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Tom Henry’s The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli looks to the past and the future. The product of the author’s decades-long engagement with the artist, the book is unabashedly an artist’s biography that aims “to embrace Signorelli’s humanity” (xiv). When Henry writes, “A man's work is, after all, the most satisfactory and reliable document for those who take the pains to decipher it—the autobiography which every man of genius bequeaths to posterity” (17), he echoes the first book in English on Signorelli, written by Maud Cruttwell and published in 1899, Luca Signorelli (London: Bell), a volume in the “Great… Full Review

Alex Potts’s ambitious new book, Experiments in Modern Realism, attempts to decenter and reconfigure dominant notions concerning the nature of art production in one of the liveliest periods in the history of art, roughly 1945–1968. At nearly five hundred pages and with numerous chapters and subheads, the book has the broad scope and episodic feel of a textbook, but it also has some of the rich texture and nuance of a volume with more specialist concerns. If Potts’s last book, the brilliant The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) (click here for review… Full Review

In the fall of 2013, scholars, artists, collectors, and art aficionados gathered in Washington, DC, for a two-day symposium to consider the role of Africa and its diaspora in the development of art in the United States (available as a webcast). Welcomed by Elizabeth Broun of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Johnnetta Cole of the National Museum of African Art, the event consisted of two days of panels interspersed with comments from respondents and complemented by the insightful opening remarks of the eminent art historian David Driskell. In short, the seventeen distinct papers reflected the breadth and depth… Full Review

The subject of this collection of eleven essays (plus two introductions) is exceedingly broad: in the words of co-editor Marcia B. Hall, it is "the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period" (1). Broadening the subject even more is her immediate qualification that "here 'sensuous' refers to the dictionary definition of the term: of, related to, or derived from the senses, usually the senses involved in aesthetic enjoyment" (1). In other words, this is not merely the "sensual"—that is, the sexually titillating—whose problematic presence in early modern religious… Full Review

It is a long way from the Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro to the sumptuous interior of the Frick Collection, where six of the panel paintings by the famously enigmatic Piero della Francesca for the high altar of Sant’Agostino were reunited. Yet the preciosity of these mid-quattrocento works in oil and tempera, some resplendent with gold leaf and fictive jewel-encrusted fabrics, was deceptively compatible with the luxurious neo-classical setting. That the secular venue and Piero’s religious images share a monumental imperturbability belies, however, the radically different ways in which the paintings would have been seen and understood by their… Full Review

Acting on Faith: The Confraternity of the Gonfalone in Renaissance Rome by Barbara Wisch and Nerida Newbigin is a rich, interdisciplinary study of the visual and material culture of the Confraternity of the Gonfalone, the largest and most prestigious lay brotherhood of Renaissance Rome. Focusing on the confraternity’s lavish art and architectural patronage, Wisch and Newbigin bring the spectacular public ceremonies, liturgical devotions, and broad charitable initiatives of the community vividly to life. Their study spans a tumultuous century for both church and city (1495–1584) and illuminates the sodality’s resilience and phenomenal growth in the wake of urban renewal, papal… Full Review

The concept of interdisciplinarity seems increasingly unavoidable in modern academia—but then, who would want to avoid it? As the relevance of the humanities is more and more frequently questioned, and cash-strapped universities are creatively reorganizing liberal arts departments in ways that might indeed encourage a widespread unification of intellectually contiguous disciplines such as art history, literature, and history, one has everything to gain in joining forces with colleagues across the disciplines. Art historians (especially in the field of Renaissance art) have of course been engaged for more than a century with interdisciplinary inquiry involving an integration of sources, contexts, and… Full Review

The 1970s is a decade whose image has not yet crystallized. As Rosalind Krauss reported at the time in “Notes on the Index,” seventies art in America was “diversified, split, factionalized” (October 3 [Spring 1977]: 68). Despite art history’s attempts to trace a clear picture that would bring this “willful eclecticism” into some explanatory order, the decade that followed the Minimalist and Conceptualist reductions of the 1960s and preceded the excesses of the 1980s continues to pose challenges to viewers and students of contemporary art. The Whitney Museum’s ambitious exhibition Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and… Full Review

For Westerners in the nineteenth century, and even for some today, art and architecture of ancient and far-flung peoples stood as evidence of cultural sophistication upon which to pronounce a global hierarchy of culture, from “primitive” societies of colonized peoples to their own advanced civilizations. The artworks considered most significant in determining that hierarchy were those classified as “monumental,” that is, elaborate architecture and stone sculpture. It was in this environment that Pre-Columbian arts gained scholarly attention. Explorers trekking through dense forests in Central America encountered awesome ruins of the stone and stucco Classic Maya cities, their plazas filled with… Full Review

In her introduction to Anglo-Saxon Art: A New History, Leslie Webster states that “the aim of this book is to give an accessible overview that covers the entire Anglo-Saxon period, placing it within a broader cultural and historical context, and incorporating the new discoveries and new thinking of recent years” (10). For an intended audience of beginning students and the interested public, Webster takes a thematic approach, with chapters entitled “Reading the Image, Seeing the Text”; “Rome Reinvented: The Early Inheritance”; “Rome Reinvented: The Impact of Christianity”; “Celtic Connections, Eastern Influences: Sixth to Ninth Centuries”; “Art and Power: From… Full Review