Browse Recent Book Reviews

When I received a copy of this research report in the mail, I was astonished by its heft: 140 pages of charts, graphs, and their explanations! These are preceded by an introduction by Dana Gioia, former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, and brief summaries of ten key findings. This last section has provided good headlines for a few stories in the general press, like, “Nearly two million Americans are artists,” or, “Women remain underrepresented in several artist occupations.” Understanding these findings properly requires study. After all, this is a report of statistics, not an interpretation of… Full Review

Theodor de Bry (1528–1598) remains a towering figure in the history of print and the graphic arts as well as in the development of early modern geography. He emerged from a relatively unexceptional background as a goldsmith and engraver of copper plates—the two professions went hand in hand in the Low Countries guild system in which he trained—to found one of the most important printing houses in northern Europe and to become the publisher of arguably the most influential series of books of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. De Bry's "Les Grands Voyages," which was supplemented by his… Full Review

London-born in 1902, Adrian Stokes spent some years during the 1920s in Italy looking at early Renaissance art and, soon enough, writing about it. Like many aesthetes, he found himself by moving south. After some unfocused essays and books, which he did not republish, he then created two masterpieces: Quattro Cento (1932), a study of fifteenth-century sculpture, and Stones of Rimini (1934), a very elaborate analysis of the Tempio Malatestiana in Rimini. His early life must have been full of tensions, for although he was a close friend of Ezra Pound, Stokes had a Jewish mother and was a lover… Full Review

Robert Moses did more to shape the modern landscape of New York than any other individual in the city’s history. His urban vision dramatically, and irrevocably, transformed the entire metropolitan region in the middle of the twentieth century. This is the subject of a handsome volume of essays, photographs, and catalogue entries edited by Columbia Professors Hilary Ballon and Kenneth Jackson and published in conjunction with a three-part exhibition on Moses held in New York City in 2007. The book opens with a portfolio of fifty-two color photographs by Andrew Moore, shot in 2005 and 2006. Moore presents… Full Review

The simulacra are coming! These alien agents of simulation are winning the battle for hearts and minds. The mimetic arts are in full retreat, and our grip on reality is slipping. Those who find this distressing will find some reassurance in Victor Stoichita’s book The Pygmalion Effect. Stoichita shows that simulacra are not quite the alien threat some think they are. It turns out that we have been living with them all along, albeit without attending to them much. As Ovid tells it, the sculptor Pygmalion, in love with his own creation, has his fantasy come… Full Review

Both throughout his life and since, Sir David Wilkie has occupied an ambivalent, and occasionally paradoxical, position within the canon of British and European late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century painting. The span of his career alone prevents easy categorization, falling as it does neatly between the polemics of Reynolds and the aesthetics of Ruskin. He was a Scottish painter who forged a career in England and asserted a very British vision, yet art historically his principal legacy remains rooted to the Scottish school. His stylistic development confused, and even shocked, contemporaries and has left later commentators struggling to pigeonhole him… Full Review

Caravaggio is most often represented as a hot-headed painter who preferred the seedy side of Rome—its bars, street brawls, and prostitutes—to the refined life of his wealthy patrons. Thus, one might be tempted to assume that the artist was vehemently opposed to all that was intellectual, especially the stuffy classicism of Rome’s humanist circle. This popular perception of the artist sets up two interesting dichotomies, one that pits naturalism against classicism and another claiming that a painter who had a weakness for violence and promiscuity could not also have interests in literary or theoretical matters. John Moffitt takes issue with… Full Review

British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art, 1750–1950 is the catalogue of the first major exhibition installed at the newly renovated Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent—an occasion for continentals to examine a distinctly British artistic tradition. Conceived by the museum's director, Robert Hoozee, the exhibition aimed to trace and highlight links between works from the mid-eighteenth century (when, for the first time, native artists publicly staked out their own reputation) through to the 1950s (at which point Modernism overrode the notion of a national tradition). In his opening essay Hoozee explains the organizing principle of the… Full Review

In Prodigy Houses of Virginia: Architecture and the Native Elite, Barbara Burlison Mooney provides a critical, Marxist analysis of Virginia’s Tidewater plantation houses as expressions of Virginia’s eighteenth-century gentry culture. Mooney seeks to demonstrate that analyzing members of Virginia’s colonial gentry can reveal much about the mansions they created. As a result, the book deals less with issues of architectural design than with the social and cultural context in which the architecture was created. Rather than architectural history, her study is more a work of social history as it relates to architecture. In her introduction, Mooney establishes… Full Review

There is much to appreciate in Janet W. Foster’s The Queen Anne House: America’s Victorian Vernacular. First among these is the broad focus in her celebration of American residential architecture of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, which encompasses buildings across the country in a variety of geographic and social circumstances. Foster’s celebration is amply documented in the high graphic quality of this publication, particularly in the many full-page color photographs by Radek Kurzaj that lavishly present all of the twenty-two properties chosen for the catalogue portion of her project. One of the virtues of the… Full Review