Recently Published Reviews

Calvin Kendall has a wonderful topic, the verse inscriptions that decorate a large number of Romanesque church portals. While I sometimes disagree sharply with Kendall's treatment of his material, he gets full marks for paying attention to it in the first place; it is an embarrassment to art history that such an important and literally obvious topic was first studied monographically by a professor of English. And, whatever disagreements one may have with Kendall's method and conclusions, the long appendix to his book, which meticulously transcribes and translates all of the inscriptions known to him, is a crucial corpus of… Full Review

LA is a hard city to get in focus. Many American and non-American immigrants thought of it as an ideal destination. But much of the local literature is devoted to the natural disasters--earthquakes and fires--and to stories of crime. Because it is a new, very rich city without well-established cultural traditions--and because it is the center of the film industry and a place dependent on massive water imports--LA can seem a highly artificial city. Perhaps that is why this landscape inspires such powerful myths. McClung's beautifully produced, well-illustrated book presents a wealth of information about the city in… Full Review

As an English professor, I rarely have the pleasure of reviewing visually stunning books, so my assessment of this book as lovely to look at does not rest on the basis of much comparison. The three essays that form the text, the plentiful (and lush) illustrations, and the lengthy chronology of Siddons's life contained in this volume make up a fascinating picture of Siddons's career and its alchemy with eighteenth-century portraiture. Siddons's stage roles are only one factor in what the authors--Asleson, Shearer West, Shelley Bennett, and Mark Leonard--discuss as the production of Siddons's image as star and cultural icon… Full Review

Foucault once stated that the 20th century would one day be called Deleuzian, citing Gilles Deleuze's profound ability to theorize radical change on the ontological level, beyond the restricting epistemological logic of hierarchic, organic thought that has dominated philosophical and semiotic discourse since the Enlightenment. Although Deleuze's groundbreaking work with Felix Guattari--specifically Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus--and such terms as "rhizomatics," "deterritorialization," the "body-without-organs," and the "war machine" have become increasingly common buzzwords in recent critical attempts to rethink the ideology of the image, the French philosopher has been significantly ignored by feminists, particularly in comparison to Freudian and… Full Review

Mesoamerican Architecture as Cultural Symbol is one of the latest in a series of recent works on architecture in ancient Middle America. Jeff Kowalski's volume joins The Code of Kings: The Language of Seven Sacred Maya Temples and Tombs, by Linda Schele and Peter Mathews (Scribner, 1998), and Stephen Houston's edited volumes Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture (Dumbarton Oaks, 1999), and Royal Courts of the Maya (with Takeshi Inomata, Westview Press, 2000). But unlike these volumes, which focus only on the Maya, Mesoamerican Architecture as Cultural Symbol addresses architecture as a carrier of cultural meaning in most… Full Review

More than twenty years have passed since scholars Carol Duncan, Brian O'Doherty, and Alan Wallach published their groundbreaking critical analyses of art museums and their display strategies. These incisive essays launched a wave of vehement institutional critiques that effectively pitted critically informed academic concerns against contemporary museum practices. Two of the more recent additions to the fray--Mary Anne Staniszewski's The Power of Display and the Open University's Contemporary Cultures of Display, edited by Emma Barker--indicate that with the passage of time, the field has not only remained vigilant, but also matured considerably. The Museum of Modern Art… Full Review

Cities as art centers have not always had the attention they deserve, especially in art exhibitions, because of the daunting problems of scale as well as the problems of representation of both the architectural environment and the unmovable monuments. There have been some truly notable exceptions, with particular relevance to this ambitious effort on Rome: Philadelphia's own Second Empire Paris exhibition as well as Detroit's 18th-Century Naples (1981). Once more Philadelphia has taken on a formidable "millennium show" challenge, and has done it justice. This exhibition is a revelation as well as a revision. The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome… Full Review

