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The Memorial Shrines ritual complex of Jinci in Shanxi province is located at a sacred site where three mountain springs emerge to sustain the surrounding land and people. The Jinci complex is examined in The Divine Nature of Power through multiple methodological perspectives stemming from modern fields of archaeology; anthropology; art and architectural history; and political, social, and religious history. Through a careful reading and interpretation of surviving textual and physical materials, Miller reconstructs part of the complicated cultural history of this ritual complex. She uses a female water spirit of the Jin Springs and the historical/mythical figure of Shu… Full Review

In 1886, the twenty-year old Aby Warburg, scion of the Hamburg banking family, began to keep records of his book purchases. In the same year, he enrolled as a student at the University of Bonn to study art history, archaeology, classical mythology, and the philosophy of history. He spent 1888–89 in Florence, assisting August Schmarsow in the founding of a German art-historical institute. Apart from a subsequent stint at the University of Strassburg, he spent most of his life as a private scholar in Hamburg, with the exception of a long journey to the United States and specifically to the… Full Review

Paul Rehak’s Imperium and Cosmos: Augustus and the Northern Campus Martius was unfinished at the time of the author’s lamentably premature death in 2004. The manuscript was subsequently prepared for publication by his longtime partner and colleague at the University of Kansas, John Younger. In its present version, the book offers a concise study of the major Augustan monuments of the northern Campus Martius in Rome, particularly the Mausoleum, the Ustrinum (cremation site) of Augustus, the Solarium (sun calendar), and the Ara Pacis, the emperor’s famous altar of Peace. It advances the thesis that this part of the city was… Full Review

Charlene Villaseñor Black’s Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph is a long overdue examination of the social and cultural functions of images of Saint Joseph in Baroque Spain and Mexico. As the author herself reminds us, “Hispanists have long been engaged in recovering archival documents, producing monographic studies, and documenting artistic patronage. . . . Whereas Spanish court art, mythology, still life, and collecting have been explored in depth, less scholarly attention has been directed to the thousands of Madonnas, Crucifixions, saints and martyrs represented in Spain and the Americas” (14). This lack of attention to religious subjects in Hispanic… Full Review

“Pre-modernism” as a term may not become standard usage; its multiple meanings quickly become unmanageable: a phase that comes before modernism temporally, predating its practices and assumptions; modernism avant la lettre, suggesting a longer historical genesis; and modernism not as something historically specific but instead a matter of certain structural relations between artists, critics, discourses, and audiences. “Pre-modernism” also raises a number of questions. Does modernism refer to a style—a specific artistic language? Or to a set of ideological assumptions about the relationship of the aesthetic to the social and cultural realms? Or to a particular critical tradition that… Full Review

This ambitious, multi-authored volume brings to fruition nearly ten years of academic effort. The two editors, who are in fact responsible for over two-thirds of the book, set out to question and, ultimately, to discredit a deeply entrenched set of scholarly habits. They argue persuasively that there can be no rigid division between “Dutch” and “Flemish” architecture in the early modern period. As Konrad Ottenheym demonstrates in an impassioned introduction, such a division was only imposed in the nineteenth century, when scholars serving the new states of Belgium and the Kingdom of the Netherlands dutifully invented national architectural traditions. This… Full Review

Designed for Pleasure is a visually beautiful exhibition catalogue and a great source of information concerning Japanese woodblock prints and books, Japanese paintings of the “floating world,” and the various cultures that commissioned, created, and enjoyed such works. The catalogue documents the 2008 Asia Society exhibition of the same name, which was a highly anticipated event as a result of the curators seeking out the very best works available from private and public collections in the United States. To celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Japanese Art Society of America, founded in 1973 as the Ukiyo-e Society of America, the… Full Review

Anthony J. Barbieri-Low’s book is more far-reaching than its title initially suggests. It is not just about the artisans of early imperial China (the Qin and Han dynasties), but as he explains in his introduction/first chapter: “Understanding these lives [of the artisans] and the complex social, commercial and technological networks in which they participated will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past” (17). In the following five chapters, Barbieri-Low examines artisans in the following contexts: society, the workshop, the marketplace, at court, and in irons (the slave). His thorough and meticulously documented exploration of the milieu in… Full Review

Whether it is called the fruit of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Negro Renaissance, or of the New Negro Movement, the art produced by African Americans in the interwar decades of the twentieth century has long fascinated audiences hungry for celebratory and affirming representations of and by blacks. Handsome genre portraits, poignant scenes of cities and rural landscapes, tough realist sculpture, and modernist tableaus are oft-exhibited and oft-reproduced subjects in the United States, and increasingly, abroad. James Van Der Zee’s studio photographs, Aaron Douglas’s Egyptian hieroglyph-meets-Art Deco paintings, and Palmer Hayden’s still-life Fetiche et Fleurs (1936) number among the most… Full Review

“The venerable and pious virgin Gisela von Kerssenbrock wrote, illuminated, notated, paginated, and decorated this admirable book with golden letters and beautiful images in her memory. In the year of our Lord 1300 her soul rested in peace. Amen.” This extraordinary inscription has given the elaborate Gradual typically referred to as the Codex Gisle a special place in the history of medieval German art and of manuscript illumination in general. The fact that it names the nun Gisela as responsible for all aspects of the making of the book has been used, in recent years, to give the manuscript… Full Review