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At the close of The Clement Bible at the Medieval Courts of Naples and Avignon: A Study of Papal Power, Royal Prestige, and Patronage, Cathleen Fleck observes that the history of the Clement Bible can be understood in part through the pleasure and privilege of leafing through it, an experience that those who have sat turning its folios in the British Library, including the present reviewer, have shared with its earlier owners. Tracking the production and use of the codex through a series of inventories that reveal how highly valued ownership of the manuscript was, Fleck also makes a… Full Review

In his complex and disciplined book, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Iftikhar Dadi provides a genuinely antifoundationalist history of the modern art of Muslim South Asia. Instead of viewing that history through one or more existing analytical frames—namely Pakistani nationalism, Islamic or artistic cosmopolitanism, global modernism, or, most predictably, the tradition of South Asian Islamicate art—Dadi describes how artistic practice was driven by the inherent instability of each of those categories. The “crisis-ridden quest” for an “adequate discursive and aesthetic ground” for modern artistic practice led Muslim South Asian artists to experiment with a tradition that… Full Review

More than ten years ago now, Gloria Groom’s exhibition Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Those who saw it or perused the meticulously documented catalogue can attest to the sustained and probing nature of Nabi artists’ engagement with ostensibly private, intimate modes of decorative painting. Groom made this especially clear with a stunning installation of four panels from Édouard Vuillard’s Album (1895). Vuillard’s canvases quietly vibrate with areas of pattern denoting things such as blouses, flowers, wallpaper, and linens in a restricted palette of deep reds, muted… Full Review

In an article entitled “Les musées ne sont pas à vendre” (“Museums Are Not For Sale”) published on December 12, 2006, in the daily French paper Le Monde, the art historians Françoise Cachin, Jean Clair, and Roland Recht strongly denounced the increasing commercialization of the national patrimony, epitomized by the Louvre’s plan to rent out part of its collection to a branch established in Abu Dhabi. The authors warned the French administration against the incoherence of its cultural policy: claiming to protect the nation’s artistic treasures, while at the same time using those treasures as commodities. The… Full Review

Transition periods in art history rarely present straightforward theses, and eighteenth-century South Asia is no exception. In the recent past this period was characterized more eloquently in terms of its failure rather than its success, as a cultural gulf stretching between waning Mughal power and an encroaching British one. Art historians have viewed this political crisis of the Mughal state as a corollary of an artistic crisis of style and composition—a primary concern being the dissolution of a unifying stylistic and cultural vision, the hallmark of the early modern Mughal atelier. Yet, as this book argues, when viewed from the… Full Review

Lloyd Laing’s survey of art in Britain, Scotland, and Ireland from the Iron Age to the conversion period opens with an introductory chapter entitled "The Study of Celtic Art." It then provides an overview in the following chapter, "Pre-Christian Insular Celtic Art," exploring both the motifs and the media of metalwork and examining interactions with the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, ending with a consideration of the Mote of Mark as a site of cultural interaction. Chapter 3, "The Impact of Christianity," looks at the structure of the Celtic church, the role of monasticism, and the development of Insular Christian iconography… Full Review

The tronie—a head or character study—is not a portrait; tronies figure the anonymous as opposed to the recognized, the pathos of expression rather than the portrait’s posed veneer. The tronie and its precise relation to the academic genres of history painting, portraiture, landscape, and still life has been the subject of recent scholarly attention. The slippery pictorial genre first appeared in the sixteenth century as a workshop exercise designed to teach young apprentices the fundamentals of drawing and chiaroscuro. A tronie may also mimic a particular master’s style; thus it became a popular and marketable form in the seventeenth… Full Review

Adam Kern's Manga from the Floating World analyzes the literary genre of kibyōshi (literally, "yellow covers"), providing a particular focus on the subversive effects these small, fully illustrated works of humor had on the ruling military bureaucracy in late eighteenth-century Japan. The book is rich in detail and written in a style that is engaging, informative, and entertaining. Kern has a penchant for taking standard phrases and morphing them into something ironic, as in his title for chapter 4, "The Rise and Pratfall of the Kibyōshi." A further distinctive feature is that the study follows what is now standard… Full Review

Marcia Hall has written a brave book that is even more sweeping in scope than the list of names in the subtitle suggests. Indeed, the first half of the book discusses the Council of Trent, fifteenth-century Florentine religious painting, the Venetian use of oil paint, the Reformation, Leonardo, Giorgione, Correggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, Mannerism, and Roman painting at the end of the century. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, however, is not a survey, but a lucid argument, focusing on a few examples over this broad swathe of Renaissance art in order to explore a question of signal… Full Review

“To the Romans I assign no limit of things nor of time. To them I have given empire without end” (Aeneid, 1.278). So Virgil’s Zeus prophesized to Aeneas, encapsulating the myth of Rome’s divinely sanctioned and immortal imperium (power, authority, and sovereignty) that inspired and was exploited by centuries of later rulers, popes, nobles, humanists, and others. Rome’s imperium—how it was expressed by its ancient ruins and fragments and who could possess it during the Renaissance—forms the central theme in Kathleen Wren Christian’s book. Christian examines the cultural phenomenon of antiquities collecting in Rome during the early… Full Review