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The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is Michael Camille’s long-awaited last book, published seven years after the author’s untimely death in 2002. By that time, the text must have been finished, since the preface is signed: “Paris, February 2001”; the editor indicates that only some of the citations in the footnotes remained incomplete (379). Throughout Camille’s brilliant career he was interested in medieval image making, paying equal attention to “high” and “low” art, a distinction which he identified as a modern construct. Modernity’s shaping influence on perceptions of the Middle Ages was therefore always an important aspect of Camille’s work, as… Full Review

Islamic archaeology is an unusual area of enquiry because as a term it embraces a religious and cultural element as well as an empirical-scientific component. Of course the same could be said of many branches of archaeology, though in present times the use of the term “Islamic” carries with it specific connotations of ideology, belief, ethnicity, and culture. Specifically, the term may be taken to indicate a particular Islamic ideological approach to the practice and study of archaeology. Alternatively, the term may be used in a more neutral sense to indicate the study of Islamic culture, including religion through the… Full Review

Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 is an ambitious book comprised of a series of analytical interventions pertaining to modern India’s visual arts and cultural heritage, and it demonstrates Rebecca Brown’s scholarly sophistication in grappling with wide-ranging conceptual and aesthetic criteria. The central thesis concerns the cultivation—among artists, filmmakers, and architects—of a critical engagement with the legacies of colonization and nationalism during the three decades that followed Independence and Partition. This engagement is framed as being relevant to studies of “the postcolonial condition in all of its complex relations to colonialism, modernity, and national identity” (2). The thesis… Full Review

Following an efflorescence of critical work on the subject over the last twenty-five years, the European Grand Tour has emerged as a focus of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship. The significance of ancient and Renaissance art to the Grand Tour itinerary—together with the emergence of modern display practices and attendant opportunities for the exercise of aesthetic judgment—have conspired to guarantee the Grand Tour's special appeal to art historians. The subject's enduring interest is surely also due to the fact that it has proven especially fertile ground for art history's disciplinary move toward thinking beyond national borders. The Grand Tour was founded on… Full Review

The necessary precondition for a world art history is the close study of cultural exchanges. Even nowadays, when you can travel from New York to Beijing in less than a day, the distance between America’s and China’s visual cultures is still immense. When such travel was much slower, and curators were not much concerned with exotic art, the diverse artistic traditions were relatively self-sufficient. But once Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the globe, it was inevitable that those artifacts called works of art would move from their places of origin to other cultures. The world had become one, which is to… Full Review

At the outset of this monumental study Margot Fassler takes pains to position herself in relation to Chartes’s “major industry,” the making of history. In keeping with recent scholarly trends, she takes as axiomatic that history is akin to a performance, thoroughly informed by the cultural system in which it is produced (most recently, see Robert A. Maxwell, ed., Representing History, 1000–1500: Art, Music, History, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010; this volume includes a contribution by Fassler). During the Middle Ages, she argues, the liturgical and visual arts often played a key role in this process… Full Review

The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name held at the Middlebury College Museum of Art and Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 2009. As Richard Saunders, the director of Middlebury’s museum, explains, the exhibition was inspired by the museum’s acquisition in 2005 of a panel painting by the Florentine painter Lippo d’Andrea (ca. 1370–1451) of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari (cat. 4). Such acquisitions and exhibitions of historic art are particularly important for colleges and universities to… Full Review

Two new books on Michelangelo Buonarroti explore his life and work from different yet complementary vantage points. With Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and his Times, William Wallace offers a new biography that aims to present a balanced portrait to counter persistent characterizations of the artist as “an isolated, tortured genius, with few friends, an unappreciative family, and impossibly demanding patrons” (7). To this end, Wallace relies heavily on Michelangelo’s correspondence, professional records, and poetry as well as letters written among family members and friends and related documents including contracts, accounting records, and the highly influential biographies by Ascanio… Full Review

In recent years, revisions of Hans Belting’s groundbreaking Bild und Kult (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), arguably the most influential book published in the fields of medieval and byzantine art history in the last fifty years, led to two divergent paths. On the one hand, countless studies demonstrated that even in the “era of art” since the fifteenth century, the “image” with its claims of “magical” presence survived. On the other hand, medievalists revealed the enormous amount of self-reflexivity in pre-Renaissance art. Both lines of research, however, did not seriously challenge Belting’s conceptual dualism. In Anachronic Renaissance, Alexander Nagel and… Full Review

This richly illustrated catalogue, produced in conjunction with the exhibition Sacred Spain, offers new perspectives that promise to revitalize the study of religious art in Spain and the Americas. The subject certainly warrants critical attention. As the organizer, Ronda Kasl, senior curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, points out in her introduction, art in the Spanish empire was “overwhelmingly religious” (12). Kasl and her co-authors sidestep the well-worn method of iconography in favor of two new approaches inspired by trends in religious studies: 1) examining religious art “through the lens of belief and its lived experience” (12); 2)… Full Review