Browse Recent Book Reviews

This book is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. It documents 175 objects drawn from a variety of media. The catalogue is meant to be of interest to the general public who viewed the exhibition, as well as a useful reference for students of Chinese art history, complete with Chinese character lists and an extensive bibliography. The general editor of the book, Yang Xiaoneng, also is the curator of the exhibition. Yang's… Full Review

James Cooper believes in art. In his book, which amounts to a manifesto long on assertion and short on argument (as befits manifestoes), Cooper holds up the canvases of the Hudson River School as a standard for cultural renewal. His arch-principle is that the arts carry a culture's moral, spiritual, and aesthetic values such that as the arts go, so goes the culture. This idea operates in the book as a traditional American jeremiad that both critiques modern history and heralds the opportunity of rebirth. Cooper promotes what amounts to a form of cultural theurgy: If the arts are an… Full Review

This book forms part of the New Cambridge History of India's commendable effort to integrate art history into its historical concerns. It was preceded by three earlier volumes, Architecture of Mughal India (Catherine B. Asher), Mughal and Rajput Painting (Milo C. Beach), and Architecture and Art of Southern India by one of the authors of the present volume (George Michell). The volume amply fulfills the agenda of the Cambridge Histories laid down in the general Editor's Preface, namely not only to "record an existing state of knowledge" but also "to focus interest on research" and to provide "stimulus… Full Review

Power is a front-burner issue in the postmodernist age, and scholarship from the last two decades mirrors this preoccupation. From that standpoint this is a timely book. Karen Gerhart explains (144-145) that the first half of her title, The Eyes of Power, refers simultaneously to the act of looking at the trappings of power, the process of giving visual form to power, and the gaze of power that observes the observer--a melange of ideas perhaps inspired by Foucault's notion of surveillance. In The Eyes of Power, Gerhart eschews the time-honored artist-and-oeuvre model in favor of a… Full Review

Mary Ellen Miller's Maya Art and Architecture is the first textbook in English on Maya art written by a major scholar of the Maya. It is, therefore, a milestone in the dissemination of knowledge about Maya art, particularly in a classroom setting, where this book will be most useful. That a book published in 1999 deserves this honor may come as a surprise since the study of Maya art is one of the more established in ancient New World art history. As Miller points out in her introduction, although systematic treatments of Maya art, such as Herbert Spinden's A Study… Full Review

"Reader, if you wish to hear briefly what is contained in this work, know that Poliphilo tells that he saw remarkable things in a dream, hence he calls the work in Greek words 'the strife of love in a dream'. He represents himself as having seen many ancient things worthy of memory, and everything that he says he has seen, he describes point by point in the appropriate terms and in an elegant style: pyramids, obelisks, huge ruins of buildings." With these words, Francesco Colonna introduces his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in 1499, at the closing of the age of the incunabulum… Full Review

When Giovanni Rucellai wrote that spending surpassed earning as one of the great pleasures in life, he surely expressed the sentiments of many wealthy Florentines in the second half of the 1400s. Certain forms of conspicuous consumption had become acceptable now that the successful merchants, and the humanists they supported had adapted the Aristotelian notion of magnificenza to their own circumstances. The display of wealth became praiseworthy when it embellished the city and especially the houses of worship; the pursuit of beauty contributed to the honor of public and private patrons. The desire to earn similar praise presumably led the… Full Review

This is a book about how works of art are made, how images and design motifs originate, and how artists think. By grappling with these issues, Lothar Ledderose performs a great service to the field of Chinese art, which has come to focus most of its energies on problems of reception, socio-economic factors, and historiography. Although Ledderose makes no such claim, his book can be read as a radical reorientation, a shifting of the focus of study away from the audience/receiver to the producer/artist. And although it is completely free of the jargon of critical theory, this is a profoundly… Full Review

It is curious that Peter Paul Rubens's relationship with Spain has never received monographic treatment. Certainly the Flemish artist's most notable commissions for the Spanish Hapsburgs have been analyzed in the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard series: relevant volumes include those on the portraits of the Spanish monarchs, their families, and members of their court (Frances Huemer, 1977; Hans Vlieghe, 1987); the Triumph of the Eucharist tapestry series (1627-28), commissioned by the Archduchess Isabella, daughter of Philip II (Nora De Poorter, 1978); the program of arches and stages for the triumphal entry (1635) of the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand (John Rupert Martin… Full Review

The Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) Library, a collection of more than 50,000 catalogued images of art works held in 26 North American museums, is a wonderful thing--but perhaps not the thing everyone might want it to be. A teacher might want such a collection to supply the images needed for standard art history courses. A researcher might want it to provide a catalogue to the vast holdings of these museums. When something is new and different, we often attempt to understand it using familiar models--in this case the slide collection or the catalogue of a museum's permanent collection. However… Full Review