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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

Scholars of medieval art increasingly are investigating the modern vicissitudes of the objects and architecture they study. There is a wealth of work, for example, on neo-gothic imaginings of the Middle Ages, as manifest in nineteenth-century church restoration projects, the development of museums, and the construction of new buildings in medievalizing styles. But there are relatively few studies of modern attitudes toward manuscript illumination. This is surprising given the fact that contemporary scholars are so deeply indebted to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century collectors and enthusiasts for preserving, cataloguing, and inaugurating the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Christopher de Hamel’s examination… Full Review

Dada, a globalized art movement, has in the last ten or so years generated a genuinely global field of research. Once confined in the United States largely to Francophone interests, and in Europe to national domains matched between scholar and subject, Dada is now commonly investigated as an avant-garde tendency that set down roots around the planet. Exhibitions such as Dada Global (Zurich, 1994), Dada: L’Arte della Negazione (Rome, 1994), or the Paris version of the most recent survey, Dada (seen also in Washington, DC, and New York, 2005–2006), include contributions from Antwerp to Tokyo to Zagreb. Parallel to these… Full Review

In the last years of the nineteenth century, a group of glazed stonepaste (also known as fritware) vessels appeared in the showrooms of Europe and the United States. In the early years of the new century, scholars and connoisseurs started to associate the underglaze-painted and luster-painted wares with the ancient city of Raqqa in northeastern Syria. Largely abandoned since the mid-thirteenth century, the great walled city was at the time being repopulated by Circassians who, in the course of removing old bricks to build their houses, were uncovering large numbers of jugs, jars, and bowls. Although the bubble was to… Full Review

Roman architecture has inspired generations of architects, and of its types, temples have been particularly influential. The same was also true in antiquity, and, for that reason, temples, according to John Stamper, tell us a great deal about the religious, political, and social history of the Roman world. But while the Romans built temples throughout the Mediterranean, Stamper focuses only on those of central Rome: their religious, social, and historical backgrounds and their architectural history and relationships He begins with the sixth-century BC Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. From the beginning of the Republic through the late-fourth-century AD,… Full Review

Faute de mieux, the Republican form of government held France together during the last decade of the nineteenth century better than anyone would have guessed. How did art and artists of the period reflect, mediate, and express the major stresses and strains of that decade when the society felt the full impact of modernity? And how can this approach to art and society help bring coherence and meaning to the immense and varied artistic production of the period? These are the two challenges that Richard Thomson sets out to meet in his new book. In answer to these questions… Full Review

The use of mythological subjects in fourth- and fifth-century visual culture has attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years. It has always been accepted that gods and classical myths were commonly represented on late antique mosaics and silverware; the manufacture of statues and statuettes was, however, believed to have died out in the later third century. Recent studies by Niels Hannestad and Marianne Bergmann have demonstrated that small-scale statuettes—if not life-size sculptures—of gods and classical heroes were still produced in the fourth century (Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture: Conservation, Modernization, Production. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994; and Bergmann… Full Review

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) remains one of the most fascinating figures in the history of early twentieth-century American art, in no small part due to his extraordinary ability to act at once as a consolidator of boundaries and a boundary-crosser. In his best-known paintings, Hartley presented compelling images of American modernist, regionalist, and nationalist identity, iconic representations that seem to operate within the familiar parameters of place and character, just as they venture creatively beyond them. During the mid-nineteen-thirties, for example, Hartley developed a highly innovative compositional strategy in which he presented regional subjects so familiar that they were virtually interchangeable… Full Review

Julie Codell’s study of biographies and autobiographies of artists in Victorian Britain offers a significant addition to the understanding of artistic life in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Focusing on the category of “lifewritings,” she examines the intersection of artistic practice and publicity, showing how these texts both reflected the machinations of the art world and shaped popular conceptions about art’s social roles. Nineteenth-century Britain was obsessed with biography. Narratives of exemplary individuals’ lives were deployed and disseminated across Victorian culture for a variety of political and social ends. This was, after all, the era that produced the daunting sixty-three-volume … Full Review

Meyer Schapiro, eminent mid-twentieth-century scholar of Early Christian, medieval, nineteenth-century, and modern art, gave these six lectures on Insular manuscript illumination in 1968 as the inaugural series of the Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The lectures reflect a segment of Schapiro’s two decades of study on Insular art, most of the results of which were “published” as public lectures in various fora; only three, on specific issues, were sent to press in Schapiro’s lifetime. The impetus to publish the Walls lectures originated with Lillian Schapiro… Full Review