Recently Published Reviews

From Vasari’s epitome of “grazia” at the culmination of art’s third, most perfect era to Wölfflin’s paragon of the Classic style, Raphael’s paintings have exemplified definitive formal perfection. Their sacred subject matter seemed incidental to this aesthetic achievement, so completely does the expression of beauty subsume the mere articulation of devotional content. Christian Kleinbub, in his magisterial book, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, thoroughly upends this outmoded view of the artist. He demonstrates how Raphael conceived his religious imagery, and especially visionary subjects, to mediate higher levels of spiritual contemplation. Kleinbub addresses the tension between the mimetic aims… Full Review

The focus of Anna Contadini’s A World of Beasts is the sole extant manuscript of the Kitāb Na‘t al-Ḥayawān (“Book of the Characteristics of Animals”), an Arabic treatise on the distinctive qualities of animals and their therapeutic value. Datable on stylistic grounds to ca. 1225 CE, “the Na‘t” was acquired by the British Museum in 1884 and is now held by the British Library under shelfmark Or. 2784. Contadini’s investigation exposes the manuscript as a unique witness to the convergence of Islamic illustrative traditions, pseudo-Aristotelian animal lore, and Greco-Arabic medical knowledge. In eight chapters and three appendices, she offers… Full Review

Stephen C. Pinson earned his PhD degree from Harvard University in 2002 with a dissertation on Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre that forms the nucleus of this book, nourished by over fifteen years of research and elaboration in several articles. Speculating Daguerre has been eagerly awaited; the last book-length study of Daguerre’s art, in any language, was Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, first published in 1956 and revised in 1968 (New York: Dover). As Pinson notes, the Gernsheims’ book was primarily biographical and documentary. Like several smaller publications, it relied heavily… Full Review

Greg M. Thomas’s comprehensive Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art intelligently expands upon ground recently covered by others in scholarly literature: images of French nineteenth-century childhood. The finest parts of the book are his discussions of works by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, about which he unearths new factual detail, and provides persuasive original readings of paintings both familiar and not. Drawing upon a wide socio-historical framework, Thomas analyzes images from the world of commodities associated with childhood, especially toys. His overarching thesis, that Impressionist images of childhood reveal the fundamental dilemma of the modern subject—“trying… Full Review

The three museums that hosted The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860–1900 appeared to be staging three different exhibitions. Curators Stephen Calloway at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Yves Badetz at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris championed the late blooming “decadent” aspect of the Aesthetic Movement that the Victorians derided, contending that it was the definitive expression of an aesthetic disposition. Calloway’s curatorial selections and catalogue essays highlighted sensuous works by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, and Aubrey Beardsley, among others. Unlike Badetz, however, he recreated period rooms and crowded the V&A’s exhibition galleries with… Full Review

Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life was produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at the Art Institute of Chicago, which drew from the resources of that museum and other Chicago-area collections. The catalogue study is an important addition to the growing volume of literature that considers prints as functional, three-dimensional objects, rather than simply as flat images. The first footnote, in fact, offers a good overview of this specialized literature. The study’s primary author, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, completed her doctoral dissertation on similar material in 2006 (Yale University), Art—A User's Guide: Interactive and… Full Review

The phrase “the medicine of photography” may very well draw a blank in the minds of even the most experienced photographic historians. Photography’s development through the latter half of the nineteenth century is not usually told in terms of medicine, but in terms of art, with the camera styled as a “solar pencil” able to match painting’s aesthetic capabilities. Yet in this highly original book, Tanya Sheehan showcases a vast, alternative narrative in which cameras were seen as scalpels, developing chemicals as therapeutic drugs (3), and photographers as “doctors of photography” (30) possessing the ability to inspect, diagnose, and rehabilitate… Full Review

Peter Cornelius Claussen’s Die Kirchen der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter 1050–1300 is a supplement to the author’s path-breaking book on Roman marble workers, Magistri doctissimi romani (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1987). Magistri is the first volume of the ambitiously conceived Corpus Cosmatorum, the second volume of which is an alphabetically organized compendium of the “high medieval” churches in which the marble workers were active. The second volume has appeared to date in three parts: part 1, with entries on twenty-nine churches from S. Adriano to S. Francesca Romana (Stuttgart: Franz Streiner Verlag, 2002); part 3 (S. Giacomo alla Lungara to… Full Review

Man Ray | Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism is an intimate exhibition. Circumscribed in both scale and subject, it is in turn satisfying and disturbing for the keyhole access and insights it offers into the life and art of two of European Surrealism’s notable American exponents during their brief, fecund, and often tempestuous creative partnership and love affair. Man Ray and Lee Miller were together in Paris from 1929 to 1932, three short years. But like a pebble that life casually skipped on the water, this particular time and place instigated ripples and reverberations for both protagonists and, this exhibition… Full Review

For nearly six hundred years castles lay at the heart of England’s social and political life. Whether located in cities or the country, along land frontiers or sea-bound shores, they served as strongholds, centers of government, residences, markers of social status, and political showpieces. Introduced at the Norman Conquest in 1066 (with more than five hundred constructed in the first decade after the Battle of Hastings), castles outlasted the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and succumbed only in the Civil War of the 1640s. Such longevity might be expected to ensure exhaustive coverage in the literature, but oddly this… Full Review

Gathering close to eighty assemblages, collages, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures made between 1918 and 1947, as well as a partial replica of the Merzbau installation, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is the first large-scale retrospective in the United States of Schwitters’s work since John Elderfeld’s 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Here at the Berkeley Art Museum, where I saw it, it is also the first big retrospective of his work to reach the West Coast. Isabel Schulz, coeditor of Schwitters’s catalogue raisonné, curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, and executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at… Full Review

The discovery of the Book of Hours of Duchess Catherine of Cleves in the 1960s caused many art historians to change their views on fifteenth-century northern Netherlandish book illumination in a positive way. Instead of being regarded as a rather provincial school, Dutch book illumination was appreciated much more after the Cleves Hours had the chance to reveal her beauty to the world. The Book of Hours, made around 1440, has weathered the centuries in remarkable condition—missing only a few leaves—but was divided into two parts in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both parts miraculously found their way… Full Review

Two recent exhibitions at the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) offer opportunities to contemplate the changing face of Mexican art in relation to issues of nationalism and identity. With curatorial assistance at SDMA from Amy Galpin and Julia Marciari-Alexander, Mexican Modern Painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection presents eighty paintings from the first half of the twentieth century, complementing the San Diego Museum of Art’s permanent collection by including works by many of the same artists, such as Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, Rufino Tamayo, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez. Although the exhibition loosely situates these works within the context of… Full Review

Jenifer Neils’s lavishly illustrated new book aims to provide non-specialist readers with an introduction to the women of the ancient world as they are revealed through images and other artifacts held in the British Museum. The “ancient world” here is broadly defined, stretching from the Neolithic period to the late Roman empire and from Italy and northern Africa to modern Iran, although the discussion generally concentrates on the periods and regions for which there exists the best evidence. Neils does not pretend to cover her topic comprehensively; the evidence is too incomplete, and as she notes in the introduction, what… Full Review

In this pioneering study, Alison McQueen examines an important and yet largely overlooked phenomenon: the engagement with the visual arts of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. McQueen draws upon her extensive work in the archives throughout Europe and years of sustained consideration of this subject to argue that Eugénie’s patronage and collecting activities were distinctly political in nature, critical to the fashioning of her private and public personae, and central to the art world. A declared aim of this book is to challenge “the coherence of studies on art in nineteenth-century France” (5) by showing how Empress Eugénie’s involvement… Full Review