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This book arrived for review one day after an issue of American Quarterly that reviews six books under the caption "Visualizing Nineteenth-Century American Culture," even though none of the books' titles include the word "visual" (51 [December 1999]: 895-909). Then an article in CAA's own Art Journal asked, "Who's Afraid of Visual Culture?" (58 [Winter 1999]: 36-47). Several days later the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art queried members about launching a new periodical called Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. Visual culture is in, and it is red-hot. The question this raises for me is… Full Review

Arguably, the "Sweet Land of Cyprus," to use the words of the early fifteenth-century chronicler Leontios Machairas, is culturally and visually one of the most complex parts of the medieval Mediterranean. The arts of medieval Cyprus, especially the thirteenth-century icon and monumental painting, formed a central part in the scholarship of the late Doula Mouriki. Medieval Cyprus contains fourteen lavishly illustrated articles encompassing visual material from Early Christian to the Venetian period and is offered as a tribute to Mouriki's memory and the wide range of her scholarship. The essays in the volume build on Mouriki's scholarship (outlined… Full Review

Here in San Francisco, every now and then a splendid mansion cracks in half, and beneath it appears an unexpected fault line. The mansion's architects call in the geologists, get down in the basement with flashlights, and try to remember enough of their old geology courses to understand whether or not the whole building has to come down. The architects are forced to start talking geology, wishing all the while they were back up in the light, doing what they trained to do. Noël Carroll's many books of aesthetics will interest art historians because aesthetics underlies art history… Full Review

Readers familiar with George Henderson's work on Gospel Books, the color purple, or the importance of opus sectile as a source for art in other media will find all three themes woven through the various topics covered in his new volume. This is an extraordinarily rich book that attempts to set the art of early Anglo-Saxon England within its broader religious and cultural context, both within the Insular world and in relation to late antiquity and the Early Christian church. The chapter titles promise a logical progression from subject to subject. The introduction is devoted to Early Christian… Full Review

On the cover of Esther Pasztory's 1998 book we witness today's most celebrated pre-conquest Maya sacrificer, Lady Xoc, performing the act for which she is most notable: the Maya noblewoman lets blood by threading a thorn-studded rope through her tongue. Shield Jaguar, her male consort and eighth-century lord of Yaxchilan, stands close by brandishing a torch that illuminates the sacrificial scene. In recent years the sculpted lintel with Lady Xoc and Shield Jaguar, Yaxchilan Lintel 24 has emerged as the veritable metonym for Maya, perhaps even pre-Columbian, art. For this reason alone the image makes a fitting cover for a… Full Review

The old Praeger World of Art series attempted to cover the history of world art with a large number of affordable paperbacks with color illustrations. David Talbot Rice's Islamic Art was a pioneering book in the series; published in 1965, it was revised in 1975. Never a particularly noteworthy introduction to the field, it did at least possess the virtues of being in print, affordable, and the only book of its kind. With the appearance of the two Pelican History of Art volumes on Islamic art, the first by Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar (1987) and the second by Sheila… Full Review

Isn't it puzzling that while people who study and write about, say, Shakespeare or Kafka call themselves literary critics, people whose work concerns Michelangelo or Matisse call themselves art historians? As someone who does call himself an art critic, and whose writing is primarily concerned with the work of artists who are or might be alive today, I find most writing--even some of the best of it--by those who call themselves art historians uncritical, precisely because it lacks the commitment to the hermeneutical encounter in the present which is the hallmark of criticism, and which is in no way contradictory… Full Review

Architectural history as often serves to mythologize celebrated architects as to examine their careers critically. The nineteenth-century Boston architect H. H. Richardson is a case in point. It was less Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer's pioneer biography, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, published two years after Richardson's death in 1886, than Henry-Russell Hitchcock's The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times of 1936, that is the key mythologizing text. Although Kenneth A. Breisch does not berate Hitchcock for his interpretive agenda, he does reexamine Richardson's buildings with respect to "his times." Breisch filters this examination through the series… Full Review

Jonathan Batkin's article on the early dealers in pueblo pottery, one of the most eye-opening in this valuable volume, also has one of the best stories: in a curio store in Santa Fe in the late nineteenth century, among the pottery rain gods (shipped in barrels of 100 at $6.50 the barrel), the beadwork and tambourines, the Jicarilla Apache baskets and Navajo silver, the owner claimed to be able to show you Ben Hur's trunk and the skull of Henry Ward Beecher "as a boy." It made me laugh, and it encapsulated what the essays in this volume reveal--and what… Full Review

Mark Johnstone's book follows in the tradition of earlier California surveys such as Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1977) and 50 West Coast Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in California (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1981) by Henry Hopkins. Focusing on Los Angeles, Contemporary Art in Southern California includes an introduction and individual entries on forty-three artists, each accompanied by several reproductions. The design of the entries and illustrations is somewhat repetitive, which means that the book is best consulted sporadically rather than read straight through. Many… Full Review