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This book is a collection of nine essays and a short preface analyzing some aspects of the connections between Philippe de Champaigne, the convent of Port-Royal, and Jansenism. The editor, Marianne Cojannot-Le Blanc, contributed two essays; the last one (“La Foi et les œuvres. Postface sur l’œuvre peint de Philippe de Champaigne et ses possibles liens avec la spiritualité de Port-Royal”) functions as a postscript. It provides a useful context for the collection by summarizing the literature and explaining the approaches scholars have used (in the past and here) while proposing Cojannot-Le Blanc’s own interpretation, to which I will return… Full Review

Assyrian relief sculpture forms well-known parts of the collections of several major art museums. Lesser known, perhaps, is the fact that many smaller institutions can also boast of collections of these antiquities. Unfortunately, the sculpture at these smaller museums has not often been fully researched or even adequately published. Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography goes a considerable way toward remedying this situation with respect to the materials from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In addition to dozens of large, high-quality color photographs of the Hood's sculpture, Assyrian Reliefs also includes nine… Full Review

Writing in the 1930s, Italian artist, writer, and musician Alberto Savinio described the invention of photography as “a moment of transformation in the history of humanity that in some ways surpasses the conquest of Constantinople and the discovery of America” (quoted in Diego Mormorio, Una invenzione fatale, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985, 13). Although Savinio comes close, it is hard to overstate the importance of the ways in which photography offered entirely new ways of seeing the world to an unprecedented number of people. The new medium’s cultural impact in Italy was profound, and the country (unified only in 1860 and… Full Review

In this tiny volume Paul Barolsky seeks to demonstrate the “powerful influence of fiction in the history of art and the history of the artist” (ix). Although modern art-historical scholarship has, since its inception in the nineteenth century, emulated the scientific method (in order to establish its legitimacy as an academic practice), Barolsky finds fault with the consistent use of this approach when dealing with many of the primary sources that serve as the basis for evidence. He contends that, in the past, imaginative literature contributed greatly to the history of art and that scholars have often taken it at… Full Review

The image of a donor holding an architectural model is a familiar feature in medieval art, and yet it is a deceptively challenging subject for comprehensive study. While there are many preserved examples in a variety of media spanning the entire Middle Ages, there are also many documented, but now lost, examples for which both the date and compositional elements are often questionable. In short, the record is far from complete. Even among the extant representations, the ways in which the buildings are depicted range widely, both in terms of viewpoints (i.e., from the side, front, or back) and of… Full Review

The sixteenth-century painter, architect, and print designer Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526–1609) has not been ignored by recent art history. Two exhibitions—in Antwerp and Schloss Brake—in 2002, an international symposium in 2004, with catalogues, proceedings, and other publications and detailed studies of parts of his oeuvre, edited by Heiner Borggrefe, Piet Lombaerde, and others, have secured the artist’s firm position in the current view of northern Renaissance art history. Christopher P. Heuer’s The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, is the first book-length… Full Review

Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture by Sonya S. Lee is the first book-length study of the nirvana image in Chinese art, examining carefully chosen works from the sixth to twelfth centuries. In her exploration of this motif, which represents the final extinction of the historical Buddha Śākyamuni, Lee’s methodological approach mediates the interactions between the monastic community, lay patrons, and artisans in articulating the particular resonance that this motif had in China, where it materialized in a broader range of architectural, material, and visual forms than had been the case in South and Central Asia… Full Review

In texts and poetry of ancient China, the Yellow Springs refers to the subterranean realm of the dead and was thus “the imagined location of innumerable graves” (7). Wu Hung’s Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs presents a long-awaited synthesis of developments in tomb art in China from the Neolithic period through the Song Dynasty, or the third millennium BCE though the fourteenth century (and in some instances, even into the succeeding Ming and Qing dynasties). Such broad, sweeping studies are rarely attempted, but the core of this book is in fact a compilation of some three decades… Full Review

In Writing Art History, Margaret Iversen and Stephen Melville have produced a timely book. It is neatly paradoxical. It worries about the “professionalization” of art history in research universities. Its principal readership, however, will be professional art historians in research universities. It protests pedagogical methodologism in art history—the reduction of theory to teachable methods, or “methodology.” But its own method of deconstructive close reading and rhetorical analysis is conspicuous. It has been widely legitimated as one way—maybe the best—to read good writing in the history and criticism of art, “theory” or not. These tensions are not fatal, however. They… Full Review

Contemporary Korean art has garnered a place in the narrative of Western contemporary art with Nam June Paik and Ufan Lee, who had retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and 2011, respectively. Although both were born in Korea, they left at a young age. Along with these two stars, the recent story of contemporary Korean art has focused on Lee Bul, Do Ho Suh, and Kimsooja, among others, who have likewise attracted attention at international art institutions and fairs in recent years. Generally excluded in the Western narrative are the talented young or established artists who live and… Full Review