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In Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite, Barbara Burlison Mooney provides a critical, Marxist analysis of Virginia’s Tidewater plantation houses as expressions of Virginia’s eighteenth-century gentry culture. Mooney seeks to demonstrate that analyzing members of Virginia’s colonial gentry can reveal much about the mansions they created. As a result, the book deals less with issues of architectural design than with the social and cultural context in which the architecture was created. Rather than architectural history, her study is more a work of social history as it relates to architecture. In her introduction, Mooney establishes… Full Review

The exhibition J. M. W. Turner, recently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the first large-scale exhibition of the artist's work presented in the United States since the 1960s, and viewers paid the price, with a show that was too big and broad for most appetites. On my visits, the exhibition seemed to be challenging the stamina of all but the most devoted tourists and art historians. The problem was not only one of stamina. Seen in such quantity, Turner’s uniqueness is eclipsed. As is well known, Turner was famous for his performances during… Full Review

Looming before the visitor entering the recent Gustave Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was an enlargement of the artist’s striking The Desperate Man (1844–45), an image effectively representative of the artist’s intense effort to secure artistic fame without sacrificing his personal vision. Once inside the exhibition, the paintings themselves provided the chief drama in a curatorial endeavor that “sought to relocate Courbet’s work in the context of his time” instead of “attempting to formulate new hypotheses” (15). Organized thematically in roughly chronological order, Gustave Courbet began with the early role-playing self-portraits and ended with works produced during… Full Review

There is much to appreciate in Janet W. Foster’s The Queen Anne House: America’s Victorian Vernacular. First among these is the broad focus in her celebration of American residential architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which encompasses buildings across the country in a variety of geographic and social circumstances. Foster’s celebration is amply documented in the high graphic quality of this publication, particularly in the many full-page color photographs by Radek Kurzaj that lavishly present all of the twenty-two properties chosen for the catalogue portion of her project. One of the virtues of the… Full Review

The Memorial Shrines ritual complex of Jinci in Shanxi province is located at a sacred site where three mountain springs emerge to sustain the surrounding land and people. The Jinci complex is examined in The Divine Nature of Power through multiple methodological perspectives stemming from modern fields of archaeology; anthropology; art and architectural history; and political, social, and religious history. Through a careful reading and interpretation of surviving textual and physical materials, Miller reconstructs part of the complicated cultural history of this ritual complex. She uses a female water spirit of the Jin Springs and the historical/mythical figure of Shu… Full Review

In 1886, the twenty-year old Aby Warburg, scion of the Hamburg banking family, began to keep records of his book purchases. In the same year, he enrolled as a student at the University of Bonn to study art history, archaeology, classical mythology, and the philosophy of history. He spent 1888–89 in Florence, assisting August Schmarsow in the founding of a German art-historical institute. Apart from a subsequent stint at the University of Strassburg, he spent most of his life as a private scholar in Hamburg, with the exception of a long journey to the United States and specifically to the… Full Review

Paul Rehak’s Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius was unfinished at the time of the author’s lamentably premature death in 2004. The manuscript was subsequently prepared for publication by his longtime partner and colleague at the University of Kansas, John Younger. In its present version, the book offers a concise study of the major Augustan monuments of the northern Campus Martius in Rome, particularly the Mausoleum, the Ustrinum (cremation site) of Augustus, the Solarium (sun calendar), and the Ara Pacis, the emperor’s famous altar of Peace. It advances the thesis that this part of the city was… Full Review

Charlene Villaseñor Black’s Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph is a long overdue examination of the social and cultural functions of images of Saint Joseph in Baroque Spain and Mexico. As the author herself reminds us, “Hispanists have long been engaged in recovering archival documents, producing monographic studies, and documenting artistic patronage. . . . Whereas Spanish court art, mythology, still life, and collecting have been explored in depth, less scholarly attention has been directed to the thousands of Madonnas, Crucifixions, saints and martyrs represented in Spain and the Americas” (14). This lack of attention to religious subjects in Hispanic… Full Review

“Pre-modernism” as a term may not become standard usage; its multiple meanings quickly become unmanageable: a phase that comes before modernism temporally, predating its practices and assumptions; modernism avant la lettre, suggesting a longer historical genesis; and modernism not as something historically specific but instead a matter of certain structural relations between artists, critics, discourses, and audiences. “Pre-modernism” also raises a number of questions. Does modernism refer to a style—a specific artistic language? Or to a set of ideological assumptions about the relationship of the aesthetic to the social and cultural realms? Or to a particular critical tradition that… Full Review

This ambitious, multi-authored volume brings to fruition nearly ten years of academic effort. The two editors, who are in fact responsible for over two-thirds of the book, set out to question and, ultimately, to discredit a deeply entrenched set of scholarly habits. They argue persuasively that there can be no rigid division between “Dutch” and “Flemish” architecture in the early modern period. As Konrad Ottenheym demonstrates in an impassioned introduction, such a division was only imposed in the nineteenth century, when scholars serving the new states of Belgium and the Kingdom of the Netherlands dutifully invented national architectural traditions. This… Full Review