Browse Recent Reviews

Yukio Lippit’s fine book examines the ways in which certain leaders of the Kano house (or school) in seventeenth-century Japan adapted to competition and enhanced the prestige of its painters and, ultimately, of the painting profession as a whole. By the 1600s, the Kano were part of a society in which warriors had placed their status group at the top of a rigid social hierarchy with some room for movement below but not up into it. The structure was not, however, all-encompassing, nor did it absolutely determine matters of prestige, wealth, and influence. Members of the nobility and monks, for… Full Review

A major exhibition of Édouard Manet’s portraits was already a gleam in Lawrence Nichols’s eye from the time in 1992 when he joined the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA). What sparked the idea was the handsome portrait of Manet’s close friend, Antonin Proust (1880), donated to the museum in 1925, having passed through just one French collection after that of the sitter. The TMA’s portrait project was developed into a collaboration with the Royal Academy in London, where the active participation of MaryAnne Stevens gave it the particular character revealed in the catalogue and essentially in the larger, London version… Full Review

Jagged peaks surrounded by swirling mists, pavilions perched precariously on cliffs, wise old men walking along winding, narrow paths: such motifs may conjure the stereotypical image of a traditional Chinese painting for many contemporary viewers. Indeed, many of the fifty-odd works displayed in The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in 17th-Century China fit this bill. Yet the curators of this exhibition—Peter Sturman, Professor of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Susan Tai, Elizabeth Atkins Curator of Asian Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art—successfully narrate the politics and human emotions invested in such landscapes… Full Review

The first painting viewers see upon entering the Los Angeles County Museum’s (LACMA) elegantly mounted exhibition, Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy, is an anomaly in the Baroque master’s oeuvre. One of the very few portraits that is now securely attributed to Caravaggio (after years of debate), it depicts Cardinal Maffeo Barberini who eventually became Pope Urban VIII. The youngish cardinal is shown seated against a typically Caravaggesque shallow and dark background, wearing delicately sketched, diaphanous sleeves and bisected by a sinuous, horizontal streak of red satin along the inside of his sober but sumptuous robes. Along with… Full Review

Originally published in 1979, Vicente Lleó Cañal’s Nueva Roma: Mitología y humanismo en el Renacimiento sevillano represented a breakthrough in the history of Spanish art. Along with Jonathan Brown’s Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), Nueva Roma was among the first sustained discussions of the social and intellectual bonds forged among Sevillian men of letters, artists, and patrons. Lleó also charted new territory by exploring how humanistic learning informed local architecture, painting, sculpture, and broader aspects of visual culture. In the decades since the book was originally published, scholars have made great strides in… Full Review

In 1839, when François Arago first presented the photographic processes of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Nièpce to the French Chamber of Deputies, he declared photography’s utility to the field of archaeology. Thus, photography’s link to archaeology was recognized almost from the outset. In his new book, Photography and Archaeology, Frederick N. Bohrer specifically argues that photography maintains an archaeological way of seeing. As these fields developed through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bohrer argues, they symbiotically influenced each other in a number of ways. He focuses mostly on the roles of photography in the “object-based” practice of archaeology… Full Review

Near the end of her new study on the group portraits of Henri Fantin-Latour, Bridget Alsdorf notes: “The history of nineteenth-century French art is a field fascinated by movements and collective politics, yet still dominated by accounts of singular artists and oeuvres. Although we depend on groups to give structure to history, as artists depended on them to provide camaraderie and support, it has proved difficult to imagine the artistic self as formed fundamentally by way of others” (227). Her book Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting goes a long way toward rectifying… Full Review

The exhibition catalogue for Diego Velázquez: The Early Court Portraits is the third published in an ongoing partnership between the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, Texas. Each year visitors to the Texas museum are treated to a new, small exhibition that centers on a work brought to the United States from Spain. El Greco and José de Ribera starred in the first two installments of this series, and in 2012 it was Velázquez’s turn, represented by the Prado’s important early full-length Portrait of Philip IV (ca. 1623–28). The choice could… Full Review

Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections caa.reviews On the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of caa.reviews, it is my great pleasure to introduce a new series of review essays authored by members of the journal’s Council of Field Editors under the rubric “Re-Views: Field Editors’ Reflections.” For some time, members of the caa.reviews editorial board have expressed their desire to increase the number of essays we publish. At the CAA Publications Committee session I organized and chaired at the annual conference in February of this year titled “Book Reviews and Beyond: caa.reviews at 15,” the panel (consisting of past… Full Review

Patricia Emison's The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory examines some of the most celebrated works of art of the Italian Renaissance. Its itinerary is not based on a linear, chronological trajectory, but rather on salient issues and works that have defined the field of early modern art history. Emison establishes her objectives in the introductory chapter, stating that her book addresses students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to learn more about specific topics as well as a more general audience interested in acquiring a broader knowledge of this extraordinarily rich period in the history of art. In Emison's own… Full Review