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Anthony Snodgrass has written a little book on a large subject. Just 8 1/2 x 6 x 9/16 inches and 186 pages including index, Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art takes within its compass such vexed dilemmas as the introduction of writing to Greece, the dates of the Iliad and Odyssey, the relation of Homer’s poems to lost epics of the Trojan cycle, the great bard’s standing in the cultural contexts of the eighth through mid-sixth centuries b.c., indeed, the very meaning of the word "Homeric" itself. And all this but serves as necessary framework… Full Review

Identifying the sources of Tibetan Buddhist painting has been the object of much scholarship in recent years, a pursuit that has often been frustrated by the scarcity of materials. While almost nothing except a few Dunhuang paintings in Tibetan style remains from the period of the First Conversion in the eighth century, about 500 works have survived from the years between the eleventh-twelfth century chidar, or Second Conversion under the guidance of the Indian sage Atisha, and Tsongkhapa's founding of the Gelugpa order in the early fifteenth century. This number represents only a sample of an artistic inventory largely lost… Full Review

How can paintings inform us of past cultural practices? By interrogating paintings produced at the Mughal court, Bonnie Wade reconstructs musical practices prevalent at the medieval royal courts of North India. Although Wade's project began as an ethnomusicological enquiry eager to mine more than textual sources, her study ends up problematizing what meanings Mughal paintings had for past as well as present viewers. For historians of South Asian visual culture, Wade's innovative study therefore signals a sharp turn away from the "dating game" that has dominated the field of Mughal painting history. Instead it situates these paintings within the cultural… Full Review

Madeline Caviness introduces this volume herself by explaining her "penchant for re-joining fragments and reconstructing programs." While that description narrowly summarizes the content of many of the articles, it hardly does them justice. The anthology comprises fifteen articles written by Caviness between 1962 and 1993, bringing together contributions to festschriften, catalogues and conferences that might not otherwise be readily accessible (in this review, the articles will be referred to by Roman numerals I-XV, as they are in the book). It is also clear that the practice of looking long and hard at paintings on glass gave Caviness insights into subjects… Full Review

In the autumn of 1816 the twenty-five year old Gericault set off for Italy, where he spent the next year in Rome—except for an initial month in Florence and a two-month excursion to Naples in the spring of 1817. In this abundantly illustrated monograph, Wheelock Whitney explores the Italian journey in the context of Gericault's short career, and shows that this least studied period of Gericault's work was a crucial stage—the year in which the artist "came of age" (1). The significance of the Italian visit has long been debated. His earliest nineteenth-century biographers generally dismissed… Full Review

Ruth Phillips's study of souvenir art made in the Northeast describes a number of histories of longstanding, transcultural negotiation among the native and nonnative people in this region. Although the dynamic forces at work in the contact zone have been described as reciprocal before—Arjun Appadurai (1996) has aptly described the negotiation of imagined lives as "self-fabricated" and James Clifford (1997) has characterized the roles of native movers and shakers (formerly called informants) as active ones, forged by people who have "been around"—Phillips’s feat in this book is to link these notions with cases, so that we may now understand the… Full Review

In this study of American culture between the Centennial and Sesquicentennial, Steven Conn argues that American museums played a vital role in the production and dissemination of knowledge. Believing that their duty was to educate and enlighten, museums offered an eager public vast arrays of systematically organized artifacts. Displayed in glass cases, these artifacts spelled out compelling narratives of evolutionary change, of savagery and civilization, of intractable backwardness and triumphant human progress. Until the early 1900s, this "object-based epistemology" allowed museums to bring the latest scientific discoveries to public notice. But as universities began to place greater emphasis on scientific… Full Review

Masaccio's Trinity is part of a new series initiated last year by the Cambridge University Press, which recalls two high quality series of art history books from the 1970s. As in the Viking Press series, "Art in Context," a single masterwork of Western European painting from the Renaissance through the twentieth century is examined in detail. Following a format similar to "The Artists in Perspective Series" (Prentice-Hall), each volume includes an introduction by the editor followed by a series of six essays by various authors, chosen to represent a variety of methodological perspectives. In her introduction to … Full Review

This book is one of the University of California Press's Discovery Series, each of which focuses on a single important work of art, artist or theme in the history of art. Thus, Pressly's contribution examines in detail two paintings illustrating incidents in the French Revolution: Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, (1794, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut) and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers, August 12, 1792, (ca. 1794 [unfinished], Museum der Stadt, Regensburg). Johan Zoffany (1793-1810) was born in Germany where he was trained as a history painter. He studied in Italy,… Full Review

See also: Nadine M. Orenstein, ed. "Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints":http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/443, reviewed by Nils Buttner This recent catalogue of the drawings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is the product of decades of research on the part of its author, who served as a curator of the Berlin-Dahlem Print Room from 1971 until his death in 1994. A widely respected scholar, Hans Mielke was the author of several significant publications, including major catalogues of the drawings of Dürer, Rubens and his circle, and Albrecht Altdorfer. Mielke became absorbed in the complexities of Bruegel's drawings during his… Full Review