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Patricia Ann Berger’s Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China is not just the first monograph on court art of this period in Western language, but also a much-needed contribution to the study of Manchu court culture in general, an area enjoying something of renaissance in the last decade. Like recent publications by cultural historians, Berger’s work could be read as contrasting the “cynical” view on Manchu rulers, a view that dismisses the emperors’ cultural projects or religious practices as purely political manipulation or that explains them as a result of the rulers’ personal obsession with… Full Review

On June 9, 1311, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà was placed on the high altar of Siena cathedral. A mid-fourteenth-century Sienese chronicle describes its first presentation to the city: bq. On the day on which it was carried to the Duomo, the shops were locked up and the Bishop ordered a great and devout company of priests and brothers with a solemn procession, accompanied by the Signori of the Nine and all the officials of the Commune, and all the populace and all the most worthy were in order next to the said panel with lights lit in their hands,… Full Review

Writing historiography is one of the most self-revealing acts an art historian is likely to perform. That is probably why many eminent scholars have kept well away from it. To confront Giorgio Vasari’s personal prejudices, jealousies and hatreds, and silences and suppressions of fact is to come into critical conflict with the mainstream of art-historical interpretation—the lengthy, authoritative tradition of credence given to the biographer. Paul Barolsky found his own gentle and inimitable way around this problem in his valuable monographic reassessments of the literary themes in Vasari’s Vite. For most scholars, however, the way to expose Vasari’s animus… Full Review

The most substantial studies on the art and politics of Nazi Germany in English have been written, with few exceptions, by historians. Why art historians have not taken a stronger interest presumably has to do with a strongly rooted aversion to cultural artifacts so closely associated with modern dictatorial power, so alien from the things the profession has tended to think possess cognitive interest and aesthetic appeal. In any case, the longstanding discrepancy between the attention given to National Socialist Germany by historians and its neglect by art historians continues to exist. At a CAA Annual Conference session on German… Full Review

Capitalizing on a trend that has figured prominently in recent art-historical studies, Debra Higgs Strickland’s new book investigates the place of the Other in the art of the Middle Ages. She structures her tale around an ideological assertion that will be familiar to scholars of the medieval West: namely, that for theologians and artists in this period, the non-Christian was effectively nonhuman. Strickland’s study demonstrates how this ideology of dehumanization haunted medieval imagery in ways that are not always consistent or logical when viewed from the vantage point of the modern viewer. This simultaneous need for and hatred of outsiders… Full Review

Beauty returns and is redeemed (perhaps) in Arthur C. Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. The central concepts and examples, especially Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, will be familiar to those who know the philosopher’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). The readable Abuse of Beauty, based on the Paul Carus Lectures that Danto presented to the American Philosophical Association in 2001, connects earlier points—his query of… Full Review

The catalogue raisonné is art history’s effort to associate itself with Enlightenment science. Identifying the complete production of a particular artist according to a consistent, authoritative, reasoned taxonomy, this kind of publication has long been a staple of academic art history. So it might surprise some to know that this volume is the first time a catalogue raisonné has been dedicated to the work of a photographer. The project has required its authors—representing the combined resources of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford, England—to face up to… Full Review

The goal of the organizers of the first Clark Studies in the Visual Arts conference in 1999, which resulted in this book, was simple enough. It was “to move the discussion [of the curator-academic divide] into a new and, we hope, less contentious phase, to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the respective practices and goals of the two art histories and of how each of them is engaged in the production and dissemination of art historical knowledge” (xii–xiii). In the introduction, editor and conference co-organizer Charles Haxthausen interprets the large audience and “spirited exchange” as evidence of the… Full Review

Books are valuable for many reasons. Some tell good stories or offer different ways of thinking, while others help us to understand the evolution of a field. Jules Prown’s new collection of essays does all this and more, lifting the curtain on the life of a renowned art historian and a pioneer in material culture analysis. It is as if Prown beckons us aside, whispering secrets to his scholarly success: “Look closely, think broadly, and avoid narrow categories. Most important, change and grow.” Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture demonstrates how research can shimmy and shift, veer… Full Review

The Morgan Old Testament (New York, Morgan M638, also known as the Morgan Crusader Bible, the Morgan Picture Bible, the Maciejowski Bible, and the Shah ‘Abbas Bible) is an extraordinary illuminated manuscript in the mid-thirteenth-century French Gothic style. Almost certainly made for or within the entourage of the crusader, Louis IX of France (1226–1270), or “Saint Louis,” the manuscript comprises a pictorial narrative of the early books of the Bible, from Genesis 1 through 2 Kings 20, and emphasizes the martial history of the Israelite advance on the Holy Land in a way that was “inspired and inflected by the… Full Review