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The past decade or so has seen a steady march of publications—and particularly monographic studies—on Titian. Several exhibitions, beginning with the masterful show at the Prado (2004) and culminating most recently with the exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale (2013), have brought the artworks in dialogue with various themes (such as late style, artistic competition, replicas, etc.) and prompted the enormously helpful scientific evaluation of several pictures. These exhibitions included catalogues with the same titles: among them are Late Titian and the Sensuality of Painting (Venice: Marsilio, 2008) (click here for review); Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance… Full Review

The grotesque is not an easy concept to define. One of the strengths of Frances S. Connelly’s The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play is that she accepts this and turns it into a key observation: “Grotesques are by their nature intermixed, unresolved, and impure . . . and to represent them as fixed entities misses their most salient feature” (19). In her interdisciplinary study, the grotesque is analyzed as a leitmotif in modern, Western culture (mainly through visual art and literature) from around 1500 until today. Based on fundamental analyses in the field of art… Full Review

The term for sensory knowledge appears twice in the title of Jacques Rancière’s book—once in transliterated ancient Greek (the “genitive, third declension” aesthesis, meaning “perception via the senses”) and once in the Latinate form innovated by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750 (when he published the first volume of his Aesthetica), which Rancière takes in its adjectival form, aesthetic. There is a clue in this doubling that helps decode this strange and rewarding text: we need an “aesthetic regime of art” to make the space for “aesthesis,” a place of relative sanctuary where “sensible experience” can occur. The… Full Review

That the histories of photography and of the American West are intertwined is a truism in histories and theories of photography, one most frequently evoked in studies on expeditionary and geological survey photographs by such notables as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O’Sullivan. Rachel McLean Sailor’s copiously illustrated history of western regional photography does much to ground that truism in the particulars of the medium’s technological evolution and in the region’s events. Meaningful Places: Landscape Photographers in the Nineteenth-Century American West primarily concerns the kinds of photographs that populate local historical societies. These seemingly “uninteresting and uncomplicated” photographs… Full Review

In the Lombeek altarpiece in Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Lombeek (Belgium), created by artists from Brussels in ca. 1525, ornamental fields vary with the biblical subject matter of the figural scenes and, indeed, sustain a secondary discourse. As Ethan Matt Kavaler writes in Renaissance Gothic: Architecture and the Arts in Northern Europe, 1470–1540, “Forced to assimilate the tabernacles [above the figures] to the realm of human actors, [a] viewer might think of the visible world as a finite index of the divine matrix” (108). On the west facade of the Church of La Trinité at Vendôme (France), designed by Jean Texier… Full Review

This book originated in a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in London in June 2009, and the contributors have had ample time to finesse their papers. The editor is to be congratulated for his work in ensuring an improved and coherent collection of essays. He notes at the outset that the authors are “enthusiastic amateurs in the world of Gombrich studies, rather than scholars with the learning to assign him a fixed place in the historiography of art” (4). Given the sheer volume of Ernst Gombrich’s publications, let alone the material available in the Warburg’s archive of his work… Full Review

Fredrika Jacobs’s appealing Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy joins a wave of recent studies on the art of religious devotion in early modern Italy, offering yet another approach to this rich and rapidly developing field. (Full disclosure: my own contribution, Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire in Early Modern Italy, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.) Unlike, for instance, Marcia Hall’s The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) (click here for review), Jacobs’s book is not bound to the… Full Review

For at least twenty centuries before the European invasions of the 1500s, artists from the Pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States elaborated a wide range of elite objects with mosaic tesserae, including human and animal skulls, scepters, knife handles, diadems, pectoral ornaments, masks, disks, plaques, and jewelry for the ear, nose, and lips. Maya, Mixtec, Aztec, and Ancestral Puebloan artists fashioned the tesserae from a variety of culturally significant materials, including jade, turquoise, iron oxides, and many types of marine shell. Both native accounts and modern research have shown that these materials were selected primarily for their… Full Review

For nigh on fifty years, it has been fashionable to denounce mid-century urban renewal projects, as well as the planners and politicians who brought them into being. Even as the bulldoze-and-build movement reached its zenith in the 1960s, many Americans began to develop posthumous nostalgia for quaint, tumbledown neighborhoods that were rent asunder to make way for superblocks, highways, and modernist behemoths. This widespread sentiment gave rise to a cottage industry of screeds against urban renewal. Happily, the invective of a previous generation is now being displaced by more judicious analyses. To that end, architectural historian Elihu Rubin's … Full Review

Pamela A. Patton’s Art of Estrangement: Redefining Jews in Reconquest Spain makes an important contribution to the already rich field of medieval art and Jewish-Christian relations. Scholars such as Bernhard Blumenkranz, Michael Camille, Ruth Mellinkoff, Heinz Schreckenberg, Sara Lipton, Debra Higgs Strickland, Mitchell Merback, Vivian Mann, Nina Rowe, Herbert Kessler, and David Nirenberg, among others, have examined the ways in which Christian art expresses perceptions of Jews and Judaism.[1] As Patton points out, these studies focus primarily on northern European art. Patton expands the scope of this current scholarship by demonstrating that Iberian Christian imagery incorporated, altered, or resisted northern… Full Review