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Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena is a wide-ranging attempt to identify several Sienese artistic commissions and individual motifs as politically meaningful, by which editors Timothy B. Smith and Judith B. Steinhoff mean, “the creation and deployment of visual art and architecture to embody political ideals, promote political agendas, or otherwise serve the concerns of government” (1). More precisely, the book concerns the role of art and architecture in the creation and promulgation of a civic identity for Siena. This is a laudable goal since the vast majority of Sienese art-historical literature has mostly ignored the subject… Full Review

The Romanesque cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos has long merited a scholarly study on the scale of Palace of the Mind: The Cloister of Silos and Spanish Sculpture of the Twelfth Century. Housed in a Benedictine monastery whose own history is deeply entwined with that of the Castilian kingdom, the cloister holds an enduring place in modern narratives of the genesis of Romanesque art. Its importance is owed both to the precocious, if somewhat controversial, documentation traditionally associated with it and to the exceptional sophistication of its sculpted capitals and pier reliefs, especially those of the cloister’s first… Full Review

Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere’s compact Vessels of Influence: China and Porcelain in Medieval and Early Modern Japan manages to contain three strikingly distinct chapters, as well as a long introduction that counts as a fourth component. Although the four segments are interrelated, it is easy to imagine that each would appeal to a separate reader for a different reason. Whether read in isolation or in sequence, they are highly informative concerning the impact of the long presence of Chinese porcelain—“vessels of influence”—in Japan. Rousmaniere’s book is especially important for introducing the findings of Japanese archaeologists and art historians—a realm of discourse… Full Review

In his book Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England, 1170–1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) (click here for review), Paul Binski writes perceptively about the complexity, quality, and originality of the sculpture of Reims cathedral. In his estimation, this body of art, from its corbels to its tympana, sets new standards for architectural decoration in subject matter, formal adventurousness, and expressivity. For the art historian wishing to probe Binski’s claims in greater detail, the sculpture of Reims provides a set of archaeological and interpretive challenges that are simultaneously compelling and daunting. One must look both… Full Review

The first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed several publications devoted to individual Chinese paintings. They hark back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Sherman Lee and Wen Fong collaborated to write Streams and Mountains Without End: A Northern Sung Handscroll and Its Significance in the History of Early Chinese Painting (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1955) and Chu-tsing Li wrote The Autumn Colors on the Ch’iao and Hua Mountains: A Landscape by Chao Meng-fu (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1965), two monographs that helped frame the study of Chinese painting in those and subsequent decades. The present crop of monographs on single… Full Review

Suffusing his working process, his subject matter, and his address to the viewer, violence is central to the montage-based work of the German artist John Heartfield. It is on clear display, for example, in the missing limbs, firearm, and prominent vagina dentata with which he and his fellow Berlin Dadaist George Grosz assembled the sculptural self-portrait The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Electro-Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture) in 1920. One witnesses it also in his 1928 poster The Hand Has 5 Fingers promoting the German Communist Party’s “List 5” in the upcoming Reichstag elections by way of threat, with a tremendous… Full Review

After eight years of intense study, research, conservation, and planning, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s former Islamic Art galleries were reinstalled and opened to the public in November 2011 under the name The Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. Navina Najat Haidar coordinated the reinstallation, with contributions by many members of the Department of Islamic Art, including senior colleagues Daniel Walker, Michael Barry, Stefano Carboni, and Sheila Canby. Almost twelve hundred objects are now on view in fifteen galleries, organized chronologically from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries, and covering a vast… Full Review

Until several years ago, Richard Spear’s 1971 exhibition catalogue, Caravaggio and His Followers (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art), defined the scope and limits of Caravaggio’s influence on painters in Rome and beyond. But since 2010, more recent exhibitions commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Caravaggio’s death have offered the opportunity both to evaluate new discoveries in the individual careers of Caravaggesque painters and to discuss anew the large and disparate group of followers. Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy is the fourth and last of a linked series of exhibitions dedicated to Caravaggio and Caravaggism, an initiative of FRAME… Full Review

Photography in Africa has long had a dual role as a tool of explorers and colonial officials and as a new “modern” object that slowly worked its way into the daily lives of many African peoples. It has been used extensively to document fieldwork in Africa, and in turn the photograph as a material image has become an important topic of study. Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, a collection of essays edited by Richard Vokes, is a valuable addition to the growing library of books about photography in Africa—which also includes Erin Haney’s Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books… Full Review

Shipwrecks have long attracted salvagers, archaeologists, and historians, offering precious but fragmentary evidence of broader cultural, political, and economic networks. The Westmoreland or Westmorland (so spelled in deference to early Spanish orthography and established scholarship), a British merchant ship that sailed from Livorno for England during the War of American Independence in 1778, was not sunk but captured by French frigates and escorted to Málaga, where her passengers were taken prisoner and her cargo—including books, prints, drawings, pictures, sculptures, music, fans, lava samples, and Parmesan cheeses consigned by British travelers—was confiscated as spoils of war. The story would have ended… Full Review