Recently Published Reviews

Amid the symphonic blockbusters regularly staged in the large museums of New York City, the special exhibitions mounted at the Frick Collection in three quiet, elegant rooms on the lower level of the museum offer visitors a welcome dose of chamber music. Striking in this regard was the summertime exhibition of works by the eighteenth-century Genevan artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, whose spare but penetrating portraits, character studies, and still lifes filled the Frick’s small space with a Mozartian blend of lightness and piercing exactitude. Liotard is perhaps best known today for his pastel figures redolent of genre painting, such as La… Full Review

Scholars of medieval art increasingly are investigating the modern vicissitudes of the objects and architecture they study. There is a wealth of work, for example, on neo-gothic imaginings of the Middle Ages, as manifest in nineteenth-century church restoration projects, the development of museums, and the construction of new buildings in medievalizing styles. But there are relatively few studies of modern attitudes toward manuscript illumination. This is surprising given the fact that contemporary scholars are so deeply indebted to eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century collectors and enthusiasts for preserving, cataloguing, and inaugurating the study of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Christopher de Hamel’s examination… Full Review

Dada, a globalized art movement, has in the last ten or so years generated a genuinely global field of research. Once confined in the United States largely to Francophone interests, and in Europe to national domains matched between scholar and subject, Dada is now commonly investigated as an avant-garde tendency that set down roots around the planet. Exhibitions such as Dada Global (Zurich, 1994), Dada: L’Arte della Negazione (Rome, 1994), or the Paris version of the most recent survey, Dada (seen also in Washington, DC, and New York, 2005–2006), include contributions from Antwerp to Tokyo to Zagreb. Parallel to these… Full Review

In the last years of the nineteenth century, a group of glazed stonepaste (also known as fritware) vessels appeared in the showrooms of Europe and the United States. In the early years of the new century, scholars and connoisseurs started to associate the underglaze-painted and luster-painted wares with the ancient city of Raqqa in northeastern Syria. Largely abandoned since the mid-thirteenth century, the great walled city was at the time being repopulated by Circassians who, in the course of removing old bricks to build their houses, were uncovering large numbers of jugs, jars, and bowls. Although the bubble was to… Full Review

Roman architecture has inspired generations of architects, and of its types, temples have been particularly influential. The same was also true in antiquity, and, for that reason, temples, according to John Stamper, tell us a great deal about the religious, political, and social history of the Roman world. But while the Romans built temples throughout the Mediterranean, Stamper focuses only on those of central Rome: their religious, social, and historical backgrounds and their architectural history and relationships He begins with the sixth-century BC Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. From the beginning of the Republic through the late-fourth-century AD,… Full Review

Faute de mieux, the Republican form of government held France together during the last decade of the nineteenth century better than anyone would have guessed. How did art and artists of the period reflect, mediate, and express the major stresses and strains of that decade when the society felt the full impact of modernity? And how can this approach to art and society help bring coherence and meaning to the immense and varied artistic production of the period? These are the two challenges that Richard Thomson sets out to meet in his new book. In answer to these questions… Full Review

The use of mythological subjects in fourth- and fifth-century visual culture has attracted considerable scholarly interest in recent years. It has always been accepted that gods and classical myths were commonly represented on late antique mosaics and silverware; the manufacture of statues and statuettes was, however, believed to have died out in the later third century. Recent studies by Niels Hannestad and Marianne Bergmann have demonstrated that small-scale statuettes—if not life-size sculptures—of gods and classical heroes were still produced in the fourth century (Hannestad, Tradition in Late Antique Sculpture: Conservation, Modernization, Production. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1994; and Bergmann… Full Review

Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) remains one of the most fascinating figures in the history of early twentieth-century American art, in no small part due to his extraordinary ability to act at once as a consolidator of boundaries and a boundary-crosser. In his best-known paintings, Hartley presented compelling images of American modernist, regionalist, and nationalist identity, iconic representations that seem to operate within the familiar parameters of place and character, just as they venture creatively beyond them. During the mid-nineteen-thirties, for example, Hartley developed a highly innovative compositional strategy in which he presented regional subjects so familiar that they were virtually interchangeable… Full Review

The Museum of Modern Art’s Odilon Redon show was a quiet triumph. In addition to a much-needed and long-overdue consideration of a major figure within the history of French Symbolism, this intimate exhibition provided a welcome respite from the mall-like spaces of the rest of MoMA’s cavernous emporium of modern art The exhibition was made possible by the Ian Woodner Family Collection donation in 2000 of more than one hundred Redon works on paper and canvas, and its breadth reveals Ian Woodner’s deep commitment to Redon’s work, from the artist’s drawings and charcoal noirs to his illustrated books and later… Full Review

Julie Codell’s study of biographies and autobiographies of artists in Victorian Britain offers a significant addition to the understanding of artistic life in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Focusing on the category of “lifewritings,” she examines the intersection of artistic practice and publicity, showing how these texts both reflected the machinations of the art world and shaped popular conceptions about art’s social roles. Nineteenth-century Britain was obsessed with biography. Narratives of exemplary individuals’ lives were deployed and disseminated across Victorian culture for a variety of political and social ends. This was, after all, the era that produced the daunting sixty-three-volume … Full Review

Meyer Schapiro, eminent mid-twentieth-century scholar of Early Christian, medieval, nineteenth-century, and modern art, gave these six lectures on Insular manuscript illumination in 1968 as the inaugural series of the Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures at the Pierpont Morgan Library. The lectures reflect a segment of Schapiro’s two decades of study on Insular art, most of the results of which were “published” as public lectures in various fora; only three, on specific issues, were sent to press in Schapiro’s lifetime. The impetus to publish the Walls lectures originated with Lillian Schapiro… Full Review

Debate continues over whether visual culture studies represents a coherent field with the means to effectively train students in historical methods. The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader mounts a powerful challenge to the field’s critics both by providing a historical genealogy of visual culture studies as a discipline that may trace its origins to the role of vision and visuality in the works of key writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century such as Charles Baudelaire, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Walter Benjamin, and by presenting a carefully chosen set of scholarly essays that make good on the opening claims… Full Review

Although the French seized upon the idea of national patrimony during the July Monarchy (1830–48) and have never let go, the constructed nature of the past this engendered has not been widely studied in France. In the past twenty years, Pierre Nora’s volumes of essays on “lieux de mémoire” have spawned French editions of the writings of Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, among others. Jean Nayrolles’ L’invention de l’art roman à l’époque moderne is a welcome in-depth study of such sources for a nascent French art historiography. It follows his earlier titles from the mid-1990s as… Full Review

Tonio Hölscher’s essay belongs to a particular moment in art-historical scholarship, not to mention Roman art history. The moment, to be more precise, is the mid-1980s, when semiotics was a thriving method of inquiry and two of the most formidable Romanists in the German language, Hölscher and Paul Zanker, both indebted to structural linguistics, separately set out to explain why Roman art looks the way it does. For example, Zanker, in his book The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), explores the political language of both subject and style in Augustan… Full Review

The early Dutch Republic witnessed an explosive growth in the popularity of paintings and prints representing groups of handsome young men and women absorbed in social pleasantries. These “merry company” scenes, as they are often termed, characteristically show their ostentatiously attired figures occupying richly appointed interiors or elegant open-air gardens. Gathered around tables covered by freshly ironed linens and set with expensive goblets and platters, they engage in good-natured conversation, make music on various instruments, smoke pipes, drink wine from stemmed glasses, and play board games. What was the reason for the burgeoning popularity of these arresting pictures? Moreover, what… Full Review