Browse Recent Book Reviews

The title of the volume Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism is captivating for an art historian: it promises an inquiry into the visual components of an important strand of Buddhist discourse. Instead, author Andy Rotman offers an interesting and thorough exploration of the “economy of dharma” in the Divyavadana (produced sometime during the first three centuries CE), with special attention to the role played by the act of seeing in the establishment of faith and devotion. Rotman digs deeply into the theoretical fabric of the Divyavadana; however, he does not include much background… Full Review

In Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics, Elizabeth Chang contends that as a place, a product, and an idea China provided a crucial counterexample to emergent modernist trends of visual and literary realism in Victorian Britain. She argues that, “In the century in which realism reached its greatest heights, the persistence with which authors and artists continued to invoke a defiantly antirealist aesthetic that they claimed to be Chinese demonstrates an aspect of realism’s development that has so far received little attention” (5). The use of the image of China as a foil that serves to reinforce Enlightenment… Full Review

In British Art and the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy, Douglas Fordham offers an original and provocative re-interpretation of the emergence of public art and art institutions in eighteenth-century Britain. Scholars have long noted that the 1750s and 1760s were marked by increasing concern about the development and institutionalization of a school of British art. “Why,” Fordham asks, “did the visual arts become a pressing national concern at this moment in Britain’s history?” (1) He argues that any answer to such a question must take into account the “transformative place in British culture” (2) occupied by the Seven… Full Review

The art world wants to be deceived. That is certainly the conclusion one comes away with after reading A Real Van Gogh, Henk Tromp’s thoroughly researched, highly readable, fascinating new book, which uses the history of van Gogh authenticity and forgery debates to discuss what happens in the art world when someone cries wolf. It is not a pretty picture for the expert who deigns to proclaim a work inauthentic. Tromp’s book does an admirable job of balancing a text that is rigorous in its academic research (use of primary source documents, copious citations, application of… Full Review

These three recent books explore an eighteenth-century British engagement with classical archaeology during a time when the practice was transforming from an early modern antiquarianism into a modern scientific discipline. Two of the books are monographic studies of the Society of the Dilettanti, an organization that became known for its support of unprecedented archaeological activity in Greece, while a third outlines how British subjects, some of whom were Dilettanti, undertook archaeological excavations on Italian soil and refurbished, sold, and bought the antiquities found there. In some measure, all the authors note this engagement as integral to shaping British cultural identity… Full Review

This sumptuously produced and lavishly illustrated volume celebrates the reopening of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Medieval and Renaissance galleries. It is not a traditional catalogue; readers in search of entries on specific objects are referred to the museum’s website. The director’s forward mentions several aims for the book, among them “to provide a stimulating introduction to the material culture of medieval and renaissance Europe” and to stand as a “new and original contribution to the literature on the art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” In these ambitious goals, presumably addressing the casual visitor and the specialist respectively, Glyn… Full Review

Until recently, the printed image in early modern England—the period 1500–1700 covered by Malcolm Jones’s The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight—has been the victim of neglect by scholars, leading to the false impression that early modern English culture was predominantly a textual instead of a visual one. It has been accepted as conventional wisdom that there were very few English prints from this era, and those that do exist are crude when compared to the staggering developments in other Northern European regions such as the German-speaking territories, France, and the Netherlands. Furthermore, English trained art historians… Full Review

Who really was Camille Silvy? This is one of the thorny questions that remains after reading Mark Haworth-Booth’s enthusiastic biography, Photography of Modern Life: Camille Silvy. Like most commercial photographers who set up portrait studios in the 1850s, Silvy combined elements of entrepreneur, charlatan, genius, and hack. French by birth, Silvy lived in London during most of his ten years of photographic activity where he carved out a reputation based on the hundreds of cartes de visite that he successfully marketed to London’s fashionable world and on a couple of landscapes that he exhibited to much acclaim in 1859… Full Review

This is a big book in every sense. In seven long and detailed chapters Noble offers nothing less than a survey and analysis of Byzantine and Carolingian theology around the question of the place of images in religious worship, with a dash of historiography thrown in for good measure. It is a thought-provoking study which places the issues in historical, political, and social contexts, and raises crucial questions about the relationships between Byzantium and the West. It is a book that should change the ways that we think about issues concerning art in the eighth and ninth centuries. Images,… Full Review

From the onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 until the end of the Second World War in 1945, artists in Europe and the Americas took positions in the struggles between parliamentary democracies, fascist dictatorships, and left-wing regimes. The single best-known artistic product of that historical moment is undoubtedly Picasso’s Guernica, which was hung in the modernist pavilion of the embattled Spanish Republic at the World Exposition in Paris in the summer of 1937. However, the Spanish display was overshadowed at that time by the towering neoclassical pavilion of National Socialist Germany and the dynamic masses of its… Full Review