Recently Published Reviews

In Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870, Suzanne Glover Lindsay takes an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of modern funerary sculpture in France—how it functioned historically, culturally, and aesthetically. The book places new emphasis on the dynamic that existed between tomb cult and the funerary arts, highlighting contemporary French attitudes toward death and burial as a result of Enlightenment thought and the Revolution of 1789. To frame this discussion, Lindsay focuses on a specific type of funerary sculpture—the recumbent effigy depicting the deceased in death—from its consideration and dismissal in France around 1750… Full Review

We often speak about Michelangelo’s influence on other artists as an active force to which later artists merely yielded. Morten Steen Hansen’s In Michelangelo’s Mirror turns the equation around, making Michelangelo’s work the object that later artists use for their own varied purposes. He focuses on three artists—Perino del Vaga, Daniele da Volterra, and Pellegrino Tibaldi—who knew each other in Rome, but this intelligent study is not about their connections to each other. Rather, Hansen considers their references to Michelangelo’s art as part of the discourse about the older artist’s work that took on particular urgency after the unveiling of… Full Review

Chris Burden: Extreme Measures at the New Museum, the Los Angeles-based artist’s first major museum exhibition in the United States in twenty-five years and his first solo museum show in New York, is a boy’s dream come true. Organized by Lisa Phillips with Massimiliano Gioni and Jenny Moore, the show presents a grown-up man playing with toys. The difference is that, this time around, Burden’s adolescent universe gets a big injection of money, engineering, and industriousness. Even if the exhibition does not directly address issues of gender, the male-oriented sensibility is felt all over. Everything is presented in a large-scale… Full Review

Of the many urban operations that contributed to making modern Paris, the construction of the Halles Centrales (Central Markets; 1854–74) was among the largest, most radical, and most influential projects undertaken as part of the Second Empire renovation of the city. Designed by the academically trained architect Victor Baltard (1805–1874), the Halles Centrales required the rebuilding of an entire neighborhood in the heart of the French capital. Planned on a regular grid and linked by covered streets, Baltard’s iron market pavilions were designed to provide for the efficient transaction of commerce and remained in operation until 1969. For a couple… Full Review

What constitutes live/performance art today? The terms and definition(s) have always been slippery. In the past, live art was a large, interdisciplinary umbrella that included body art, interactive installation, postmodern dance, post-dramatic theater, time-based work, and performance video. Live art has also included the work and products of artistic collectives, interventionist work, relational aesthetics, eco art, social practice, institutional critique, and, recently, reenactment. Live art is further related to a burgeoning category in academic writing that is known as performance studies and which includes contributions from scholars who locate their disciplinary home in theater, fine arts, art history, dance, anthropology… Full Review

What to do with Paolo Soleri (1919–2013)? For the last half-century, the work of the Italian-born architect has seemingly refused to conform to the stylistic and theoretical concerns of the times. That is, until recently, when Cosanti, the foundation he established, began making efforts to transform the general perception of his work from one of an arts-and-crafts practice to that of visionary sustainable design. For the discipline of art history, however, Soleri’s legacy is important, not for his attempts to create efficient urban structures, but for his refusal to deny the significance of the aesthetic component of any human environment… Full Review

Organized by Koenraad Jonckheere in collaboration with Peter Carpreau, senior curator at M – Museum Leuven, this important, thoughtful, and beautiful exhibition aims to enshrine Michiel Coxcie among the select group of northern masters—Jan Gossaert, Jan van Scorel, Maarten van Heemskerck, and Frans Floris—who visited Rome during the first half of the sixteenth century and engaged inventively with the art of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as with their ancient sources, both sculptural and architectural. The exhibition and its Dutch- and English-language catalogues (which slightly vary in content) constitute a robust response, four hundred years after the fact, to the ambivalent… Full Review

