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After first poking around in The Noisy Renaissance, I found myself wondering when during the day Donatello worked most efficiently, where he stashed his ready cash, whom he spoke with on a regular basis, and how he responded when he heard a bell ring. After reading Atkinson’s book, I know that Donatello’s response to the ringing of a bell would have depended on where he was, on which bell was sounding, and on the time of day, the day of the week, and the moment in the cycle of the religious calendar. Atkinson makes it clear that Renaissance Florentines… Full Review

To a degree unparalleled in many other subfields of art history, twentieth-century Latin America has come into focus through exhibitions and accompanying catalogues. Indeed, these exhibitions often presage scholarly immersion in—or even assembly of—a related archive. Witness the dominance of selected institutions in establishing the canon for study of modern and contemporary Latin American art in the anglophone world: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); and (to a lesser degree) the Tate Modern in London. These museums have built or acquired crucial collections, as with the MFAH’s stunning… Full Review

Reaching beyond sight has become a commonly stated aim of art history. For medievalists, interest in the connections between art and embodied sensation grows logically from the field’s long-standing and rich examination of vision and its particular attention to materiality. This legacy brings with it certain propensities—most notably a bias toward religious objects and the relationships they structure between bodily experience and the apprehension of God. The ambitious A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe expands the scope of that inquiry significantly, joining current interdisciplinary efforts (such as the series of roundtables organized by Éric Palazzo… Full Review

The raison d’être for the publication of Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis near Pompeii was the traveling exhibition of the same name organized by Elaine Gazda and John Clarke at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology of the University of Michigan, with additional venues at Montana State University and Smith College Museum of Art (where this reviewer saw the exhibition in February 2017). Without the exhibition, it is unlikely that a new and lavishly illustrated book on the Oplontis villas would have been published (and certainly not at such an attractive price), and so… Full Review

Written from the perspective of visual culture studies, broadly speaking The Face of Medicine addresses “the entanglement of art, science, politics, and popular culture in the early Third Republic” (1). Knowledge of that political regime is assumed, and readers rusty on their French history may find themselves stymied. Of course such information is readily, and amply, available, whereas Mary Hunter’s examination of medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris is unique, and a most welcome addition to the corpus of historical writings on art and medicine. Much of the book focuses on three paintings: a depiction of Louis Pasteur in his… Full Review

During the heyday of the Taos/Santa Fe School, which lasted from about 1915 to the mid-1930s, support came from two different kinds of patrons: those intrigued by an exotic and remote Indian civilization in the far Southwest, which somehow doubled as an early America; and those who looked on the same group of Indians as descendants of the ancient Anasazi tribes, with cultural attributes that merited preservation. Distinguishing between the two groups has never been easy; some patrons frequently crossed the line. Thus, constructing a historiography of the school—that is, a rough outline of how these different kinds of paintings… Full Review

Brian A. Brown and Marian H. Feldman’s volume, Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, is first an outstanding reflection, and stands at the leading edge, of ancient Near Eastern art history. Perfectly poised within current scholarship in the larger discipline of art history, the essays touch upon trends of interdisciplinarity, post-processual theory, materiality, and thing-theory, to name just a few. As the larger field of art history is beginning to embrace the turn to material culture, ancient Near Eastern art history is coming into its maturity in this respect. Driven in part by the work of Zainab Bahrani, today’s… Full Review

In the decades since Cindy Sherman established her photographic practice as part of the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and early 1980s, her work has provoked polarized opinions. Her relationship with feminism in particular has been hotly debated, with some insisting that her work reveals and subverts the patriarchal nature of the gaze, and others suggesting that Sherman’s use of masquerade merely reinforces the visual dynamics of fetishism. As Jui-Ch’i Liu has suggested, Sherman’s own ambiguous position regarding feminism has only added fuel to these debates (Jui-Ch’i Liu, “Female Spectatorship and the Masquerade: Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills,” History… Full Review

The Andean Science of Weaving: Structures and Techniques of Warp-Faced Weaves is a monumental volume that contributes an important perspective to the study of Andean textiles: “a world view perceived from a weaver’s ‘fingertips’” (18). This tremendous undertaking by authors Denise Y. Arnold and Elvira Espejo represents years of research and fieldwork experience, as well as extensive and creative thought not only about the way in which weavers of the Andean highlands construct textiles—particularly in Bolivia, and also in parts of Peru—but how this process of making textiles is inextricably integrated into the mindset (and language) of the cultures of… Full Review

What art can do in relation to historical trauma has been discussed most thoroughly through the Holocaust. After (the misreading of) Adorno’s famous dictum on the impossibility of using art to work through a trauma of such scale, art has, from the distance of several decades, more or less successfully returned to the question. Claude Lanzmann’s filmic monument to the catastrophe, Shoah (1985), can stand as an emblem for this aesthetic return. It leveraged a monumental time frame (over nine hours) and the then-current turn to oral testimony on the presumption that the truth-value lay in direct access to history… Full Review