Recently Published Reviews

In 2004, the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought, for an undisclosed sum that was reported to be more than $45 million, a small panel painting—the so-called Stoclet, or Stroganoff, Madonna—that was widely assumed to have been the last work by Duccio in private hands. Four years later, after a rigorous investigation of the panel, Keith Christiansen, the museum’s curator of European paintings, published an extended essay on the work in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. Subsequently, Christiansen’s article was republished as this slender, generously illustrated book. In a way, Christiansen’s book is rather like the painting that… Full Review

In writing Michelangelo’s Vita in 1568, Giorgio Vasari remarked that in his old age the revered sculptor burned many of his drawings, discarding everything he considered less than a perfect creation, thereby destroying any evidence that could have left his monumental greatness in doubt. Although modern scholars frequently question the veracity of Vasari’s anecdotes, this one rings true for two reasons. On the one hand, it is a well-known fact that Michelangelo was an exacting artist, for whom only the finest creations were worth preserving. On the other, and perhaps even more important, one must acknowledge that all artists “edit”… Full Review

Karline McLain’s interdisciplinary study of the premier comic book series in India, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK, founded 1967), masterfully engages in three related projects of import for art history and for South Asian studies. First, her book investigates the reception of popular visual culture, the global transmission of images and visual literacy, the tension between canonized religious texts and the production of images, the appropriation of (high) art for nationalist causes and for popular audiences, and the struggle to put text and image together on a page in the service of an entertaining narrative. Second, she courageously takes on issues… Full Review

Sculpture is no longer quite the poor relation in eighteenth-century French art studies which it once was. Although the academic curriculum still requires a considerable knowledge of Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jacques-Louis David but only, at best, a passing familiarity with Antoine Coysevox or Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, the literature on French sculpture available to those teaching courses on French art is far more substantial than it was twenty years ago. Building on the foundations laid by François Souchal, a series of impressive exhibitions curated by both French and American scholars—notably Guilhem Scherf, James Draper, and Anne Poulet—have given a new prominence to… Full Review

It must have been a challenge to find a cover illustration for The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History since, according to Lauren Hackworth Petersen’s strict standard, only a handful of the approximately fifteen first–second century CE monuments discussed are verifiably those of freedmen (liberti). For Petersen, only those who made their legal status as liberti explicit in their inscriptions are to be counted, although, save for imperial freedmen, such formulations became increasingly rare during the first century. Petersen also dismisses other indicators of freed status—Greek cognomina as former slave names (87, 97) and membership in the… Full Review

Juliet Koss's Modernism after Wagner is a groundbreaking addition to studies in the history and theory of artistic modernism. Her work traces the fortunes of Richard Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), beginning with his writings in the late 1840s. Throughout her book, Koss explores the various understandings and misunderstandings that continue to dog Wagner's legacy to the present day. Assailed by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century and later embraced by Adolf Hitler, Wagner and his dream of a total work of art were dealt a series of critical blows. Most devastating were those delivered… Full Review

Baroque 09 was a yearlong series of cultural events in the United Kingdom that celebrated the era’s art, music and culture. The Victoria and Albert Museum participated with the well-received exhibition, Baroque 1620–1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence, which ran from April 4 to July 19, 2009. Michael Snodin and Nigel Llewellyn’s volume of the same name serves as the catalogue for the exhibition. The book is more than this, however, as the catalogue itself comprises only twenty-eight pages located toward the back of the book. The preceding three hundred pages attempt to reconstruct the Baroque and present… Full Review

On January 23, 1710, a royal proclamation written by Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (1670–1733), announced the formation of a new porcelain manufactory established under his patronage within the walls of the Albrechtsburg Castle in the town of Meissen located a short distance from the Saxon capital city of Dresden. The proclamation heralded the discovery by the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger (1682–1719) of a formula for high-fired porcelain of a type commonly known as hard paste that had been developed in China centuries earlier and that was coveted throughout Europe from the time of its arrival… Full Review

The Derveni Krater by Beryl Barr-Sharrar brings together many diverse elements related to this spectacular metal vessel. This is not the first scholarly monograph about the krater. It was the subject of a dissertation that appeared in 1978 by Eugenia Giouri for the University of Thessaloniki, and Barr-Sharrar gives credit to Giouri’s pioneering work. Barr-Sharrar’s volume is, however, the first in-depth study of the Derveni Krater that is easily available to readers outside of Greece. Filled with super illustrations, it includes information that has come to light since 1978 from numerous sources, including her own papers and publications. She knows… Full Review

In Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, Fernand Braudel claimed that, “The history of costume is less anecdotal than would appear. It touches on every issue” (Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 226). The innovative catalogue and exhibition On a Pedestal: From Renaissance Chopines to Baroque Heels at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto take Braudel’s focus on costume as a point of departure to investigate how footwear provided a significant perspective onto social, economic, and cultural conventions around the early modern Mediterranean. The bulk of the… Full Review

This beautifully illustrated catalogue, companion to the 2009–10 exhibition curated by Carole McNamara at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (Ann Arbor), brings together several eminent scholars of nineteenth-century art and photography to consider questions of influence. We have often heard about the Dutch and English sources that helped spur the nineteenth-century French vogue for painting seascapes, but what about the influence of photography? The Lens of Impressionism explores the idea that photography presented new pictorial modes for representing the Normandy view. Its five authors pursue implications and explications of how painters were inspired to adopt some of those… Full Review

Six years into the afterlife of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), two of his U.S. academic publishers have excavated texts that have photography as their major point of focus, and they have published these pronouncements posthumously. While Copy, Archive, Signature reads as a wide-ranging conversation about a variety of important topics concerning “photography in deconstruction” (to recite the subtitle of editor Gerhard Richter’s astute introduction), Athens, Still Remains is a slim volume that takes the images of the contemporary French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme as a springboard for a larger meditation on photography and its relation to death. The conversation was conducted… Full Review

The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is Michael Camille’s long-awaited last book, published seven years after the author’s untimely death in 2002. By that time, the text must have been finished, since the preface is signed: “Paris, February 2001”; the editor indicates that only some of the citations in the footnotes remained incomplete (379). Throughout Camille’s brilliant career he was interested in medieval image making, paying equal attention to “high” and “low” art, a distinction which he identified as a modern construct. Modernity’s shaping influence on perceptions of the Middle Ages was therefore always an important aspect of Camille’s work, as… Full Review

Islamic archaeology is an unusual area of enquiry because as a term it embraces a religious and cultural element as well as an empirical-scientific component. Of course the same could be said of many branches of archaeology, though in present times the use of the term “Islamic” carries with it specific connotations of ideology, belief, ethnicity, and culture. Specifically, the term may be taken to indicate a particular Islamic ideological approach to the practice and study of archaeology. Alternatively, the term may be used in a more neutral sense to indicate the study of Islamic culture, including religion through the… Full Review

Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 is an ambitious book comprised of a series of analytical interventions pertaining to modern India’s visual arts and cultural heritage, and it demonstrates Rebecca Brown’s scholarly sophistication in grappling with wide-ranging conceptual and aesthetic criteria. The central thesis concerns the cultivation—among artists, filmmakers, and architects—of a critical engagement with the legacies of colonization and nationalism during the three decades that followed Independence and Partition. This engagement is framed as being relevant to studies of “the postcolonial condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national identity” (2). The thesis… Full Review