Recently Published Reviews

Significant Objects: The Spell of Still Life explored what curator Gloria Williams Sander identified in the didactic materials attending the exhibition as a long-standing undervaluation of the category. As the introductory wall text explained, still life has often found itself “disparaged critically and theoretically as mere copying that lacked artistic imagination.” Indeed, while superb examples populate nearly every major collection, it remains difficult to imagine a still-life exhibition that could truly be described as a “blockbuster” at most North American museums. This state of affairs owes something to the traditional subordination of still life within the classical hierarchy of genres… Full Review

In Aztec Goddesses and Christian Madonnas: Images of the Divine Feminine in Mexico, Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera undertake an ambitious survey of sacred females in Mexican art and culture. The authors offer an encyclopedic compendium of Pre-Columbian Aztec goddess cults and the extraordinary range of Mexican Catholic dedications to the Virgin Mary that developed in the colonial period—“a Catholic devotion,” Kroger writes, “that privileged Mary in a way that even I was unprepared for” (xvii). Indigenous artistic traditions and religious institutions are treated not as ancillary material but rather as vigorous devotional traditions that continued to inform the… Full Review

Of the relationship of Albrecht Dürer to his artistic sources it might be said: “Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves” (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, 5). The images produced by the first generation of printmakers to respond to Dürer also did well to demonstrate this dictum. Hans Sebald and Barthel Beham, Hans Baldung Grien, and Urs Graf seized Dürer’s compositions, toppling their precursor’s equilibrium and tearing through his restraint to expose the rawness of sexuality and the garishness of death. That his unique presence… Full Review

While doing research in Leiden, Maki Fukuoka discovered an unpublished manuscript entitled “Honzō shashin,” which was brought from Japan to Holland by the German physician Phillip Franz von Siebold. Honzō refers to materia medica; the term shashin means “photography” today, but the manuscript was written in 1826, decades before the medium of photography was introduced to Japan in the 1850s. What did shashin mean to Mizutani Hōbun, who compiled the manuscript and led a scholarly group called Shōhyaku-sha in the Owari domain? What does this tell us about Japanese photography, as we now understand it? Fukuoka’s encounter with the… Full Review

Reading Sean Roberts’s Printing a Mediterranean World, one is struck by the intriguing variety of editions of a single work set against the background of late medieval Florence and its investment in the renaissance associated with print and geography. Roberts charts the making and dissemination of Francesco Berlinghieri’s Geographia (1482), a “resurrection” (newly configured) of Claudius Ptolemy’s work of the same name. An added dimension of Roberts’s book is its focus on two Ottoman princes as recipients of copies of the Geographia. He argues that, “The possibility of a diplomatic context for the Geographia suggests the need for… Full Review

The editors of The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800 state that in a world in which current technology has made color cheap and ever more available, they would like to restore a sense of wonder and appreciation for the experience of color. The very recent aspect of this technological revolution is vivid to this reviewer who remembers that in art history classrooms of the late 1950s and early 1960s the projected image of a (rare) color slide was startling. In my classroom I have for several years now found it useful to… Full Review

According to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis brings “examples of Dutch Golden Age painting to the United States, including four works by Rembrandt van Rijn, three works by Jan Steen, two works by Frans Hals, and . . . Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring” (6). The thirty-five paintings on loan from the Mauritshuis represent some of that institution’s best-known holdings, and the High Museum of Art helps fulfill the curators’ stated aim of enabling “a wide American public to experience in person the masterpieces of the Mauritshuis” (6). On… Full Review

That sculpture was crucial to the development of the Renaissance has been recognized since 1436, when Leon Battista Alberti praised three sculptors in the prologue to his Tuscan treatise on painting (four, if one counts Filippo Brunelleschi, who trained and worked as a goldsmith) and only a single painter, Masaccio. The Springtime of the Renaissance exhibition celebrates the crucial role Florentine sculptors played in the stylistic revolution of the fifteenth century, demonstrating how the naturalism, classicism, and linear perspective associated with the period’s “new language and spirit” (25) appeared first in sculpture. The exhibition comprises ten thematic sections, opening… Full Review

