Browse Recent Book Reviews

It might be fair to judge Heidi Pauwels’s latest book on poetry and painting from the Rajput court of Kishangarh by its cover. A painting depicts eyes irrigating a garden of poetry with a river of tears. The verses, laid in rectangular text blocks inscribed in green calligraphy, narrate this image: the beloved Laylā is so dangerously beautiful that, upon seeing her, her lover cannot help but cry. One couplet reads, “A fountain springs from the eyes, a waterfall of pain. As long as the heart’s soil is pure, the verdant garden of love will remain” (255). The painting dates… Full Review

Cécile Fromont’s The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo presents a gripping narrative of hybridity, change, and global encounter as European Christianity, the Atlantic world, and the Kongo kingdom met at the start of the sixteenth century and continued to interact directly with each other into the nineteenth century. The topic of Kongo conversion has been heavily debated for decades, resulting in a dichotomous split on just how influential and important Christianity was for both the kingdom and broader central Africa. Fromont presents a stimulating and provocative narrative, arguing the crucial place and lasting appeal… Full Review

The 2010 exhibition Man, Myth, and Sensual Pleasures: Jan Gossart’s Renaissance (Metropolitan Museum and National Gallery, London) (click here for review) brought renewed attention to a key Netherlandish artist. Whereas the exhibition sought a comprehensive view of Gossart’s varied output, Marisa Anne Bass’s eloquent new book, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, focuses specifically on his mythological paintings. In so doing, she presents a much-needed extended examination of Gossart’s relationship to classical antiquity, which has long constituted the foundation of his art-historical interest and reputation. As is often noted, Gossart’s drawings of Roman monuments… Full Review

Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, was the maestro who remade Rome as a Carrara marble metropolis rivaling Athens and Alexandria and created a burgeoning empire of copycat cities. While his comprehensive conversion of the capital referenced Rome’s birth and the general trajectory of its first eight centuries, the dramatic transformation obscured some of the details of its storied past. A clearer picture of Rome’s pre-Augustan buildings and their striking significance is now beginning to emerge. In recent years, excavations on and around Rome’s seven hills have revealed such unexpected finds as the remains of a wall possibly dating as early… Full Review

Stephen F. Eisenman’s vivid, compact study of artistic visions of animals in the modern era integrates historical, philosophical, and ethological research with an incisive political critique of capitalist exploitation of labor and life. Learned and wide-reaching, the book is written in a clear, jargon-free style that could make it accessible to general readers concerned about the relations between human and nonhuman animals in our world today as well as to specialists of Western art and cultural history. Focusing principally upon the era of the animal rights movement in Europe and the United States—the later eighteenth century to the present—Eisenman nevertheless… Full Review

The critical fortune of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s art has suffered in the last centuries: first, because of the unfair assumption that it was the last gasp of Gothic art in Florence; and second, because Ghiberti was the subject of Richard Krautheimer’s influential monograph (with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), the effect of which was largely to foreclose further discussion. Ghiberti’s second set of bronze doors for Florence’s Baptistery, known as the Gates of Paradise, represent a watershed moment in Renaissance art history. Their recent restoration and cleaning (lasting thirty years) mean that viewers may now… Full Review

At a moment when popular opinion has us living in a “post-truth” world, it is revealing, and indeed imperative, to review the contested nature of past truth claims. In Nature’s Truth: Photography, Painting, and Science in Victorian Britain, Anne Helmreich examines the truth to nature edict that resonated through artistic and scientific discourses in the mid-nineteenth century. She then traces the transformation of truth to nature from its initial reliance on inductive reasoning—the development of general theories from close observation and experimental investigation—to its early twentieth-century focus on sensation, flux, and subjectivity. Throughout the book, Helmreich combines meticulous research… Full Review

The 2016 anthology The Civil War in Art and Memory, edited by Kirk Savage, assembles fifteen essays presented in the symposium of the same title, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in November 2013. The conference paralleled the exhibition Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial, curated by Sarah Greenough and Nancy Anderson, which took place from 2013 to 2014 at the National Gallery. Both the exhibition and symposium honored the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President… Full Review

Wyatt Gallery’s beautiful collection of photos documenting Jewish artifacts in the Caribbean elegantly eliminates people as it dwells in an elegiac past. It should, as a result, continue vigorous debates on the meaning and ethics of human representation in sites prone to romanticization. Do the islands, long the subject of colonial gazing, continue to serve as a place of others’ historical imaginations (as Krista A. Thompson suggests in her 2007 book An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque [Durham: Duke University Press]) or as a site of human presence in its own complex terms? Gallery’s… Full Review

In Enchanting the Desert: A Pattern Language for the Production of Space (http://www.enchantingthedesert.com/home/), the inaugural Interactive Scholarly Works publication from Stanford University Press, geographer Nicholas Bauch “revives” as a layered digital map a forty-three-photograph slideshow of the Grand Canyon assembled and narrated by commercial photographer Henry Peabody in the first decades of the twentieth century. Originating in Bauch’s “deep sense of wonder about the landscapes depicted in the photographs” (“Motivation for Enchanting the Desert”) and integrating archival research with theoretical approaches to the production of space, the project addresses and historicizes the ways that images of the… Full Review