Recently Published Reviews

Veramente il mare, a “veritable sea,” was what the courtyard of Florence’s Palazzo Pitti looked like according to Simone Cavallino on the occasion of the naumachia (mock naval battle) organized in 1589 to celebrate the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine. This expression, used in Cavallino’s official description of the festivities and quoted by Felicia M. Else (165), is paradigmatic of what her book aims to demonstrate. According to Else, bringing the sea to landlocked Florence, making it visible, and reproducing it in the city of the Arno was a goal of three… Full Review

Opening in time for Epiphany 2020, the exhibition Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art at the Getty Center in Los Angeles was the first exhibition at a major museum to examine the portrayal of the youngest of the Three Magi, Balthazar, as a black African king. (The exhibition adopted the phrase “black African” in acknowledgment of racial diversity across Africa. Medieval European terms were in contrast often vague, inaccurate, or pejorative.) Balthazar begins with a question: why, if early medieval legends describe Balthazar as a black African man, does it take nearly a millennium for him… Full Review

The field of Spanish colonial art, to use a widely known if contested term, has enjoyed somewhat of a resurgence in the United States in the last decade or so. More and more universities are offering classes in the area, and an increasing number of museums are making serious overtures to establish collections. Perhaps mirroring these efforts, institutions in Europe are also starting to take a fresh look at the field and consider the region’s rich artistic output as part of the larger history of the Iberian world. To be sure, this growing interest in the field goes hand in… Full Review

In her new multidisciplinary monograph, Sonja Drimmer asks a “deceptively simple” question (15): “Who is Geoffrey Chaucer?” An author? Narrator? Pilgrim? And who, for that matter, is John Gower? Or John Lydgate? The very identities of these first Middle English poets, Drimmer argues, presented an ontological challenge to the limners, or illuminators, portraying them and illustrating their texts. Drimmer contends that limners helped shape late medieval ideas about authorship, political history, and royal identity. They did so via the “art of allusion,” which Drimmer likens to the writing practices of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English authors; that is, the… Full Review

Sanja Savkić and Hannah Baader offer a fine collection of edited essays dedicated to the question of aesthetic practices in the cultural traditions of indigenous America. The volume seeks to participate in “the praxeological turn” across “a plurality of fields” in the humanities and human sciences: its intention is to explore “the emancipatory capacities of aesthetic experience” and the “practical reflection” occasioned by artistic experience (429). The collection’s overall vision amalgamates continental theories of practice (Pierre Bourdieu, Theodore Schatzki) with “the biography of objects” (Arjun Appadurai, Nicholas Thomas) and object-agency (Alfred Gell, Timothy Ingold, Ian Hodder), although this characterization is… Full Review

Within the past five years, art historians and others interested in the intersection of race and representation have benefited from several noteworthy publications examining the role of visual culture, both current and historical, in the construction of American identity. To this list—which includes John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier’s Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (Liveright, 2015), Sarah Lewis’s edited issue of Aperture entitled “Vision & Justice” (Aperture 223, 2016), and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019)—must… Full Review

Among premodern artists, Michelangelo is by far the most written-about individual. Through books, articles, and popular culture we are inundated with information and interpretation about him. While the onslaught of literature will and must continue, it is rare when a book offers a fundamentally new way of considering the artist. Christian K. Kleinbub’s book Michelangelo’s Inner Anatomies does just that. It offers meaningful and original investigations into Michelangelo’s sense of self and the meaning of his art. Kleinbub seeks to turn Michelangelo and his art inside out. Rather than looking at surfaces and outward appearance, Kleinbub investigates how Michelangelo might… Full Review

After closing for two years to undergo extensive renovations, the Seattle Asian Art Museum reopened in early February with Boundless: Stories of Asian Art—an exhibition that reimagines its existing collection and presents a timely intervention into the field of Asian art. Boundless foregoes curation based on linear histories, geography, and national borders, turning instead to a thematic approach that makes space for a more expansive conception of Asia. Criticisms of curating based on national, regional, or civilizational designations have often been lodged in art historical discourse on Asia; however, alternative approaches have been rarely realized. Historically, museums and exhibitions… Full Review

For a few decades now, immigration has been at the center of societal debates and political programs, at least in the Global North. Migrant artists are rarely mentioned in these discussions, perhaps because professional artists make up a relatively negligible segment of the total immigrant population. Conversely, however, it seems likely that nowadays a high percentage of those making a living by making art are migrants; the same goes for art historians. Marije Osnabrugge, the author of this timely book, for example, is a Dutch scholar working on a subject requiring long research stays in Italy, professionally based in Switzerland… Full Review

In La griffe du peintre, Charlotte Guichard offers a reflection on the painter’s signature in France during the long eighteenth century, both as a sign of artistic identity and as a bearer of value. She convincingly argues that the topic is best served by anchoring analysis at the intersection of various perspectives, simultaneously tracing a “material history of easel painting and a cultural history of signature” (25; all translations are my own). Together, these approaches constitute what the author calls an “anthropology of painting” (23), a method she advocates that proceeds from the network of the actors (artists, dealers… Full Review

In this extensive study on eighteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul, Ünver Rüstem examines the evolution of baroque architecture under the patronage of five consecutive sultans, from Ahmed III (r. 1703–30) to Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–89), concluding with the significance of building activity during the reign of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) at the close of the century. Rüstem’s book thus presents one of the few comprehensive and chronological surveys of an entire century of sultanic patronage in Istanbul. In each chapter, architectural details are relayed in singular specificity and each monument is discussed through the use of numerous primary sources, Ottoman chronicles… Full Review

Three recent exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) reflected an important shift in priorities for that institution. The first and largest, Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art, presented a selection of over seventy works from the Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida Collection as well as the BMA’s permanent collection. The exhibition was curated by Katy Siegel, the BMA’s senior research curator and Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Endowed Chair at Stony Brook University, and Christopher Bedford, Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at the BMA. Generations stands out as a significant contribution… Full Review

The initial sensation on entering Nick Cave’s installation Until is one of beguilement. Thousands of brightly colored wind spinners—metal discs cut with concentric designs that generate a holographic effect when in motion—hang on wire strands from ceiling to floor in a glittering thicket. The walls are netted with pony beads threaded into vivid designs: the word “power,” a hashtag, a red World AIDS Day ribbon, a rainbow. Skirting the wind-spinner forest, a pony-bead curtain cascades over the floor, leaving a bejeweled tideline. At the exhibition’s heart sits a gigantic structure that seems to float celestially, its underside shimmering with illuminated… Full Review

“Slave rebellions were a continuous source of fear in the American South, especially since black slaves accounted for more than one-third of the region’s population in the 18th century.” So begins the most current article on slave rebellions on the History network website. The writers can imagine a fear of rebellion but not the hopes embodied therein; they traffic in an actuarial metaphor, “accounting,” that subtly affirms that “black slaves” were indeed commodities; and they proffer a unit, “the American South,” that includes the slavers and their enablers but not the enslaved, whose resistance to slavery is just as… Full Review

In 2017, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art received a trove of 9,200 Polaroids taken by unknown artist April Dawn Alison (1941–2008). To use curator Erin O’Toole’s words, Alison was “the private feminine persona” of Alan Schaefer, a reclusive Oakland-based commercial photographer with a proclivity for short dresses, high heels, wigs, and jewelry, whose gender identity was known only to a few relatives and friends. The voluminous archive consists mostly of self-portraits taken in the artist’s two-bedroom apartment over the course of four decades. The photographs were discovered by artist Andrew Masullo, who purchased the archive from the liquidator… Full Review