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In this volume, Catherine Karkov examines the textual linkages and visual stratagems that unify Oxford, Bodleian Library Junius 11, an anthology including the Old English verse Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. Karkov presents the imagery of Junius 11 in the context of eleventh-century learning and proposes a new and more sophisticated understanding of the relationship of text and image, where the images' performance as a commentary on the text depends on the audience's access to a "complex and highly learned intertextuality" (6). In doing so she raises the level of discourse both for Junius… Full Review

The late Craig Owens began his 1979 review of Robert Smithson's collected writings[1] with a gloss on a passage from the artist's "A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art," which, Owens noted, fell "precisely at the center" (on page 67 of 133) of the first section of Smithson's book. Owens's conceit not only acknowledges the centrality of language in Smithson's work, but the way in which the essay itself both figures and performs the decentering effects of the "eruption of language into the field of the visual arts." The fact that James Meyer's discussion of Donald Judd's essay… Full Review

Reflections of Early China: Décor, Pictographs, and Pictorial Inscriptions by Xiaoneng Yang is an ambitious study that attempts to define the relationship between "pictorial" writing and pictorial imagery from early China, which is characterized as the late Neolithic through early Western Zhou periods, ca. 3000–1000 B.C.E. The author's primary interest in this book is neither art-historical nor aesthetic, but rather historical and epigraphic. His main goal is to identify the significance of zu hui, or clan signs, that are inscribed into Shang and early Western Zhou bronzes. To Yang these "signs," sometimes in the image of animals, body parts… Full Review

Néstor García Canclini's book Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, originally published in Spanish by Grijalbo in 1995, is an important contribution to the contemporary debate on citizenship from the vantage point of Latin America. This English-language version, translated by George Yúdice, presents timely arguments for reevaluating the increasing influence of consumption in the definition of cultural policies. García Canclini argues that multiculturalism, the empowerment of civil society and the expansion of culture industries and global markets go hand in hand with the weakening of the role played by nation-states in defining symbolic references for social belonging. Local… Full Review

If an Orlando-like epic romp through the scholarly and institutional afterlife of the painting reproduced on the cover of Ivan Gaskell's Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory, and Art Museums is suggested by the book's title, then this book cannot readily be judged by its cover. The cover stands a chance only once we find out what the author means by "Vermeer's wager": ...that it is possible by means of art to embody systematic abstract ideas that constitute methodical thought in purely visual form exclusively by means of the representation of plausible modern domesticity; and secondly, that … Full Review

Can a book be judged by its cover? Monographs on Caravaggio, as David Carrier has observed in "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: Caravaggio and His Interpreters" (Word and Image 3 (1987): 50), are a case in point. The dust-jacket illustrations that embellish studies of this artist's work are usually selected from a small group of well-known canvases that are considered synecdochic of his stylistic or thematic preferences as a whole. In the case of John T. Spike's new book on the artist, the images on the front and back of the dust jacket--the Vienna David with the Head of… Full Review

In addition to providing refuge for Europe's oppressed Jewry, seventeenth-century Amsterdam served as the hub of a theological movement devoted to effecting rapprochement between Jews and Christians. This program, known today as "philosemitism," was mainly the brainchild of Dutch and English Protestant millenarians who, inspired by their interpretation of biblical prophecy, held such reconciliation to be a precondition of messianic redemption. Also central to the effort was a leading member of Amsterdam's Jewish community, the Sephardic rabbi and publisher Menasseh ben Israel (1604–57). A devoted messianist who saw redemption as the reward for the good actions of all peoples, Menasseh… Full Review

If the standard exhibition catalogue of Chinese art is a collection of topical essays and entries that describe individual items, then Between Two Cultures: Late-Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Paintings from the Robert H. Ellsworth Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is both more and less than what we normally expect. Wen C. Fong's book neither provides sufficient description of the exhibition's contents, allowing the reader to know what was in it, nor tells him or her what proportion of the exhibition is represented in the catalogue. In its 114 color plates, Between Two Cultures, one of the few published works… Full Review

Ebba Koch's Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays contains eleven essays published between 1982 and 1997 on the art and architecture produced under the Mughals (1526–1858), the longest-surviving and richest of all the dynasties to rule the Indian subcontinent. The texts range in length from a short, eleven-page reflection on the impact of the Jesuit Missions on the depictions of the Mughal emperors to a seventy-page, near book-length study of the decoration on the throne made for the emperor Shah Jahan in the Red Fort at Delhi. To meld the essays into a coherent whole, the illustrations from the… Full Review

Philip Steadman presents his case for Johannes Vermeer's use of the camera obscura with prosecutorial flair, bringing in diagrams, reconstructions, and a variety of circumstantial evidence. Vermeer never wrote about his methods, and no physical evidence exists in the form of preparatory drawings or sketches. The inventory of his studio contents lists standard equipment, such as easels and canvases, without a hint about lenses, boxes, or any other unusual objects that might place a camera obscura in the artist's studio. As Steadman himself notes, the sole source of evidence for his conjectures lies within Vermeer's paintings. While… Full Review