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Diane Wolfthal’s In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Europe is yet another beautiful book from Yale University Press. It features a delicious picture on the dust jacket cover of a man and a woman fully covered (well, almost—there have to be openings in their clothing somewhere), making love in a beautiful bed, as another couple peeks through a curtain in order to watch. Meanwhile, a cute little dog at the side of the bed turns its head to observe the voyeurs. In other words, we watch the dog watching the couple watching the lovers. Actually… Full Review

This lucid, thoughtful, and remarkably terse study provides extensive insight into a variety of subjects: not only into photography of the Japanese American internment during World War II, but also the functions photography can be made to serve in defining loyalty and security risk in other wars, and the authenticity and force of documentary photography in general. Jasmine Alinder, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, is a sophisticated photography critic able to make complex arguments without the jargon that so often characterizes cultural criticism today. Her book can thus serve as a fine introduction to some of the… Full Review

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Il Guercino (“the squinter”), was born in 1591 in Cento, a small town between Ferrara and Bologna, and died in Bologna in 1666. Born a generation after the Carracci, whose works influenced him, Guercino soon developed a personal style noteworthy for combining naturalism with dramatic chiaroscuro effects. From Cento, he produced paintings for such patrons as Cardinal Jacopo Serra, papal legate to Ferrara; Ferdinando Gonzaga, duke of Mantua; and Cosimo II de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany. Guercino was enticed away from Cento only when his patron Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope Gregory XV… Full Review

In her chapter on Emilia Francis (later, Lady Dilke), Colleen Denney writes that “Victorians were guilty for delighting in the saucy details of the scandal at the same time as they projected an outward shell of moralistic judgment” (86). The protagonists Denney selected for her perceptive narrative about “scandalous” women were born into the rapidly expanding middle classes: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Lady Dilke (1840–1904), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), and Sarah Grand (1854–1943). This decision (which is unexplained by the author) excludes a figure like Frances Evelyn "Daisy," Countess of Warwick, author and activist, referred to in the press as… Full Review

During the past twenty years the understanding of representations, subjectivities, and societies has been transformed by the proliferation of cultural studies, human rights discourses, activist practices, and interdisciplinary fields. Re-Presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum makes an important contribution to each of these areas in its integration of disability studies with museum studies. Editors Richard Sandell, Jocelyn Dodd, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson have assembled a volume intended to not only raise theoretical questions, but to serve as a catalyst for change and reform. The vigorous activist agenda of the collection is refreshing, and appropriate, given the subject matter and… Full Review

I have become increasingly uneasy about writing book reviews. We need them, and I read them, but when I sit down to write one, I begin to squirm. To write a book review is to climb into the cheapest of judgment seats. Although a book may receive several reviews, each reviewer operates singularly—with a voice from on high—in rendering judgment on the book and its qualities. In addition, the qualifications for writing a book review in the humanities are minimal. Many reviewers are graduate students or young scholars who have not yet written a book and have no direct experience… Full Review

Elissa Auther’s String, Felt, Thread provides a revealing case study of the specificity of an artistic material and the mutability of that material’s significance in the art world. She follows Glenn Adamson’s insight that “craft” is an idea, not a particular material or practice (Glenn Adamson, Thinking through Craft, London: Berg, 2007, xxix). Accepting that principle, however, Auther does not abandon material specificity but, rather, explores the historically shifting resonances of one material typically associated with the idea of craft, namely, fiber. What she discovers is that fiber’s meaning shifts, but it nearly always determines an artwork’s “proper”… Full Review

The artist’s book Sanctus Sonorensis by Philip Zimmermann is straightforward in content yet complex in associational meanings. Through image and text it refers directly to the New Testament, the Sonoran Desert landscape, and illegal immigration, and also to religious pilgrimages and recent Arizona immigration laws. As a book it calls attention to its objectness with mass and weight—a thing with its own set of meanings. The figure/ground relationships are unambiguous in design yet complicated in translation. To fully engage Sanctus Sonorensis, one must read the words, the images, and the object, and let the mind travel through implied paths… Full Review

Scholars interested in using works of art to understand the lives of individuals and groups in the past can only be discouraged by the realization that so many of the works we study were created at the instigation of elites as demonstrations of wealth and power. While we might want to understand how these works related to members of diverse levels of society, the surviving evidence is generally restricted to information about the motivations and responses of members of the upper classes. This means that in our scholarly lives historians of the Renaissance are consigned to study the Medici, the… Full Review

The 2008 exhibition that this catalogue accompanied was instigated by the British Museum's acquisition of an important drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mary Hamilton (1789). Cover-girl of the catalogue and an astonishing tour-de-force by the gifted nineteen-year-old artist, this work reminded authors Stephen Lloyd and Kim Sloan of just how ubiquitous miniatures and portrait drawings were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—particularly at the Royal Academy—and how central they were to the contemporary debates on the purpose and significance of portraiture. As Lloyd (of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery) and Sloan (of the British Museum) admit, this publication only begins… Full Review