Recently Published Reviews

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

Scholarship on Giotto’s architecture has focused on work such as the campanile in Florence (1334) as well as other buildings he is said to have designed, along with the origins of Giotto’s depicted structures, whether and how he based these renderings on actual buildings. To this point, Decio Gioseffi’s Giotto architetto (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1963) is the only monograph dedicated to the full span of Giotto’s painted architecture—in addition to discussing his role as architect. In Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (3rd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), John White brilliantly analyses a few frescoes in the… Full Review

Arranged topically rather than chronologically, the English translation of Paul Zanker’s concise and highly accessible review of art in the Roman world is a valuable contribution and will appeal to students and general readers alike. Divided into seven main chapters, Zanker examines both political and non-political imagery as seminal elements in a “system” of visual communication. As he states in the introduction, much of his approach is indebted to the earlier studies of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli and, more recently, Tonio Hölscher (Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Center of Power. Roman Art to A.D. 200, trans. Peter Green, London: Thames… Full Review

Neal Keating has written a stimulating—and bold—book. Iroquois Art, Power, and History “describes and interprets the historical and current practices of visual expression carried out by indigenous Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America.” (Haudenosaunee refers to the original six member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.) Covering more than four centuries, Keating seeks “to demonstrate a significant cultural continuity between contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples and their pre-colonial and colonial-era ancestors.” Fortunately, he recognizes this is “an argument that is surprisingly contentious in the field of Iroquois studies” (3), and so his assertions are, on the whole, well… Full Review

The abundance of literature on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio published in the last four decades has shown not only an incredible divergence of attitudes toward the painter but also an increased number of interpretations that in some cases make it seem as if a new Caravaggio has emerged with no clear reference to the real one. It is these assessments of the painter that brought Sybille Ebert-Schifferer to take a step back and reexamine Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre in light of the sources and the documents known to us today. In that, Ebert-Schifferer’s purpose seems to be ambitious on the one… Full Review

The advent of digitization has created methods of cultural production that bring new considerations to the relationships between ideas, artifacts, and audiences. Looking at the San Diego Museum of Art’s exhibition Piranesi, Rome, and the Arts of Design, conceived by Michele De Lucchi, one can observe the effects of digitization, as the eighteenth-century designer and fabulist’s work is expressed though twenty-first-century opportunities. The show goes far beyond previously typical methods of curation, creating entirely new incarnations of Piranesi’s work. The result is an exhibition of eighteenth-century work with the resonance of a twenty-first-century cultural spectacle. Its ambitions tread into… Full Review

The publication of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) marked the rebirth of the Mediterranean, both as an object of study and as the space characterizing a given object of study. Since then, the sea and its many corruptions, from antiquity to early modernity, has fallen under the lens of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, as well as art and architectural historians. Mediterranean Studies became increasingly multi- and interdisciplinary, with a growing number of scholars interested in cross-cultural interaction and exchange. Indeed, it has grown so exponentially that one can… Full Review

In Harmony: The Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art, an exhibition at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum, celebrated the university’s acquisition of Norma Jean Calderwood’s impressive, yet largely unpublished, private collection of Persianate art. Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, certainly faced challenges in cohesively displaying this private collection, which consists of a disparate array of over 140 objects and spans a thousand years of production history. However, the exhibition ultimately provided a thoughtful and welcome display of Islamic art during a time in which Harvard’s permanent Islamic collection is… Full Review