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The figure of Diego Velázquez has dominated discourse on painting at Philip IV’s court since at least the late seventeenth century. Jusepe Martínez (ca. 1675), Antonio Palomino (1724), and other writers emphasized and reinforced Velázquez’s preeminence in the decades following his death. Yet in the 1620s, when Velázquez was a recent arrival in Madrid, fellow artists and connoisseurs often compared his works unfavorably with those of other painters. Scholars have recently shown that the rivalries surrounding Velázquez shed broader light on artistic theory and practice in Madrid. William Jordan’s Juan van der Hamen y León and the Court of Madrid… Full Review

Published in 1832, Fanny Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans was a sensation in England and a scandal in the United States. Basing her remarks on observations she made during the two years she spent in Cincinnati, Trollope claimed that "in America that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of." The greatest difference between England and America, according to Trollope, was "the want of refinement." By all appearances, Cincinnati's aspiring middle class took Trollope's criticism to heart. Wendy Jean Katz argues that during the antebellum period Cincinnati artists participated "in… Full Review

What if every new biennale mattered? Take Belief, for instance, the inaugural Singapore effort, which opened in September 2006. Headed by Fumio Nanjo, the new director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, Belief was curated by Nanjo and his three appointees: Roger McDonald, deputy director of Arts Initiative Tokyo; Sharmini Pereira, an independent curator based in London and Sri Lanka, and founder of Raking Leaves publishing; and Eugene Tan, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. The show was installed in over sixteen venues across town: from the National Museum to mosques, churches, and temples, from the defunct Tanglin… Full Review

One would think that by now gender studies would have made solid inroads into just about any artistic province. That is not, however, the case for Northern Renaissance art—and surprisingly so, considering the rich harvest its wonderful tradition of portraiture promises to yield. Andrea Pearson’s study is to be welcomed as one of the first to take up this task. Fluent with feminist theory’s non-essentialist, negotiated approach to gender and subscribing to the view that spirituality always is an embodied experience, Pearson is an excellent guide. Her aim is to demonstrate the “viability of gender methodologies” for the study of… Full Review

Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images. Essays by Richard Armstrong, Stephanie Barron, Roberta Bernstein, Sara Cochran, Michel Draguet, Thierry de Duve, Pepe Karmel, Theresa Papanikolas, Noëllie Roussel, Dickran Tashjian, Lynn Zelevansky. Ghent and Los Angeles: Ludion and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2006. 256 pp; 250 color ills.; 50 b/w ills. $60.00 (cloth) (9055446211) The impetus behind the exhibition Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the presence in the permanent collection of an iconic modernist painting, The Treachery of Images (1929), better known… Full Review

Recent years have witnessed a transformation of the field of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, as scholars have rejected a definition of the modern derived from French art, and investigated the specific contours of a British modernity and its visual modes. Tim Barringer has already played a significant role in this reappraisal , and his recent book, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, continues this conversation, making an important contribution both to the study of mid-Victorian visual culture and to the larger theoretical questions raised by recent scholars of Victorian art. The subject of … Full Review

At stake in this book are the very identity and stability of Byzantine art. Accustomed to understanding Byzantine art as a settled category, we often perceive this material culture as expressions of the powerful piety and pious power emanating from Constantinople. The authors of this book, however, perform a remarkable feat in undermining those perceptions to the point where new categories become possible. Remarkable is the persuasive power of their prose, which is measured, self-effacing, and lucid. Moreover, their book is methodologically unthreatening: The prose is streamlined, the notes are not fat, and the illustrations are many, often unusual and… Full Review

Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300 is a book of remarkable depth and range. In contrast with more typical media-specific studies of the past, Paul Binski has undertaken a study that considers the art of the period in an integrated and synthetic manner. Indeed, Binski’s approach not only considers a broad range of media but also a broad range of issues concerning the production and reception of his subject. This dense and complex analysis draws on a variety of methodologies, chief among them the historical and cultural theories developed by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. In order to develop… Full Review

Uniquely, this book, according to its jacket copy, “presents the hypothesis that the Bayeux Tapestry, long believed to have been made in England, came from the Loire valley in France, from the abbey of St. Florent of Saumur.” For those with more than just a general knowledge of the Tapestry (the assumed audience of this book), this claim will seem bizarre, if not mad! Beech, somewhat like Charles Darwin, “anticipated reactions of stupor and disbelief” (ix) before he put pen to paper, but preferred not to discuss his theory with friends and colleagues until after he had finished the book… Full Review

Pamela Patton’s Pictorial Narrative in the Romanesque Cloister addresses some large, wide-ranging questions that are of interest to all who work on the function and imagery of cloisters or indeed on medieval pictorial narrative in other contexts. The central question is one that has exercised medievalists for a long time: were there any Romanesque cloisters with coherent iconographic programmes? As Patton’s contenders have narrative imagery, she also asks what was the function of that kind of imagery and how was it viewed by the resident monks or canons. Both Ilene Forsyth (“The Vita Apostolica and Romanesque Sculpture: Some Preliminary Observations,”… Full Review