Recently Published Reviews

In 1968, the Mono-ha artist Sekine Nobuo dug a perfectly cylindrical hole, 2.7 meters in depth and 2.2 meters in diameter, in a park in Kobe. Next to it, he placed an earthen column of identical dimensions, giving the impression of a simple transfer of matter, a sculpture plucked from the earth. Presenting earth as earth, this work was intended as a negation of the artist’s privileged role as creator, as a critique of the art market, and as a questioning of the modernist art object. This and other works of its generation constituted an attack on modernism that was… Full Review

What do we mean when we say “the nineteenth century”? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What does it contain or exclude? How do we make such choices—on what basis? Surveying four major textbooks, this review offers a look back at the ways these questions have been answered over the past two decades, beginning with the first publication of Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson’s 19th-Century Art in 1984 and ending with the second edition of Petra ten-Doesschate Chu’s Nineteenth-Century European Art in 2006.[1] Although other forms of scholarship (journal articles, monographs, exhibition catalogues, and the like) perform such… Full Review

Enthusiasts for the remarkable work of Joseph Michael Gandy—visionary, perspectivist to Sir John Soane, romantic evoker of the sublime—have been a small but indomitable band. This is the book for which we have been waiting many years. Since the 1970s, Brian Lukacher has been researching the work of Gandy—ferreting out unknown pictures, discovering the anatomy of a life and oeuvre. He knows more than anyone else is ever likely to know about his remarkable and scintillating subject. In short this publication could not be more welcome. Gandy (1771–1843) is in many ways a bit of a sad case. He… Full Review

The aesthetic appropriation of psychic states and disorders has a distinguished pedigree. André Breton adopted hysteria in the early days of the Surrealist movement, while his colleague Salvador Dalí preferred paranoia. Anton Ehrenzweig pressed Melanie Klein’s manic and depressive moments of an infant’s life into a theory of creative processes in his influential book, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Of course, Sigmund Freud himself set the modern trend for this sort of borrowing in his analysis of the psychic energy underlying Leonardo da Vinci’s peculiar genius, but the tradition reaches as far back as… Full Review

Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance offers a wide-ranging study of the elite visual culture of France under the Valois-Angoulême dynasty. In this book, based upon her dissertation at the University of Chicago, Zorach studies the many manifestations of the Fontainebleau style, from panel and wall paintings to sculpture, prints, ceramics, diplomatic gifts and royal entry decorations, costume, and the many copies after the antique that populated the galleries and gardens of the palace. The book’s plentiful, high-quality illustrations exemplify both the author’s arguments as well as the incredible fertility of artistic production… Full Review

This spring Phoenix, Arizona has become a center for Baroque art. Under the able leadership of James K. Ballinger, Director, and Thomas J. Loughman, Curator of European Art, the Phoenix Art Museum is hosting two major exhibitions of European seventeenth-century art, and for one of these, Phoenix is its sole venue. In the last decade, the museum has organized other major Baroque exhibitions, most notably in 1999 with Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece Painting on Copper, 1525–1775; but scheduling two concurrent shows on seventeenth-century art—one focusing on the Mediterranean city of Naples, the other on the Dutch… Full Review

Historians and art historians have a soft spot for Charles Sheeler, the American painter, filmmaker, and photographer who made a career out of his apparent love for industrial modernity during the interwar decades. It is customary for scholars of this period to bend their knees at his Machine Age altarpieces, because they so plainly depict the means and effects of the era’s mania for rational efficiency, and also because—let’s face it—the works are beautiful, all the more seducing in their tight-lipped, standoffish reserve. For Charles Sheeler: Across Media, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name, curator… Full Review

