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In contrast to the vast scope (and scale) of his 2003 book Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon), David Summers has dramatically focused his investigation in his newest volume, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting, choosing instead to examine a few discrete moments in the history of Western art. Over the course of four chapters, Summers traces the development of optical theory and its related fields, describing their changing relationship to Western painting from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. According to Summers, the depiction of light and its interaction with… Full Review

An intriguing concept lies behind this anthology: in 1999, a group of graduate students under the direction of Yves Christe in Geneva began the systematic comparison of the iconography of the Bibles moralisées and the stained glass of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. In 2001, their results were presented along with other scholarship on the Sainte-Chapelle at an international colloquium organized by Christe and Peter Kurmann at the Collège de France. Four contributors from the Geneva project (Christe, as well as Christine Hediger, who also edited the volume and wrote its preface, Stanislas Anthonioz, and Maya Grossenbacher) are joined in this… Full Review

The History of British Art, Volume 1: 600–1600 is the first of an ambitious new three-volume series produced by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain. Edited by Tim Ayers, this volume is, temporally at least, the most ambitious of the three, covering the period of the conversion of Britain under Augustine around 600 AD to a rather more difficult period to account for, ca. 1600. The latter date—which denies the normal boundary for the British Middle Ages with the Dissolution of the Monasteries—does much to challenge still prevalent historiographical problems surrounding the inexact relationship between the periodization… Full Review

Artists’ books are a strange genre in contemporary art, hovering between several different disciplines and having multiple histories. One of the persistent arguments in the field concerns the definition of an artist’s book. A reductive form of this argument might be: is it a craft practice or is it some kind of conceptual art form? Arguing definitions in the abstract is a fruitless and pointless activity, but examining the work of specific artists is rewarding and informative. The publication of a catalogue of work produced at the Visual Studies Workshop Press presents an opportunity to consider a diverse range of… Full Review

Over the last two decades much important research has been done on Spanish portraiture of the early modern period and court portraiture in particular. A feature of this research has been its interdisciplinary approach, such as Juan Miguel Serrera’s seminal essay on the uses of portraiture (“Alonso Sánchez Coello y la mecánica del retrato de corte,” in Alonso Sánchez Coello, exh. cat., Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 1990, 38–63) and Javier Portús Pérez’s groundbreaking publications on the representation of art and artists in the literature of the Golden Age (see, for example, Pintura y pensamiento en la España de… Full Review

Anyone who has ever wondered why and how representations of the human nude became so central to Renaissance and post-Renaissance Western art will derive great pleasure from this catalogue, which documents an exhibition of fifty-six drawings from the impressive collection of the Crocker Art Museum. The works splendidly demonstrate the skillful use of pen-and-ink and wash techniques as well as combinations of black, red, and white chalks, most by renowned artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacques-Louis David, and Albrecht Dürer, along with masterly works by less familiar artists. Its numerous high-quality reproductions, informative essays, and catalogue entries for each… Full Review

Lori Boornazian Diel’s study of the colonial Mexican manuscript known as the Tira de Tepechpan is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly literature examining colonial historical documents, both pictorial and textual. The Tira de Tepechpan is an annals-style manuscript documenting the history and ruling lineage of the central Mexican town of Tepechpan. It was probably begun around 1553 and its imagery completed ca. 1590/96, with written annotations in Nahuatl added at an unknown time. Its various contributors organized the historical information along a continuous line of year dates taken from the fifty-two-year Mexican calendar. The manuscript, which… Full Review

Over the past twenty years or so, Paul Gauguin’s imagery has drawn a good deal of interest from scholars who have analyzed it from feminist, post-colonial, and socio-historical perspectives. Taken together, the contributions of Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Griselda Pollock, and Stephen Eisenman have deepened our understanding of the ways in which Gauguin operated uneasily within Western, patriarchal, imperialist norms and structures. For her part, Debora Silverman has anchored his work in nineteenth-century Catholic theology and visual culture (Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Going Native,” Art in America 77 [July 1989]: 119–128, 161; Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Color of Art History… Full Review

Those unfamiliar with earlier publications by Jérôme Baschet, a member of the Groupe d’Anthropologie Historique de l’Occident Médiéval at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, might well approach this modest little paperback in expectation of a useful but uninspiring handbook devoted to the matching of written text and visual image. Defined by Erwin Panofsky as preliminary to the true interpretation of meaning, iconography has too often been conceived in practice as a matter of identification and description; more recently, it has slipped out of favor with the advent of interpretive models that liberate the image from passive dependence… Full Review

“Both at the moment of the Revolution and long after its official end,” writes Trish Loughran in The Republic in Print, “the challenge posed by national dispersion would be the most recurrent problem in American political economy” (62). The “United States” had to be constructed as a self-evident, self-identical entity during precisely the period that its populations were dispersing most rapidly over a vast geographical space. How did anything like unity—rhetorical or actual—emerge from conditions characterized primarily by difference, distance, delay, and displacement? Standard accounts of print culture in the early national period stress the role of print as… Full Review