Recently Published Reviews

There are, I'm sure, many people in the world who feel that no more can be said about Michelangelo and that, really, no more ought to be said. At the same time, there seems to be no limit to the number of people who simply want to look at his work--crowds are undiminished at the Sistine Chapel, and large-scale, lavishly-produced picture books continue to be made. In recent years, these books have been rather selective: the many variants of glorious restorations, the early work, and the sculpture. Therefore, a need did exist for a monographic volume, and William Wallace's book… Full Review

"Visuality" is to vision as sexuality is to sex; that is, visuality presents the discourse and particularized cultural habits of viewing art, layered upon the physiology of vision itself. This is a term that has been cropping up more frequently in art historical writing lately, e.g. Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (Princeton, 1998), but it has received little theorizing or application in multiple cultures prior to this volume. Its editor, Robert Nelson, will be known to the discipline from his own recent anthology of critical discourse, Critical Terms for Art History (Chicago, 1996; coedited with Richard… Full Review

This book is a free-flowing philosophical rumination about an art-form to which the author has been addicted since a child (as such he appears on the dust-jacket), and which he rightly considers to have been unfairly marginalized by art and cultural history (ignored for instance by CAA publications)--not to speak of philosophy and aesthetics. The book breathes a relaxed air, despite its rather daunting frame of scholarly reference, mitigated by a cozy reflex to begin each chapter with an autobiographical snippet. The book is loosely constructed and wanders casually among weighty philosophical truisms and concrete examples of comics, idiosyncratically chosen… Full Review

William Vaughan and Helen Weston are contributing editors to this volume in a recently launched series by Cambridge University Press, Masterpieces of Western Painting. Each volume in the series offers a group of essays on a single painting by specialists in the field representing different methodological perspectives. The objective is to provide a concise history and reassessment of paintings that belong to the Western canon. A volume of this nature devoted to David's Marat is timely since the field of David studies has undergone an intense period of revitalization over the past decade, launched by the 1989 David retrospective… Full Review

It is no coincidence that many of the new theorists of technology and telesis are based in California--ever on the edge of tomorrow, but also host to the primary commercial market for digital imagery: the movie industry. The hybrid members of the digerati can present different faces to the world depending on the venue: artist, theorist, computer scientist, professor, robotics engineer, program designer, or supplier. A hefty cadre of these transprofessionals work and think from the San Francisco Bay area, a McLuhan unit's distance away from the throbbing belly of the media beast, yet still proximate to vassal lords such… Full Review

In a 1905 history, Samuel Isham argued that American art was "in no way native to America but is European painting imported, or rather transplanted, to America . . . . There is no local tradition or influence." (Corn, 318) Countering this Eurocentric view (one still occasionally heard among those who dismiss American art before Abstract Expressionism), is an equally persistent belief in cultural exceptionalism. From the beginnings of cultural nationalism in the early nineteenth century, many have labored to construct a homegrown tradition, expressing the peculiar qualities of the nation's visual arts. Symptomatic of this effort was John McCoubrey… Full Review

This book is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition that opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and then traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. It documents 175 objects drawn from a variety of media. The catalogue is meant to be of interest to the general public who viewed the exhibition, as well as a useful reference for students of Chinese art history, complete with Chinese character lists and an extensive bibliography. The general editor of the book, Yang Xiaoneng, also is the curator of the exhibition. Yang's… Full Review

James Cooper believes in art. In his book, which amounts to a manifesto long on assertion and short on argument (as befits manifestoes), Cooper holds up the canvases of the Hudson River School as a standard for cultural renewal. His arch-principle is that the arts carry a culture's moral, spiritual, and aesthetic values such that as the arts go, so goes the culture. This idea operates in the book as a traditional American jeremiad that both critiques modern history and heralds the opportunity of rebirth. Cooper promotes what amounts to a form of cultural theurgy: If the arts are an… Full Review

This book forms part of the New Cambridge History of India's commendable effort to integrate art history into its historical concerns. It was preceded by three earlier volumes, Architecture of Mughal India (Catherine B. Asher), Mughal and Rajput Painting (Milo C. Beach), and Architecture and Art of Southern India by one of the authors of the present volume (George Michell). The volume amply fulfills the agenda of the Cambridge Histories laid down in the general Editor's Preface, namely not only to "record an existing state of knowledge" but also "to focus interest on research" and to provide "stimulus… Full Review

Power is a front-burner issue in the postmodernist age, and scholarship from the last two decades mirrors this preoccupation. From that standpoint this is a timely book. Karen Gerhart explains (144-145) that the first half of her title, The Eyes of Power, refers simultaneously to the act of looking at the trappings of power, the process of giving visual form to power, and the gaze of power that observes the observer--a melange of ideas perhaps inspired by Foucault's notion of surveillance. In The Eyes of Power, Gerhart eschews the time-honored artist-and-oeuvre model in favor of a… Full Review

Laurie Norton Moffatt, Director of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, forthrightly states her agenda in her essay "The People's Painter": "Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People invites reflection on Rockwell as a force in twentieth-century American art and culture" (24). Moffatt reorients the critical debate by emphasizing Rockwell's cultural influence, rather than dithering about his status as either an artist or an illustrator. The admixture of popular culture studies and art history introduces Rockwell into an expanded art historical canon that embraces both avant-garde and kitsch. The exhibition catalogue reflects Moffatt's methodology: Fourteen art historians, historians, and… Full Review

Mary Ellen Miller's Maya Art and Architecture is the first textbook in English on Maya art written by a major scholar of the Maya. It is, therefore, a milestone in the dissemination of knowledge about Maya art, particularly in a classroom setting, where this book will be most useful. That a book published in 1999 deserves this honor may come as a surprise since the study of Maya art is one of the more established in ancient New World art history. As Miller points out in her introduction, although systematic treatments of Maya art, such as Herbert Spinden's A Study… Full Review

"Reader, if you wish to hear briefly what is contained in this work, know that Poliphilo tells that he saw remarkable things in a dream, hence he calls the work in Greek words 'the strife of love in a dream'. He represents himself as having seen many ancient things worthy of memory, and everything that he says he has seen, he describes point by point in the appropriate terms and in an elegant style: pyramids, obelisks, huge ruins of buildings." With these words, Francesco Colonna introduces his Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in 1499, at the closing of the age of the incunabulum… Full Review

When Giovanni Rucellai wrote that spending surpassed earning as one of the great pleasures in life, he surely expressed the sentiments of many wealthy Florentines in the second half of the 1400s. Certain forms of conspicuous consumption had become acceptable now that the successful merchants, and the humanists they supported had adapted the Aristotelian notion of magnificenza to their own circumstances. The display of wealth became praiseworthy when it embellished the city and especially the houses of worship; the pursuit of beauty contributed to the honor of public and private patrons. The desire to earn similar praise presumably led the… Full Review

This is a book about how works of art are made, how images and design motifs originate, and how artists think. By grappling with these issues, Lothar Ledderose performs a great service to the field of Chinese art, which has come to focus most of its energies on problems of reception, socio-economic factors, and historiography. Although Ledderose makes no such claim, his book can be read as a radical reorientation, a shifting of the focus of study away from the audience/receiver to the producer/artist. And although it is completely free of the jargon of critical theory, this is a profoundly… Full Review