Browse Recent Book Reviews

The late antique city Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, was full of statues. Inhabitants and visitors to the city would have seen assemblies of sculpture on display in numerous public spaces throughout the city, in venues as varied as baths and civic basilicas, circus arenas and open forums. The collections were not only large, frequently bringing together dozens of individual sculptures, but they were also exceptionally varied, including subjects ranging from imperial portraits, to animals and traditional Greco-Roman gods, to abstract personifications. Perhaps most incredibly, however, is the fact that the vast majority of these statues, which were set… Full Review

Both these books are welcome; and for this reviewer, at least, there can never be enough material about Piero della Francesca if it helps draw us nearer to understanding a painter whose memorable, orderly art is a balm for the soul, and who still stands like a giant among the creators of the Renaissance. By his own admission, James Banker is less interested in the works of art than in the facts, some seemingly negligible, that create the context of the Quattrocento painter’s world. He is the historian, while Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is the iconographer, an acute interpreter of… Full Review

This volume is actually built more broadly than the title suggests: it deals in various ways with the whole lifetime of Giulio de’ Medici, rather than being narrowly confined to his incumbency as Pope Clement VII. One might superficially expect the volume to be of less immediate pertinence to the art historian than, say, Ashgate's splendid volumes devoted to the cultural world/politics of Cosimo I de' Medici and his duchess, Eleonora di Toledo. In fact, the scope of the essays is very wide in terms of historical, cultural, and critical concerns, and almost half of them—those collected in “Part 2… Full Review

As the field of American art emerged from second-class status in the 1960s, Wayne Craven’s wonderful volume on American sculpture helped define the field. Now, in this new book on Stanford White’s role as a decorator and antique dealer, Craven calls attention to a significant aspect of the American Gilded Age. Craven has produced a neat, careful volume documenting a half-dozen of White’s most opulent houses, those designed for William Collins Whitney, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, Payne Whitney, Clarence and Katherine Mackay, Henry Poor, and Stanford White’s own New York City house. The book allows for a closer study of… Full Review

“Every single standard-issue piece of mid-century modernist strategizing happened here,” says Michael Sorkin in the roundtable discussion appended to The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big. The book, a catalogue accompanying the homonymous exhibition held nearly two years ago at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, proves this claim beyond any doubt. Montreal not only thought big in the sense of pursuing large-scale urban projects intended to facilitate predictions of exponential population growth and geographic expansion, but it also experienced the kind of bold imagination that speaks to the sense of mission with which Montreal pursued its identity as an international metropolis… Full Review

Image, relic: our distinct terms may now imply discrete categories, but in pre-modern Italy such a division was often eroded, in practice. Think, for example, of the painted cross of San Damiano, which had addressed Francis as a young man and later became the property of the Clarisse. On the one hand, as Francis himself would later point out, it is nothing but paint and wood, inert; on the other hand, though, it was also seen as the discernible residue of a miraculous event. Both images and relics could thus embody the invisible—or they could be contained and even… Full Review

Prior to this study and annotated translation by Diana Chou, an Anglophone’s introduction to the person and work of Tang Hou would likely have been Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih’s Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). In that anthology, portions of Tang’s writings were excerpted and arranged thematically under headings such as “On Artists’ Styles” or “On Mounting and Collecting.” One of the significant contributions of Chou’s book is a complete translation. Here, in straightforward prose, we receive Tang’s slightly smug but well-intentioned instructions on how to become a superior judge of painting. We may… Full Review

Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s beautiful and richly illustrated Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in his Culture substantially revises conventional art-historical approaches to this iconic figure. Her book’s achievement is two-fold. First, it provides a way of thinking about Cézanne’s project that is not beholden to the stylistic shift that occurs in his work—between the paint-laden, expressionist, and couillard (“ballsy”) canvases of the work before the mid-1870s and the more neo-classical geometries of his later years—a shift that has largely structured accounts both of Cézanne’s oeuvre as well as of his biography. By avoiding an evolutionary narrative of his career, Kallmyer is sensitive… Full Review

From the moment of its supposed “discovery,” Europeans struggled to understand the Indies as place, a space embedded in networks of social and historical relations and reproduced through imaginative geography. Ilona Katzew’s book, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, derives from and examines visual examples of this tradition of imaginative geography. As with all geographies, this book is formed as a journey with an itinerary that guides the viewer/reader through both visual and textual material in an effort to examine the historical and social topography reproduced through cuadros de casta or casta paintings, a secular genre of painting… Full Review

The marriage of art history and economics, consummated through the study of art markets, has engendered myriad possibilities for the investigation of early modern Netherlandish art. Encompassing a complex and varied set of methodologies, economic histories of the arts have framed compelling new questions around the activities of artists, patrons, and dealers as cultural agents that tend to locate meaning in behavior rather than visuality. Larry Silver’s entrée into the field not only builds on his own earlier explorations, but also significantly reorients the kinds of questions asked and, by extension, the nature of the answers derived from the study… Full Review