Recently Published Reviews

From 1690 on, children in colonial America were taught the letters of the alphabet with the New England Primer. Millions of copies of these primers formed the pedagogical cornerstone of elementary education for the next two centuries. These schoolroom textbooks iterated the basic building blocks of the English language—vowels, consonants, syllabariums—supplemented with woodcut illustrations and rhymed couplets that undergirded literacy with moral lessons imbued, in turn, with religious themes and catechisms gleaned from the King James Bible. Given this long tradition, had Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother not stumbled onto the Froebel system of kindergarten instruction as one alternative to… Full Review

A long-neglected fresco cycle by Battista Zelotti, decorating six rooms in the Obizzi Castle of Cataio, is stunningly revealed in Irma B. Jaffe’s richly illustrated new book. The cycle’s rediscovery becomes one element of a three-part narrative. First, in the acknowledgment, Jaffe relays the sense of adventure and excitement that followed a phone call from her colleague, Gernando Colombardo, who first visited the frescoes, newly open to the public in 2002, and urged her to grab the next flight to Venice in order to see them. Then in the first half of the book, two chapters contextualize the frescoes by… Full Review

A little over twenty-five years ago, Kobena Mercer published “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” an essay urging participants in the critical discourse around black artists’ work to check their discursivizing practices against the artistic and formal contents of art practices as such. Of course the project of Mercer’s essay is far vaster than an aestheticist reduction like “returning to the object” can suggest. Its target, rather, was a then-emergent multiculturalist movement lost in thrall to visibility discourse, and its simplest point was also its most valuable. Even visibility campaigns, Mercer warned, entail specific matters and problems of form… Full Review

By organizing this collection of essays around the concept of “social conflict” and insisting on the “representational capacity” of so-called “low” forms of cultural expression, Patricia Johnston puts her finger on two of the most prominent features of scholarship on American art today: the concern with the ideological implications of the visual and the corresponding drive to address the visual in its complex and diverse variations (1). Indeed, as she claims in her introduction, the “history of American art has typically emphasized quality less than the art history of other nations” and has “made more space for a variety of… Full Review

The painted diptych, a work comprised of two hinged panels of equal size that can be opened and closed like a book, flourished as a Netherlandish art form from 1430 to the mid-sixteenth century. Leading artists such as Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling used this format for some of the most compelling paintings of the period, and it enjoyed popularity for both religious and secular subjects. The splendid exhibition Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych was the first ever devoted to this formula in early Northern art. The show brought together many spectacular works… Full Review

Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, co-editors and curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy, begin their exhibition catalogue of the same name by posing this question: why hasn’t the “pivotal subject” of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian domestic interiors appeared more often in mainstream Renaissance studies? The text that follows seeks to help remedy the problem behind the question, and thus joins a growing list of recent contributions that have followed Peter Thornton’s The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400–1600 (New York: Abrams), the monograph that issued a call-to-arms in 1991. These publications devoted to Italian… Full Review

Visual Shock is Michael Kammen's eighteenth book and like so many of the author's earlier forays into American cultural history, it strives for encyclopedic breadth. Kammen relates a host of well-known historical episodes, beginning with the jeering reception accorded Horatio Greenough's Zeus-like George Washington when it was installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1841, and ending with the culture wars—Mapplethorpe! The West as America! Sensation!—of the last two decades. He also describes many obscure incidents, such as the carping criticism that greeted Kenneth Evett's murals for the Nebraska state capitol rotunda in 1954. Visual… Full Review

Alexander Roslin (1718–1793) is an artist whose better-known paintings are familiar to modern Anglo-American audiences; many will recognize the oft-reproduced portrait he made of his wife, the painter Marie-Suzanne Giroust, known colloquially as The Veiled Lady (1768; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). But overall, Roslin is a marginalized figure whose lack of critical prominence has led to the perception that he is a minor painter. The facts suggest otherwise. Roslin was massively prolific, academically successful, internationally in demand, and recognized by contemporaries as one of his era’s premier portraitists. He died one of the wealthiest artists in all of Europe, abundantly praised, and… Full Review

The four essays in this book began as lectures delivered in 2002, and it is fortunate indeed that they have been published here in so elegant and timely a form. Each develops a theme from Vasari’s Vite that has been in plain view, but overlooked, and presents it gracefully. This volume stands as a fitting tribute to its author (1949–2007), whose consistent interest in verbal description of artists and their art leads to strategies offering illuminating interpretations. The starting point for chapter 1, “The Sorcerer’s ‘O’ (and the Painter Who Wasn’t There),” is the anecdote of Giotto’s “O,”… Full Review

In Looking Close and Seeing Far, Kenneth Haltman turns our attention to neglected areas of American cultural production with rich results. The book focuses on the art of the Long Expedition (1819–20), the first U.S. exploratory expedition to include professional artists. When Major Stephen Long’s party set off from Pittsburgh for the Rocky Mountains in April 1819 aboard a specially designed steamboat, the scientific team included two artists: Titian Ramsay Peale and Samuel Seymour. Peale, though only nineteen years old, was already an accomplished draftsman and a veteran of an earlier scientific expedition. Seymour, still such an elusive figure… Full Review

Francois Cusset’s French Theory (FT) is more inclusive than Stanley Fish’s April 2008 reduction of FT to the “farce” of deconstruction (Stanley Fish, “French Theory in America,” “Think Again” New York Times blog, April 6, 2008: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/). This book straddles theory; intellectual history; cultural exchange; American university dominance and academic trench warfare; relations between FT, aesthetics, and the art world(s); global FT; and more. Its historiographic scope is conceptually useful, more genealogy than narrative history. Cusset affirms FT‘s work-up of the “undecidability of meaning” for new audiences and readers. There is a persistent tone to this… Full Review

This edited volume is the initial product of a joint research project undertaken by scholars at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. The “Epistemic History of Architecture” aims to promote a series of conferences on the theme of architecture as a historical form of “knowledge.” The group’s primary object of study is not the building itself but rather the process of construction, which is understood to incorporate implicit and explicit “systems” of knowledge, ranging from practitioners’ rules-of-thumb to codified theory in all its… Full Review

The beautifully produced catalogue of the exhibition that opened at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and will have its second venue at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is devoted to the re-evaluation of the art of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, making known to a wider public the work of artists that preceded the great flowering of Spanish painting in its Golden Age, specifically during the period between the death of Philip III’s father, at the end of the sixteenth century, and the accession to the throne of his son, Philip IV, in 1621… Full Review

This is an excellent book. Its virtues are that it offers an overview of the painting, sculpture, architecture, and luxury arts of Iberia; furthermore, it is highly reliable. Between the footnotes and the bibliography, it contains a trustworthy list of existing publications on Spanish and Portuguese art, a list that registers the history of Iberia with depth and balanced judgment. For example, Trusted does not carelessly assert that in the sixteenth century Muslims fled Spain for the Americas, where they created Islamic-derived ceilings, tiles, leather hangings, and carpets. Instead she wisely notes that the artists who created these items may… Full Review

Federico Zuccaro documented the troubled early life, apprenticeships, and rise to fame of his older brother, Taddeo, in a series of twenty drawings acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1999 from Christie’s New York. An exhibition of these drawings, created in the 1590s, coincided with the publication of this book in which the drawings and accompanying poems are illustrated and placed in the historical and artistic context of sixteenth-century Rome. Two major themes recur throughout the volume. One is the prominence of not only Taddeo (1529–1566) as a central player among Raphael, Michelangelo, and Polidoro da Caravaggio in… Full Review