The fall issue of Aesthetics, the newsletter of the American Society for Aesthetics, brought an article by Saul Fisher called "Analytic Philosophy of Architecture: A Course." Quickly the introductory discussion proceeded to the question: "Why the Philosophy of Architecture?" That question was narrowed: "Why an Analytic Philosophy of Architecture?" Architects in recent years have of course shown quite an extraordinary interest in philosophy. But the analytic philosopher of architecture apparently cannot count on such interest. And yet, the author insisted, professional architects "should take note of what analytic philosophers are saying." Should they? Professor Fisher's answer: "The price of… Full Review

This volume, the first of two, offers a catalogue raisonné of the diverse motif punch impressions in panel painting and book illumination collected by the auther over a span of thirty-five years. As indicated in the title, the volume covers such evidence in the period from the early fourteenth to the fifteenth century in Italy, and also in countries north of the Alps, especially Bohemia. It further includes some early Byzantine and late medieval material. The photos of the motif punch impressions have been enlarged threefold for better reading. An accompanying metric scale allows for precise measurement. The motif punches… Full Review

Diane P. Fischer opens the principal essay of the Paris 1900 catalogue with a reference to the self-conscious declaration of the American Department of Fine Arts at the Paris Exposition of 1900 to present the United States as a nation free of "foreign trammels." The examination of this desire to assert a unique American identity, both political and artistic, binds Fischer's text with the other essays of the catalogue, detailing the complex interrelationships of national and artistic identity in 1890s America. Fischer constructs an opposition between the 1900 art display and that of the Universal Exposition of 1889, where American… Full Review

Witness the arrest of Marie-Antoinette as image in the stark drawing by Jacques-Louis David that cuts the Queen's last vestige of luxury, a pair of black silk shoes we are told she wore in defiance to the guillotine, down to the barest gashes. That which Terry Castle diagnoses as "Marie-Antoinette obsession" [The Apparitional Lesbian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)] infuses these ancien régime material objects, associated with the doomed Queen, with a particular charge. A decade of scholarship, informed in various ways by feminist theory and queer commentary, challenges us to rethink any easy dismissal of the objects… Full Review

Jonathan Crary sets out the central thesis of his book at the outset of the seventy richly annotated pages of its first chapter, "Modernity and the Problem of Attention." The topic of attention became central to scientific research and intellectual thought in the late nineteenth century, he argues, with attention itself coming to be considered "an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed contents of consciousness" (18). As evidence, he cites the work of such figures as Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, Thomas Edison, Wilhelm Wundt, and numerous others in the overlapping fields of optics, philosophy, physiology… Full Review

The sculptor Canova rose to fame and fortune despite the conflicts that arose during the Napoleonic Era. He succeeded in doing so not only because of his exceptional artistic talents, but also because of his astute diplomacy that enabled him to remain a free agent. Christopher Johns makes clear the complex strategy of "political ambivalence" that allowed the artist to partake of the patronage of Europe's ruling elite, despite their bitter enmities. This instructive study of Canova, his art, and its political context makes for an indispensable history of patronage. Using meticulous documentation, culled from archives, libraries, and… Full Review

As anyone who has seen the 1977 film Star Wars can attest, the ruined Maya city of Tikal in northern Guatemala presents a dramatic spectacle. Stephen Spielberg used the image of the site's massive temples poking above the forest canopy to portray the secret rebel base. Tikal is Guatemala's most visited tourist attraction, and has fascinated both the general public and Mayanists since its discovery in the 1850s. Thanks to the University of Pennsylvania Tikal Project in the 1950s and 1960s, and to the Guatemalan national project in the 1980s, Tikal is also one of the best known Maya cities… Full Review

Until recently, accounts of 20th-century art history have failed to see the relevance of fashion for their object of study. Typically, fashion was regarded as superficial, fleeting, and feminized; therefore, the interest in clothing design manifested by modernist artists from Henry Van de Velde to the Russian Constructivists has customarily been presented as an effort at rationalization or reform, and as a rejection of commercial dress design as practiced by such successful couturiers of the period as Jacques Doucet and Paul Poiret. However, as contemporary artists and scholars have become increasingly interested in the potential of sartorial display to articulate… Full Review