Many periods in the history of art are subject to anachronistic or pejorative names that have somehow stuck, yet few have been so controversial as the term “baroque.” Is baroque a style? If so, what are its characteristics and how to account for the countless exceptions? Is it a period? When does it begin or end? What are its geographical boundaries? Is it a concept? Due to its historical anachronism, pejorative connotations, and, not least, the sheer difficulty in defining it as a style or a period, art historians have in recent years shied away from the term. Cultural critics… Full Review

Richard Wrigley’s Roman Fever: Influence, Infection, and the Image of Rome, 1700–1870 is a thought-provoking look at Rome—and, it should be noted, also at its wider environs—from an unlikely point of view: the filthy public sanitation and insalubrious atmospheric conditions of the city and outlying areas, and how these factors, together with the evidence surrounding the Roman phenomenon of mal’aria (bad air or climate), affected the “making and viewing of art” by artistic pilgrims sojourning there. Borrowing his title from the 1934 short story “Roman Fever” by Edith Wharton dedicated to the sentimental and physical dangers of Rome’s deadly nighttime… Full Review

The star of colonial Latin American art is ascendant. Though some museums, like the Denver Art Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art, have long had important collections in this area, others have recently begun to take more than a passing interest in the period and region. Just last year the Louvre and the Philadelphia Museum of Art held major colonial Latin American exhibitions. This was the second show of such scale at Philadelphia in recent history. Their 2006 exhibition, Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, after traveling to Mexico City, went on to the Los Angeles… Full Review

Renata Ago’s Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome is an English translation of Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento, first published in Rome in 2006 (Donzelli Editore). The translation is by Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen. Findlen also contributes an important foreword that analyzes in detail the Nota delli musei, librerie, galerie et ornamenti di statue e pitture, ne’ palazzi, nelle case, e ne’ giardini di Roma, a list of collections in the houses, palaces, and gardens of Rome that was published in 1664 and… Full Review

Roman Architecture in Provence, by James C. Anderson, Jr., is a welcome contribution to the literature on architecture in the Roman provinces. Anderson focuses on the ancient cities of modern Provence, Roman Gallia Narbonensis, surveying urban development and offering detailed studies of monumental types and individual structures. The book is divided into a brief introductory chapter and still briefer conclusions framing two longer, substantive chapters. In chapter 1, “Historical Overview: Roman Provence, ‘Provincia Nostra,’” Anderson begins with a brief account of history and geography, highlighting the early and close relationship between Rome and Gallia Narbonensis, or… Full Review

Though it is a far-reaching critique of the kind of historicism that contents itself with studying the past without regard for the present, Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History is not an attempt to liberate us from history. On the contrary, it is a critique of historicism in the name of history, and it never loses sight of the urgent issues that have fueled historicism, especially in the last century. In the final chapter of the book, for example, Moxey argues that art historians adopted historicist distance after the Second World War as a means of guarding against… Full Review

Beginning with the title—Moche Art and Visual Culture in Ancient Peru—Margaret A. Jackson frames her first book as a comprehensive new approach to Moche visual arts. She proposes to address the corpus of Moche visual culture from an innovative theoretical perspective that “challenges conventional opinions” and “tests operative paradigms” about incipient writing systems in the Americas (10–11). Jackson argues that the perceived visual complexity of Moche iconography may be understood as “neither strictly linguistically informed nor purely pictorial” (149), but rather as an intermediate category, which she describes variously as “semasiographic,” “systematized notation,” and “hybrid presentational syntax.” The… Full Review

Tom Henry’s The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli looks to the past and the future. The product of the author’s decades-long engagement with the artist, the book is unabashedly an artist’s biography that aims “to embrace Signorelli’s humanity” (xiv). When Henry writes, “A man's work is, after all, the most satisfactory and reliable document for those who take the pains to decipher it—the autobiography which every man of genius bequeaths to posterity” (17), he echoes the first book in English on Signorelli, written by Maud Cruttwell and published in 1899, Luca Signorelli (London: Bell), a volume in the “Great… Full Review