Constantine is the man of the hour. The 1700th anniversary of his ascent into the ruling circle of the Roman Empire, just as the administration of shared authority instituted by Diocletian was about to break apart in civil war, is being celebrated across Europe. Rimini led off in 2005 with an important show and sumptuous catalogue (Angela Donati and Giovanni Gentili, eds., Costantino il Grande: La civiltà antica al bivio tra Occidente e Oriente, Milano: Cinisello Balsamo, 2005). The volume under review here, the catalogue of York’s effort in the fall of 2006, is the second entry in the… Full Review

One can hardly think of Rome without picturing the massive dome of St. Peter’s. Clearly symbolic of Catholicism and, more subtly, of the transition from late pagan antiquity to the ascendancy of Christianity, the basilica has a rich and varied history. As Lex Bosman states in the introduction to The Power of Tradition, “The church of St. Peter’s in the Vatican is not special only because of its size and its splendor. It is also, more than any other building in Western Europe, a testimony to part of the history of Christianity in different types of stone” (9). … Full Review

The University of Texas’s spacious new Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, which opened in April 2006, recently mounted an outstanding exhibition devoted to Luca Cambiaso, the leading native-born figure in sixteenth-century Genoese painting. Organized with the Palazzo Ducale Genoa, this first monographic exhibition in fifty years was supported by a beautifully produced catalogue, in English, edited by Jonathan Bober, the show’s chief architect and the Blanton Museum’s curator of prints, drawings, and European paintings. The volume comprises 118 substantial catalogue entries, each accompanied by a superb full-page color plate, preceded by an excellent fortuna critica, an anthology of… Full Review

Palladio’s Rome offers an unusual recreation of the Renaissance city in the words of the celebrated architect from northern Italy. Palladio made several visits to Rome when he was still an aspiring architect, producing a pair of guidebooks that were published in 1554—one an introduction to the ancient city (The Antiquities of Rome), and the other a companion guide to the churches of contemporary Rome (Description of the Churches). In keeping with standard practice of the time, the texts are brief and unillustrated, but the contents are surprising given the identity of the author. Vaughan… Full Review

It is a sign of the times, I suppose, to begin a book review, itself published online, with a reference to a website. For in many ways, Jane Geddes’s The St. Albans Psalter is a book that was spawned by a website. In 2003, the University of Aberdeen undertook, under the direction of Geddes, to publish the St. Albans Psalter on the internet as a virtual facsimile (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml). As academic websites go, this is a truly impressive accomplishment, for it provides high-quality color images of every page of this twelfth-century psalter (including the blank pages). For the first time… Full Review

A generation of Anglophone scholars has depended on Michael Baxandall’s masterwork, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), for its inimitable introduction to the subject of the golden age of German carved altarpieces from around the turn of the sixteenth century. Now, a quarter-century later, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol—perhaps one of the most beautiful books ever produced—reintroduces this material in a translation of the 2005 Hirmer edition, with the usual high production values of that Munich art publisher. In this case, the accompanying text is truly worthy… Full Review

In 1775 an artist named Nathaniel Hone submitted a painting called The Pictorial Conjuror, Displaying the Whole Art of Optical Deception (1775) to an upcoming exhibition at the British Royal Academy. The painting depicted in its top left corner an image of the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman frolicking naked with other naked artists, among them her friend Joshua Reynolds, who is shown lewdly jabbing his oversized, trumpet-shaped hearing aid in the direction of Kauffman’s parted legs. Hone’s painting was understood by contemporaries to be an attack on Reynolds, the president of the Academy, a mockery of Reynolds’s rumored love affair… Full Review

For some there is a paradox in the fact that Bob Jones University, a Christian-fundamentalist institution that bills itself as the bastion of “old-time religion” based on the absolute authority of the Bible, should be a repository for one of the best collections of Catholic art in the United States. In the words of Henry Hope, who first introduced the university’s museum to the public (“The Bob Jones University Collection of Religious Art,” Art Journal XXV, no. 2 (1965–66): 154–162), the spirit of the collection is “more that of the Counter Reformation than of Martin Luther” (162). In this respect… Full Review