Recently Published Reviews

The literature on Frank Lloyd Wright’s oeuvre expands yearly as, for example, with these two small books on two of Wright’s smaller Usonian houses. The residential component of Wright’s vision for a redesigned United States of North America, Usonians were built across the country in the last two decades of the architect’s long career. They would be enormously influential on American housing design for the remainder of the twentieth century. The books under review take very different approaches, but share a focus on individual Usonian houses and the story of their making. The Sidney and Mildred Rosenbaum House was… Full Review

Visually stunning and intellectually riveting, the exhibition Literati Modern: Bunjinga from Late Edo to Twentieth-Century Japan presented the Honolulu Academy of Arts's newly acquired Terry Welch Collection of over eighty Japanese ceramics, calligraphy, and paintings (in handscroll, hanging scroll, album, and both two- and six-panel screen formats) from late Edo through Showa periods (the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries). It demonstrated the claim—made by guest curator Michiyo Morioka and other panelists in the accompanying symposium—that unlike most schools of Japanese art (Kano-ha, Tosa-ha, Rinpa), Bunjinga (“literati painting”) is not determined by a single style, but rather encompasses a very… Full Review

In philosophy we have important dialogues by Plato, Bishop Berkeley, and David Hume. A dialogue is a great format for presenting opposed points of view, without requiring that the author choose between them. But in art history, apart from some staged scenes in Diderot’s Salons, Mondrian’s dialogues, and Roberto Longhi’s short imagined discussion between Caravaggio and Tiepolo, it’s hard to cite examples of this literary form. (There were some French dialogues preceding modernism, and of course Andy Warhol contributed to that tradition in one of his dictated books.) I’ve always been a little surprised that we art historians have… Full Review

Amilcare Iannucci, whose death in 2007 robbed us of a creative and prolific scholar devoted to the study of Dante’s reception, often emphasized the “producerly influence” of Dante’s literary art, especially his Divine Comedy, in his extensive scholarship on the subject. In the introduction to Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), which he edited, Iannucci explains: “The Commedia produced not only a philological response [i.e., commentaries and scholarly interpretive works] . . . but also a creative response. It inspired the production of other objects, independent of its structure, in both the artistic and literary spheres”… Full Review

In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in the human body as connected to artistic issues, resulting in studies as diverse as those by Tracey Warr (The Artist’s Body, New York: Phaidon, 2000), Martin Porter (Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and Amelia Jones (Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). In the related field of body aging issues, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging recently posted an… Full Review

Doris Carl’s monograph on Benedetto da Maiano is a monumental achievement, the culmination of decades of research on the artist. Some of her findings were previewed in a series of articles she wrote on specific aspects of Benedetto’s career, but their integration into the unpublished material presented in the book creates a comprehensive assessment of the sculptor’s entire production. The result is a wholly new understanding of the artist as a major figure in late fifteenth-century Italian art. Carl’s analysis forces a total revision of the estimation of Benedetto as a secondary artist that prevailed throughout the late nineteenth… Full Review

This is a remarkable volume and of considerable significance to art historians and university administrators. It contains most of the papers presented at the symposium “Historiography and Ideology: Architectural Heritage of the ‘Lands of Rum,’” held in Cambridge in 2006. A generation ago, the same (or more or less the same) contributions would have been called something like “The Interpretation of Islamic Architecture in Ottoman Times and in Turkey Today.” As I will argue shortly, the difference in titles reflects a major shift in approaching the history of architecture in the Ottoman world, but it is in fact a difference… Full Review

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently had the rare opportunity to see a survey of hardstone carving in Europe, an art form best known by its Italian shorthand term, pietre dure. By assembling some of the best-known works and a great variety of objects in terms of technique, origin, and appearance, the exhibition was well worth seeing, if not always consistent in the strength and coherence of its presentation. The introductory gallery of the show, as well as the first chapter of the catalogue, might have struck more knowledgeable viewers and readers as somewhat haphazard and… Full Review

This book likely exists mostly as a by-product of the pressures of the academic tenure process. What would have been an engaging twenty-page article has been inflated into 146 pages of speculation, supposition, and chiefly, digression. The nominal subject of the book is the now-lost cycle of frescoes in the great hall of the Reggia Carrarese in Padua, the Sala Virorum Illustrium. The scheme of the cycle was, according to John Richards, dependent upon a thematically related text by Francesco Petrarch, De viris illustribus. This is a tenable hypothesis, given the author’s close relationship with Francesco il Vecchio Carrara… Full Review

This text forms part of the Blackwell Anthologies in Art History, of which collections on Asian art, Early Modernism, and European and American Architecture and Design have already been published. Two titles in the series exploring art in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries are forthcoming; hopefully, an addition on the fourteenth century is also in the works. Cole’s book compiles classic and recent essays on sixteenth-century art and architecture, touching upon issues in painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and theoretical writings. Some chapters have been translated specifically for this project. The volume compiles twenty-three essays grouped under six rubrics, each… Full Review

As signaled by the exhibition’s subtitle, “Art of Our Time Viewed from Various Narratives,” Four Ways to Look at Art explores the possibility of opening up vastly different narratives in addressing art after the end of art. The show addresses the convention of the great narrative ingrained within the modernist aesthetic that has led to the suppression of individual stories. Resisting a priori aesthetic rules, it investigates ways in which contemporary art deals with its identity crisis. One primary way is to understand art in its cultural context. The artistic genres on display in the exhibition range widely from modernist… Full Review

Frédéric Cousinié’s Images et Méditation au XVIIe Siècle is a collection of six essays that focus on the relationship between devotional treatises and visual images in seventeenth-century France. This book has neither a formal introduction nor a conclusion, but in the last section (22–24) of the first essay, Cousinié provides an overview in which he briefly summarizes the questions raised in each essay. To best appreciate the book, the reader will need, in addition to knowledge of seventeenth-century imagery, familiarity with the religious history of the period, as well as the fundamentals of semiotics. Central to the study is… Full Review

The “doubt” of the title of this short but very interesting book is meant to be applied to art history. In Richard Shiff’s view, art historians and critics too often erect abstract systems on a partial apprehension of aspects of the artwork. He is as critical of interpretations that float somewhere above the particulars of an artwork as he is with those that do not admit exceptions to their own posited rules. For example, with respect to the ideas of Rosalind Krauss, he observes that “a differential or ‘critical’ term loses its efficacy . . . when we designate it… Full Review

The three volumes under review are part of the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard and produced by Harvard University Press. The expanding series covers the Alhambra, Westminster Abbey, and other major monuments. This series is designed not only to present the various monuments in their original contexts, but also to include the major events in their subsequent receptions throughout history. This important methodological choice allows for the assessment both of the material remains themselves and of how inflections from previous eras continue to shape present outlooks. Even though Cathy Gere, Simon Goldhill, and Keith Hopkins… Full Review

From 1690 on, children in colonial America were taught the letters of the alphabet with the New England Primer. Millions of copies of these primers formed the pedagogical cornerstone of elementary education for the next two centuries. These schoolroom textbooks iterated the basic building blocks of the English language—vowels, consonants, syllabariums—supplemented with woodcut illustrations and rhymed couplets that undergirded literacy with moral lessons imbued, in turn, with religious themes and catechisms gleaned from the King James Bible. Given this long tradition, had Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother not stumbled onto the Froebel system of kindergarten instruction as one alternative to… Full Review