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As many financially strapped theater chain owners will attest, the digital revolution—specifically in the form of DVDs, satellite and cable television, and widescreen HDTVs—has radically impacted film viewing and purchasing habits, transforming a once exclusively public activity into a far more pragmatic and private one. Not only are we able to reasonably simulate the spectacle of the movie-going experience within the comforts of our own living room at a fraction of the cost, but we are no longer bound by the etiquette of viewing films in unfolding real time surrounded by total strangers. We can pause, mute, and fast forward… Full Review

The first of four volumes that will contain the collected essays of the doyen of Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar’s Early Islamic Art has twenty selections. The fascinating introduction, which is too brief, explains how, starting as a medievalist, Grabar entered the field of Islamic studies. Arriving just at the end of the era when European imperialism dominated scholarship, he had the privilege, denied, alas, to scholars nowadays, to travel widely and do archeological excavations. In those days, “with slow mail, few airplanes, no television, expensive and unreliable telephones, radios that still needed electric plugs in walls . . ." (xxv)… Full Review

As Victoria’s long reign drew to a close, John Everett Millais, who died in 1896, was probably the most widely popular artist in England, and George Frederic Watts, who lived on until 1904, the most respected. Millais was Sir Henry Tate’s favorite painter, and nine major paintings by him, ranging from the early Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia (1851–52) to later public favorites such as The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870), entered the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897, as gifts of the founder or his widow. Henry Tate owned no works by Watts, but between 1897 and 1903 the artist more than compensated… Full Review

Why do early Netherlandish paintings attract so much high-pressure interpretation? This has been a matter not just of an abundance and complexity of scholarly response, but also a repeated concentration on individual objects. While the gaze of current art history settles more readily on bodies of material (oeuvres, periods, themes, collections, etc.), the scholarship of early Netherlandish art has an abiding, though far from exclusive, taste for deep accounts of single paintings. The question rises anew with the appearance of Bret Rothstein’s Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting, which dwells chiefly on four famous works:… Full Review

The later phases of Jacques-Louis David’s career have received far less attention than his earlier work during the Ancien Régime and Revolution. Art in general during Napoleon’s Consulate and Empire has, perhaps surprisingly, been comparatively neglected until recently. Philippe Bordes’s exhibition and catalogue are an extremely valuable contribution to the reassessment of David’s later career and to an understanding of art in France in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Bordes, a professor at the Université Lyon 2, was the founding director of the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille and has published extensively on David and French… Full Review

Over the past year, the United States was fortunate to host two traveling exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts movement: International Arts and Crafts, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, showed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (September 25, 2005–January 22, 2006), and The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880–1920: Design for the Modern World, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, closed its national tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art (October 16, 2005–January 8, 2006). Given the interest in the Arts and Crafts movement generated by these exhibitions, Judith… Full Review

The coast south of Naples is one of the most beautiful and evocative areas of Europe, a dramatic setting for the works of art produced at the height of Amalfi’s importance as a trading center. Jill Caskey’s Art and Patronage in the Medieval Mediterranean focuses on the art produced during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the wealthy communities around Amalfi, and her central premise is that these artistic projects exemplify the art of mercatantia: the private churches palaces, pulpits, and doors that are the material expression of the conspicuous and ambitious “getting and spending” of its merchants. Commerce… Full Review

In David Getsy’s account of the “unprecedented and rapid increase in the interest in sculpture” (2) that emerged in late nineteenth-century Britain, the group of artists labeled the New Sculpture movement is given a long-overdue reappraisal. Focusing his study on five artists at the time considered central to the sculptural revival, the author presents detailed analyses of a small number of “imaginative” or “ideal” statues made between 1877 and 1905 by Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert, Edward Onslow Ford, and James Harvard Thomas. Body Doubles is generously illustrated with more than a hundred black-and-white illustrations. Some color plates of… Full Review

Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City brings together twelve commissioned essays, the impetus for which was the conference that accompanied the exhibition, “Florence and the 1470s: Contexts and Contrasts,” curated by Patricia Rubin and Alison Wright in 1999 at the National Gallery in London. It was during this conference that the importance of the recurring concepts of cultural translation and exchange became evident to Campbell and Milner. The volume scrutinizes these aspects of the artistic and intellectual life of Italian urban cultures in the early modern period. The introduction by the editors, in particular, examines the… Full Review

Rather than rehearse traditional narratives, Briony Fer’s The Infinite Line: Re-Making Art After Modernism refreshingly shifts the established canon of post-war art by positioning lesser-studied artists like Piero Manzoni, Hanne Darboven, and Agnes Martin in relation to venerated figures such as Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse, and Mel Bochner. Her subject is chronologically circumscribed by what she defines as the period of transition between modernism and postmodernism, formally characterized by the shift away from a collage aesthetic. In modern art, collage carries connotations of the disorder and disintegration of the modern world, exemplified by a seemingly random overlapping of disparate elements… Full Review