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Originally conceived in 1960 by French U.S.-based philanthropists Dominique and John de Menil, The Image of the Black in Western Art was “prompted” by what one of the project's patrons, Dominique de Menil, described as “an intolerable situation: segregation as it still existed in spite of having been outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1954” (Dominique de Menil, “Acknowledgements and Perspectives,” The Image of the Black in Western Art. Volume 1: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire, Fribourg, Switzerland: Office Du Livre, 1976, ix). Within the volatile social and racial politics of the 1960s and… Full Review

“My name is Talky Tina . . . and I’m going to kill you.” In 1963, Morton Bartlett, a freelance commercial photographer based in Boston, carefully disassembled and packed up the dolls of children he had painstakingly made over the previous twenty-eight years. He wrapped these painted plaster creations in newspaper along with the assorted outfits and undergarments he had designed and tailored for them, interring everything in wooden crates in a locked cabinet in his home. There they remained, consigned to darkness for decades, together with numerous graphite drawings of children and hundreds of photographs of his creations staged… Full Review

In Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture, Charles H. Carman argues against viewing Renaissance painting as a secular mode of representing material reality, one divorced from spiritual, religious, and theological worldviews. According to Carman, Renaissance culture was produced and consumed by people more religious and interested in theology than many contemporary scholars will admit. Naturalistic painting in the Renaissance, with its single-point perspective, was not about denying the invisible meanings behind observable reality. Instead, it was a way to represent divine ontology as well as enable spectators to… Full Review

Yves Pauwels quotes Victor Hugo in the subtitle of L’Architecture et le livre en France à la Renaissance: “Une magnifique décadence”? Hugo formulates the study’s question about the origin of architectural variation during the French Renaissance, specifically in the orders: the classical styles of architecture traditionally defined as Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite. Pauwels expands earlier essays to explore the diffusion of architectural treatises in sixteenth-century France as indispensable: first in mastering Vitruvius’s orders and, later, as a medium for creation. Pauwels’s book contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Renaissance architectural theory and treatises. If his argument… Full Review

Madame Cézanne was an unprecedented, likely once-in-a-lifetime exhibition that spotlighted Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Organized by Dita Amory, Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the show sought to revise misconceptions, especially about the artist’s affection, or lack thereof, for his wife, and reinvigorate general and scholarly interest in this group of work. To that end, it presented twenty-four of the twenty-nine known portraits of Hortense and contextualized them with less formal graphite sketches, watercolors, and one of her few extant letters. In addition, an… Full Review

The British interest in Claude Lorrain began during the artist’s lifetime. In 1644, an unidentified Englishman commissioned two of Claude’s landscapes: Landscape with Narcissus and Echo and A Temple of Bacchus (Humphrey Wine, National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth Century French Paintings, London: National Gallery, 2001, 88). By the beginning of the nineteenth century Claude had assumed an unassailable position, described by John Constable as “the most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw” (R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Discourses, Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970, 52). The influence of Claude on British art has perhaps not surprisingly generated… Full Review

In 1970, Nicholas Negroponte dedicated his book about computer- and robot-aided design “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture” (The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973, front matter). The book, a seminal collection of experiments and observations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is a primary document in the history of the digitalization of architecture from a moment when clear distinctions between hardware and software had yet to be established. The role of “machines” (including computer programs, projective screens, and mechanical arms) in architectural culture was urgently felt… Full Review

The latest book by Hendrik W. Dey examines the afterlife of the Roman city in the territories of the erstwhile Roman Empire until roughly the ninth century. As a scholar with multiple threads of training in classics, Dey writes his book with a strong archaeological research method that emphasizes the perseverance of urban paradigms of the Greco-Roman world beyond literary tropes or oversimplified economical and demographical analyses. The Afterlife of the Roman City looks in particular at monumental architecture and urban topography by highlighting their importance in the definition of the urban space as a place of ceremonial manifestations of… Full Review

Because the few grand tapestries of the early modern period that survive are frail and rarely exhibited, we forget that they were the most luxurious and prized of art forms among European elite, far costlier than painting or sculpture. So it is rare to encounter not one but four monumental Flemish tapestries in the remarkable exhibition Spectacular Rubens: The Triumph of the Eucharist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The four belong to a series of twenty tapestries, known as The Triumph of the Eucharist, commissioned in the 1620s by the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia, Habsburg princess and Spanish… Full Review

Jennifer L. Shaw’s Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals joins a group of recent publications on the female Surrealist artist Claude Cahun. However, this study is the first in-depth look at Cahun’s signature book, Aveux non avenus, written in the 1920s and published in 1930 in Paris. It appeared in English in 2008 as Disavowals: or, Cancelled Confessions, although the English title misses the double subtleties and punning play of “confessions” and “unconfessed” (trans. Susan de Muth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Shaw calls the book “Cahun’s manifesto” and argues convincingly that the artist saw it as an activist text… Full Review