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Anyone familiar with the history of Bolognese classical Baroque art will appreciate the challenge of assembling a catalogue raisonné of the paintings and drawings of the Carracci, a family whose illustrious members included not only Ludovico, founder of a new school of painting, but also his younger cousins, Annibale and Agostino. The fact that Ludovico was the most unconventional and least understood of the Carracci clan makes Babette Bohn’s long-awaited, comprehensive, and lavishly illustrated monograph most welcome. Part of the series L’Arte del Disegno, it is a significant addition to modern critical studies of the Carracci and their drawings… Full Review

As many financially strapped theater chain owners will attest, the digital revolution—specifically in the form of DVDs, satellite and cable television, and widescreen HDTVs—has radically impacted film viewing and purchasing habits, transforming a once exclusively public activity into a far more pragmatic and private one. Not only are we able to reasonably simulate the spectacle of the movie-going experience within the comforts of our own living room at a fraction of the cost, but we are no longer bound by the etiquette of viewing films in unfolding real time surrounded by total strangers. We can pause, mute, and fast forward… Full Review

The first of four volumes that will contain the collected essays of the doyen of Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar’s Early Islamic Art has twenty selections. The fascinating introduction, which is too brief, explains how, starting as a medievalist, Grabar entered the field of Islamic studies. Arriving just at the end of the era when European imperialism dominated scholarship, he had the privilege, denied, alas, to scholars nowadays, to travel widely and do archeological excavations. In those days, “with slow mail, few airplanes, no television, expensive and unreliable telephones, radios that still needed electric plugs in walls . . ." (xxv)… Full Review

The exhibition Mir Iskusstva: Russia’s Age of Elegance at the Princeton University Art Museum coincides with several recent exhibitions on aspects of Russian art, mostly contemporary, that have been inspired by last year’s big Russia! show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The Princeton exhibition stands out, however, as a crucially important addition to the Guggenheim blockbuster, because it represents a major historic epoch in Russian art and culture that was almost overlooked by the organizers of the Guggenheim show. Mir Iskusstva, or World of Art, was not only the name of a group of artists formed around a periodical with… Full Review

SAFE: Design Takes on Risk managed to organize an unwieldy set of objects ranging from respirators for firemen, giant foil bags for temporary housing, manhole covers, and even disposable sheets for prostitutes who have to make beds on the fly. While curators Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini divided the exhibition into categories, it was the theme of safety and security, real or imagined, that unified the exhibition. The central problem the exhibition addresses is the difficulty in sorting out phantasms from real threats. Contending that most ”safety items” are ignored entirely or lie outside the realm of everyday attention—for… Full Review

As Victoria’s long reign drew to a close, John Everett Millais, who died in 1896, was probably the most widely popular artist in England, and George Frederic Watts, who lived on until 1904, the most respected. Millais was Sir Henry Tate’s favorite painter, and nine major paintings by him, ranging from the early Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia (1851–52) to later public favorites such as The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870), entered the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897, as gifts of the founder or his widow. Henry Tate owned no works by Watts, but between 1897 and 1903 the artist more than compensated… Full Review

Why do early Netherlandish paintings attract so much high-pressure interpretation? This has been a matter not just of an abundance and complexity of scholarly response, but also a repeated concentration on individual objects. While the gaze of current art history settles more readily on bodies of material (oeuvres, periods, themes, collections, etc.), the scholarship of early Netherlandish art has an abiding, though far from exclusive, taste for deep accounts of single paintings. The question rises anew with the appearance of Bret Rothstein’s Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting, which dwells chiefly on four famous works:… Full Review

The later phases of Jacques-Louis David’s career have received far less attention than his earlier work during the Ancien Régime and Revolution. Art in general during Napoleon’s Consulate and Empire has, perhaps surprisingly, been comparatively neglected until recently. Philippe Bordes’s exhibition and catalogue are an extremely valuable contribution to the reassessment of David’s later career and to an understanding of art in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Bordes, a professor at the Université Lyon 2, was the founding director of the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille and has published extensively on David and French… Full Review

To Delight the Eye is a charming exhibition of six major paintings and twenty-four drawings donated to the Fogg Art Museum by the Harvard alumnus Charles E. Dunlap (1889–1966). The exhibition, mounted by Alvin L. Clark, Jr., the Jeffery E. Horvitz Research Curator in the Department of Drawings at the Fogg, focuses primarily on artworks produced during the reigns of Louis XV (r. 1715–74) and his successor, Louis XVI (r. 1774–93), but extends into the nineteenth century with drawings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Clark has authored an accompanying brochure (Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series, no. 48, 2005) that summarizes the… Full Review

Russia! is the most comprehensive exhibition of Russian art since the end of the Cold War, and it presents an exciting journey through nine centuries of artistic development. The exhibition is the product of a collaboration between the Guggenheim Museum and three museums in Russia: the State Hermitage Museum, the State Russian Museum (both in St. Petersburg), and Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery. Private collections, museums, and galleries in Russia, Europe, and the United States also contributed to the exhibition, which showcases over 250 artworks. Many of the pieces displayed have either rarely, or never, traveled abroad. … Full Review