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In her first book, published in 1993, Marcia Kupfer drew attention to the underdiscussed frescoes of Romanesque central France, reading the images as a field within which political tensions were played out and through which social divisions were reinforced. In her second book, The Art of Healing: Painting for the Sick and the Sinner in a Medieval Town, Kupfer returns to the same fertile ground but focuses still more acutely, concentrating on the wall paintings in the crypt of the collegiate parish church of Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, in the diocese of Bourges. The result is a rewarding—but also difficult and speculative—work… Full Review

Mesopotamia, in particular Assyria and Babylon, occupies a foundational place in Western cultural identity derived from classical and biblical texts. Material traces, however, were scarce until large-scale excavations in what is now northern Iraq began in the mid-nineteenth century. In Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Frederick Bohrer examines the complex reception of ancient Mesopotamia through the lens of reception theory and postcolonialism. With the “discovery” and acquisition of monumental sculpture from sites such as Khorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh in the 1840s and their subsequent introduction to European audiences, a new engagement with the “ancient Orient”… Full Review

As the name implies, Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life is the second in a series of readers edited by the Sarai Group, a collaborative formed by fellows at Delhi’s well-known institute for social and political research, the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and the media artists and critics at the Society for Old and New Media in the Netherlands and the Raqs Media Collective in Delhi. Sarai Reader 01 explored the contemporary contours of the idea of public domain, particularly in relation to changing forms of knowledge, proprietorship, and notions of publicity. Sarai Reader 02 … Full Review

By acquiring nearly twenty thousand acres of countryside near the town of Frascati (twelve miles southeast of Rome) and refurbishing three residences on this land, the nephew of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, both created a papal retreat for his uncle and established a vast agricultural enterprise that was administered from the principal residence on this land, the Villa Mondragone. In Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome: Villa Culture at Frascati in the Borghese Era, Tracy Ehrlich contends that with these initiatives, Scipione Borghese made a comprehensive claim for his family’s nobility, seigniory, virtue, and elegance. Perhaps… Full Review

Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Nanga discusses how diplomatic contact between Korea and Japan during the eighteenth century helped to shape a new Japanese landscape painting style. By examining possible Korean influences on the development of Nanga, or Japanese literati painting, the author sheds new light on China’s Southern school of painting with respect to its cross-cultural transmission in East Asia. Students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art histories will all find this book of interest. Divided into three parts with an introduction and conclusion, Burglind Jungmann’s book provides an in-depth discussion on the… Full Review

To the untrained eye, Thai paintings can be hard to decipher. They look confusing, crowded with colorful figures that appear similar in detail and character, leaving no place to focus one’s attention. For those who wish to study Thai painting in its various forms—murals, banners, and manuscript painting—guidance from a visually rich, scholarly book would be invaluable. Reading Thai Murals by David Wyatt, the distinguished American historian of Thailand, should be such a book but falls short of the mark. Attractively presented, Reading Thai Murals focuses on the distinctive Buddhist murals dating from the late nineteenth… Full Review

What do we mean when we attribute a painting to an artist in the Netherlands or consider it belonging to the “school of Florence”? These regional designations, the coupling of artworks with place, are central to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s new book, which examines notions of cultural geography as they apply to art. Toward a Geography of Art offers the first concentrated consideration of the value of location in the definition of works of art and, as such, is a thoroughly useful endeavor. Only some twenty years ago, Karl Poma, vice president of the Flemish Government of Belgium, introduced a lavish… Full Review

To understand museums and art history, Foucauldians say, we need to understand the changing political roles of these institutions. Knowledge of the past is never neutral, for it always serves present goals. Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s very ambitious, splendidly achieved book, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, tells the story of the development of art history in India. Her study explains how English figures such as Alexander Cunningham developed their vision of Indian art’s history, contrasting the elegance of Buddhism with the degenerate excesses of Hinduism. The book also shows how the early colonial museums were… Full Review

El Greco (henceforth cited as Greco) constituted the first comprehensive North American exhibition of the work of Domenikos Theotokopolous (1541–1614) since El Greco of Toledo (henceforth cited as Toledo) of 1982–83, organized by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and traveling to Madrid, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas. A groundbreaking exhibition, Toledo brought together a substantial proportion of the artist’s most important paintings for the first time. The success of that exhibition in defining a corpus of recognized masterpieces is suggested by the inclusion of thirty-seven of the sixty-six paintings from Toledo in Greco. With eighty-three… Full Review

Of the dozen decorated biblical manuscripts that survive from late antiquity, the so-called Ashburnham Pentateuch in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. nouv. acq. 2334) is the most elaborate. Its eighteen (more or less) full-page illustrations contain some one hundred scenes set in detailed landscapes and rich architectural settings; and its ten chapter lists are adorned with decorated arches and ornamental fauna. Compared to the other surviving manuscripts, the Ashburnham Pentateuch is also relatively unstudied: even Kurt Weitzmann, who scavenged virtually every bit of evidence to support his concept of the evolution of the illustrated codex, all but completely… Full Review