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The architecture of the Amun temple holds an exceptional significance in the study of ancient Nubia. As in Egypt, kingship in Nubia was strongly associated with the Amun cult; yet, unlike their counterparts in Egypt, the Amun temples of Nubia were consistently built of friable sandstone, frequently located in regions of much higher rainfall, and often inscribed in a Meroitic language not yet intelligible to modern scholarship. As a result, deductions about a given Nubian locale’s political and economic role within the state have often been based heavily upon its public architecture, and the function of that architecture has in… Full Review

With the Culture of Diagram, John Bender and Michael Marrinan have written a complex and ambitious study examining the transformation of perception and cognition over the past two hundred and fifty years. How do we describe our world, they ask, and how has that process of description changed since the mid-eighteenth century? While Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, provides the starting point for their investigation, Bender and Marrinan examine subjects including the development of French history painting, theater design, linguistics, descriptive geometry, Cubist drawings, and quantum mechanics. This partial list of their dizzying… Full Review

Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting is a thoroughly researched biography of John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and featured in the recently opened Art of the Americas wing. This canonical American painting portrays the four daughters of Sargent’s friends Edward (Ned) and Mary Louisa (Isa) Boit in the front hall of the family’s apartment in Paris. This book, presented as a biography, traces the life of the painting, from conception and production to exhibition and reception, and provides a detailed account of its… Full Review

Courts and Courtly Arts in Renaissance Italy, an Italian edition of which was published in 2010, draws together the work of twenty-four recognized Italian scholars into an ambitious examination of the historical context and artistic production of the best-known courts across Italy from the end of the fourteenth century, a critical period of consolidation, to 1530, the year Charles V’s coronation in Bologna effectively rearranged the power structures across the peninsula. Although explorations of individual Italian courts such as those of Milan or Florence abound and have been followed by regional investigations, Courts and Courtly Arts provides a broader… Full Review

Walter Melion’s The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625, like the early modern works it studies, calls for a disciplined eye and close reading. Although the text is quite lengthy and includes numerous Latin references, it is neither dry nor tedious to read. Nonetheless, it is demanding. For readers willing to face the challenge, Melion’s book reveals the complexities and nuances of early modern visual piety in a fresh and powerful manner. Not only does it provide a new interpretation of prints seldom studied, it also encourages readers to examine artistic and devotional practices linked to… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road celebrates a 2007 gift from the Wilson Centre for Photography to the J. Paul Getty Museum of more than eight hundred photographs by the Italian-born photographer Felice Beato. The gift tripled the size of the Getty’s Beato holdings, making it the world’s largest institutional collection of his photographs, which almost exclusively depict subjects in Asia and the Near East. The exhibition catalogue features 120 of these photographs, organized chronologically to showcase Beato’s long and productive career. Framing this work are informed and thoughtful commentary by Anne Lacoste, assistant curator… Full Review

Walter Gibson’s latest book investigates aspects of the relationship between word and image in early modern Netherlandish art. Although his subject is the depiction of proverbs, he does not dwell on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting in Berlin that depicts more than one hundred proverbs set in a human landscape. Rather, he discusses the general phenomenon of the reliance on proverbs in Netherlandish culture, charting the rise of proverb books and the use of proverbs in several literary genres. Gibson then introduces a series of case studies, some drawn from earlier publications but revised for this venue. The… Full Review

With Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, Stephanie Leitch adds her distinct voice to the vast literature locating a critical epistemic shift in Europe ca. 1500. That she chooses the words “early modern” for her title is certainly deliberate in viewing this period as one of nascent modernity in its self-consciousness, broadening awareness of cultural relativity, use of the printing press, and emphasis on empirical observation (whether actual or feigned) for truth-claims. Leitch’s great contribution begins with the observation that although early modern Germany at the turn of the sixteenth century was not among the first European powers to… Full Review

Michael Marrinan’s Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 is an extraordinary book: highly interpretive and synthetic, sprawling in the breadth of visual culture it surveys, yet very readable and entertaining. Those familiar with Marrinan’s previous publications might expect an emphasis on Romantic painting, and there is plenty of that; but this book integrates painting and the pictorial arts into a sweeping narrative that includes museums, collecting, urban planning, architecture, sculpture, artisanal and industrial objects, dioramas, arcades, and more. It relates visual culture to politics, memory, emerging forms of public and private life, and new modes of commerce, industrial… Full Review

Paul Crowther’s Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics. The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history. Crowther’s approach might be called the “phenomenological depth theory” in so far as “depth” is a word with which he appears fascinated. The main theoretical issues are addressed in the second chapter, whereas the first turns present-day art history into two phantom camps—the one defined as “reductionist” as against the other, Crowther’s, which focuses on a… Full Review