The Beinecke Map forms part of the large corpus of maps and manuscripts created by native painter scribes, or tlacuiloque, in colonial Mexico as records of indigenous land property and to support land claims. Painted on fig-bark paper (amate), the map measures approximately six feet long by three feet wide and renders a small, unidentified area of Mexico City. Utilizing the image of a black rectangular grid divided into 121 fields that take up most of the map, it offers a detailed register of the plots of land owned by natives. Placed clearly inside each one of… Full Review

Although the Dutch-American artist Bas Jan Ader enjoys cult status in select artist circles—enhanced by the mystery of his disappearance at sea in 1975 at a youthful thirty-three—he remains little known in the mainstream art world, and thus occupies the strange position of being simultaneously overexposed and unrecognized. Alexander Dumbadze’s new monograph, the first and only book-length study on the artist, helps to fill in the scholarly gap by introducing a thoroughly researched and comprehensive account of the artist’s life and work. Although the relatively brief text refrains from addressing the larger contemporary critical discourse on conceptualism and cleaves so… Full Review

Mary Quinlan-McGrath’s Influences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance establishes and explains the parameters for the Renaissance continuation of the traditional belief in astrology and astronomy. Fundamentally important is the interrelationship of the two: how the heavenly bodies in their specified configurations conveyed influence upon the earth, and in turn how the absorbed celestial essences or “qualities” were capable of reflecting that power on their surroundings. In principle this was a continuation of Platonic and Neoplatonic Christian consideration of how the emanation of divine light connects the world to the creator, and how the science of light, optics… Full Review

In 1956, rector Charles Olson invited Bay Area poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988) and his partner, Jess (Burgess Collins, 1923–2004), to teach at Black Mountain College and exchange ideas on avant-garde poetry. Inspired by Olson’s concept of “composition by field,” i.e., of verse organized by nonlinear, spontaneous associations, Duncan entitled his 1960 collection of poems The Opening of the Field. An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle applies this vision of imaginative interconnection to a stimulating group of works in varied media. Deeply rooted in myth and romanticism, Olson would have appreciated its broad cultural scope, grounded… Full Review

Kristin B. Aavitsland’s Imagining the Human Condition in Medieval Rome examines a cycle of late thirteenth-century frescoes discovered in 1965 at the Cistercian abbey of Tre Fontane outside Rome. Found on the outside of the eastern wall of a medieval dormitory, at the time used as a terrace, the cycle was in poor condition. Their discovery was a revelation, countering the prevalent idea that the iconoclastic Cistercians eschewed figural imagery. The cycle is in fact the earliest known figural monumental decoration in a Cistercian setting. During a restoration in 1970–71, the frescoes were mounted on canvas and moved, which left… Full Review

Dorothy Metzger Habel is unafraid to take the road well traveled by her academic forebears, even such renowned ones as Richard Krautheimer. This was true of her 2002 book on the urban development of Rome under Alexander VII (The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII, New York: Cambridge University Press), and it is equally true of her new book, “When All of Rome Was Under Construction”: The Building Process of Baroque Rome. What makes her latest study so exciting is that she offers a fresh perspective on the architectural and urban history of… Full Review

Richard Neer’s latest book, Greek Art and Archaeology: A New History, c. 2500–c. 150 BCE, takes a refreshingly contemporary approach to the study of ancient Greek material culture. As the title suggests, the textbook surveys over two millennia of Greek history, from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period. While the purview is hardly unique, Neer aims to present a “new history” of the discipline through his broad, inclusive understanding of the Greek world and the significance of its artistic production. The strengths of this volume lie in its highly practical format, nuanced treatment of the material, and interdisciplinary… Full Review