art experimented with intriguing forms of digital mediation in Journey through Mountains and Rivers: Chinese Landscapes Ancient and Modern. This exhibition paired nine of the museum’s greatest masterpieces… Full Review

Anthony White’s monograph on Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana is a long overdue intervention in the literature on Italian and South American twentieth-century abstraction. Correcting for a longstanding lacuna in the scholarship, White departs from the tendency on the part of what scant accounts do exist to focus only on Fontana’s post-World War II production, the punctures (Buchi) and slits (Attesse) he famously made up to his death in 1968. Looking at the entirety of the artist’s development, from his early years of training at the Brera Academy in Milan during the years in which Italian Fascism… Full Review

The Spirit of Vitalism: Health, Beauty and Strength in Danish Art, 1890–1940 (originally published in Danish as Livslyst. Sundhed—Skønhed—Styrke i dansk kunst 1890–1940) is a collection of essays with a catalogue that was published to accompany an exhibition entitled Zest for Life. Health—Beauty—Strength in Danish Art 1890–1940 held at the Fyns Kunstmuseum/Odense City Museums and Fuglsang Kunstmuseum in 2008. Both exhibition and publication were the result of a long-term project dating back to 2001 and involving the participation of a number of Danish museums (7). The large-format volume consists of fifteen essays written by fourteen contributors, and a substantial… Full Review

Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture offers a lucid and perspicacious examination of the evolving social lives of major Mughal monuments, an overlooked topic in the now-extensive corpus of literature on Mughal architectural history. In the early 1990s scholars revisited Mughal architecture, a subject that had been neglected since the colonial era. The best-known scholars of Mughal architecture, Ebba Koch and Catherine Asher, provided expansive studies that examine how patronage, politics, and religious concerns shaped the formal, decorative, spatial, and symbolic programs of various Mughal monuments (Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture, Oxford: Oxford… Full Review

Students of the late John Shearman who were too young to have seen the exhibitions devoted to Federico Barocci (1535–1612) in Bologna and Florence in 1975—myself included—often heard that their beauty and interest had finally proved that exhibitions could be of real inspiration and value, subtly altering and enlarging one’s understanding of an artist’s achievement. Current generations had the possibility of experiencing the same pleasure and profit through exhibitions recently held in St. Louis and London. This monographic exhibition traced the work of the great Urbinate artist, who probably came of age in Pesaro in the later 1540s, attempted a… Full Review