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The Vitae patrum records the lives of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They included early Christian ascetics, such as saints Elias, Onuphrius, and Mary of Egypt, who went off into the wilderness, where they underwent extreme acts of contemplation, deprivation, and penance to achieve a closer connection with God. The most well-known visualizations of these eremitic saints appear in large-scale paintings, such as the monumental fourteenth-century Thebaid fresco in the Camposanto, Pisa. Denva Gallant’s Illuminating the Vitae patrum: The Lives of the Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy focuses instead on the lesser-studied imagery in the Morgan Library’s Ms M.626, the… Full Review

The Comitán Valley: Sculpture and Identity on the Maya Frontier expands the scope of Classic Maya art beyond the now-familiar canon based on sites from the Guatemalan Peten, Yucatan, and Belize. The Comitán Valley, located in the Mexican state of Chiapas, is on the western edge of the continuous distribution of Maya societies. Covering four distinct settlements, Caitlin Earley provides the first regional-scale examination of sculpture from the area, showing how the frontier location fostered diverse developments that explored different potentials within Classic Maya culture. Each chapter provides clear illustration of the known sculptures, their settings, and comparisons with thematically… Full Review

Lisa E. Bloom’s Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic is a sequel. In 1993, Bloom published Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions, which examined the construction of heroic male subjectivity vis-à-vis people seeking to reach the North and South Poles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A prescient work, Gender on Ice, located thematic overlaps involving gender, race, empire, nation, science, and environment that remain current topics in the academy three decades later, so why is there a need for the sequel? There are two ways to… Full Review

Four, slim volumes covered in soft, matte black paper set inside the recess of a black, rectangular box, Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: DRAG, COLOR, JOIN, FACE tangibly announces its subject. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s study focuses on the sculpture for which Nevelson is best known: monochromatic found-object wood assemblages, frequently consisting of modular (if not always movable), rectangular, “shadowbox” reliefs, which Nevelson built continuously from the early 1950s until her death in 1988. If this “signature” visual language brings to mind some of the central tenets of Euro-American modernism (for instance, the grid, abstraction, individualism), Bryan-Wilson argues that the colors… Full Review

For the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India exhibition of South Asian art, an array of one hundred forty breath-taking major works dated ca. 200 BCE to 400 CE made their way across the world, perhaps never to be seen again in the US during our lifetimes. The Tree and Serpent curator John Guy centered the exhibition on the art that arose from the first lived tradition of Buddhism in the world. The exhibition shifted our understanding of early South Asian art in two critical ways—first, away from Buddha images as bodily representations to… Full Review

Blue velvet lines the nécessaire made of bois de violette and mahogany. The contents consist of two small teacups and a teapot imported from Asia, a sugar pot, a gold box for tea leaves, a crystal flask, and two teaspoons. This exquisite service for two, which packages intimacy, luxury, and convenience in semiprecious materials, embodies the values of the Regency. Between 1715 and 1723, France was governed from Paris by the owner of this nécessaire, Philippe II d’Orléans, the nephew of Louis XIV and the granduncle of the minor king Louis XV. The subject of a recent exhibition and… Full Review

Books can be many things. In Penned & Painted: The Art and Meaning of Books in Medieval in Renaissance Manuscripts they are the central feature, sign, and iconographic motif in illuminated manuscripts. In this beautifully produced volume, Lucy Freeman Sandler takes the prevalent pictorial phenomenon of book-images in manuscripts and thematically unpacks it into a wide-ranging study. She includes representations of books that are open or closed, rolls (representing written words), and scrolls (representing oral speech), forming a compelling study of book-images in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts through various contexts of donation, destruction, and use. Sandler writes that the idea… Full Review

Jean-François Lyotard is probably mostly known to the general reader for The Postmodern Condition, which sparked a debate that still goes on today even though the term “postmodernism” seems to have lost much of its appeal. His writings, however, cannot be subsumed under this heading, as if constituting a program: they trace a sinuous line that blurs divisions between genres, refuses institutional boundaries, and displays many twists and turns. Kiff Bamford and Magaret Grebowicz’s Lyotard and Critical Practice contains a series of original essays as well as selections from Lyotard’s writings providing us with multiple approaches to Lyotard’s work… Full Review

Within the ever-expanding literature produced at the intersection of art and the health humanities, The Medicine of Art offers a thoughtful reframing of familiar people and places in which disease is not a disjuncture, but a point of connection, community, and intense artistic inquiry. Looking beyond the clinic, Elizabeth Lee argues that fin-de-siècle artists confronted with serious illness found a kind of relief in creative practice that period medicine could not offer. Her book skillfully interlaces extensive archival work with diverse perspectives from art historians, scholars of cultural and medical history, and theorists including Arthur Frank, Susan Sontag, Katherine Ott… Full Review

The significance of James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) to the history of photography and to the story of Black life and culture in the twentieth century is immense. And yet, as Emilie Boone elucidates in her sterling book, A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography, there is much about the artist’s prodigious and probing practice that beckons further consideration. Some of what has made it difficult to narrate Van Der Zee’s extraordinary artistic achievements tidily, Boone observes, is the sheer length of his career, which spanned more than eight decades, from 1900–83. That his images shuttle between… Full Review