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The specter of Michael Fried’s imperious rhetoric looms large over Pamela Lee’s study Chronophobia: On Art and Time in the 1960s. Indeed, part 1 of her three-part study and (rather confusingly) the first of its five chapters both bear the title “Presentness Is Grace,” a quote taken from the last line of “Art and Objecthood,” Fried’s now seminal disavowal of “literalist” art, first published in Artforum in 1967. As many have done before her, Lee subjects Fried’s essay to an extended close reading, honing in on the discussion of temporality that motivates Fried’s comparison of Minimalist practice with that… Full Review

Making Cairo Medieval addresses the urban and architectural evolution of Cairo during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interest in this topic has increased considerably over the past two decades, and this book is a recent example of this interest. For quite some time, a major source for the investigation of this subject remained Janet Abu Lughod’s highly regarded Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), even though the work addressed the overall evolution of Cairo, and its chronological scope therefore extended beyond the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since then, a number of publications… Full Review

Qusayr ‘Amra is perhaps the most enigmatic of the so-called Umayyad “desert castles” that inhabit the landscape of the Syro-Jordanian steppe and the more arid regions to the east of it. These “castles,” or qusur as they are commonly referred to in Arabic, are in fact residences, bathhouses, hunting lodges, and farms built by the elites of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750 CE). Built sometime in the first half of the eighth-century CE, Qusayr ‘Amra consists of a bath complex (a large hall and three small bathing rooms), a deep stone well, a cistern, and a hydraulic installation with a waterwheel… Full Review

Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre was the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since the 1991–92 retrospective in London and Paris. It was also the first large-scale show of both his paintings and prints in the United States in more than twenty-five years. In contrast to its predecessors this show focused on a single theme—the relationship of Lautrec’s art to Montmartre, the bohemian and lower-class Parisian district where he worked and where he found his characteristic subjects. The accompanying volume provides substantial documentation and analysis in support of the exhibition’s mission of setting the artist’s work in its socio-historical… Full Review

Juergen Schulz’s varied and rich career has been capped by a book that can only be termed revolutionary. Venetian scholarship has clung to the idea that the Venetian palace is a Byzantine import. Venice was closely tied to Byzantium politically for much of its early history, and it has seemed logical to assume that the East provided the city with its architectural models. That Byzantine or Byzantine-style embellishments—what Schulz terms, in a marvelous phrase, “borrowed finery of pseudo-antique grandeur”—were the decoration of choice for early Venetian palaces seemed to clinch the matter. The issue has been compounded by the early… Full Review

A large number of beautifully illustrated catalogues of Spanish drawings have been published in the last ten years, many to accompany exhibitions, as the more fragile treasures of Spanish art are being studied and brought to a wider audience. The Catálogo de la Collección de Dibujos del Instituto Jovellanos de Gijón stands apart from this group, as it is a reprint and enhancement of a catalogue first published in 1969 by a pioneer in the study of Spanish drawings, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez. Before its demise, the Jovellanos collection of drawings had been catalogued by Jesús Menéndez Acebal in the… Full Review

The received history of the fifteenth-century Florentine villa begins with Careggi, Trebbio, and Cafaggiolo, the brooding strongholds built for Cosimo de’ Medici by Michelozzo, then proceeds to the serene, cubic Villa Medici at Fiesole, and concludes with the all’antica forms of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano. In Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century, Amanda Lillie suggests this standard sequence is both generalizing and reductive, and notes that an assumed familiarity with this architectural type is in fact based upon the evidence drawn from the five principal Medici villas. In her book—a self-described “quest for a more representative… Full Review

Lianne McTavish’s book, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France, is part of an Ashgate series entitled Women and Gender in the Early Modern World, a group of collected essays and single-authored volumes that investigate subjects as diverse as identity politics, widowhood, and the book trade. Ashgate is, indeed, one of the few publishing houses still willing to produce these sorts of studies, especially in the form of collected essays, and we are indebted to them for their efforts to bring new studies of women and gender into the scholarly realm. Like the other books in… Full Review

It’s unfortunate that Jacques de Gheyn II is not widely known beyond Dutch specialists. He exemplifies the richness of his immediate cultural context and, more broadly, of the period surrounding 1600, when so many paradigms of European art began to change dramatically. New literature on his work is most welcome. The primary book on the de Gheyn family, I. Q. Van Regteren Altena’s Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983), was based on the author’s dissertation research in the 1930s. Although full of valuable insights and providing a useful catalogue of works by the de Gheyn family… Full Review

Wu Hung, Chinese born, has become a well-known U.S. art historian. Author of a number of distinguished books discussing the art of his native country, in Remaking Beijing he tells the history of Tiananmen Square, the gate to the Imperial Palace. Every tourist who goes to Beijing visits this central site. Coming from the east, you go north to buy a ticket and enter the Forbidden City. But if you walk south just before entering the Square, you reach the Museum of Chinese History, which now contains displays of art and a waxworks exhibition showing the communist rulers, various emperors… Full Review