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The subject of Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice, notwithstanding its expansive title, is Titian's celebrated Peter Martyr Altarpiece (1537-30). In spite of the painting's fiery demise in 1867, Patricia Meilman successfully reconstructs the altarpiece and its environment in the reader's mind, a project facilitated by her clarity of purpose to re-secure the work's artistic importance. The author furnishes a close study of the religious context, sources, and subsequent critical and artistic significance of this unusual commission to a prestigious artist by the Scuola of San Pietro Martire for its altar in the nave of the Dominican church… Full Review

John Crook's study, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of the Saints in the Early Christian West c. 300-1200, represents a remarkable synthesis of more than a decade of research spent in pursuit of a laudably ambitious goal: to provide an overview of the architectural setting of the cult of the saints in the West between the beginnings of the cult and 1200. Given the many factors that complicate the project, the results are much to be admired. Work on a similar, but much narrower, topic allowed me unwonted familiarity with the difficulties Crook certainly encountered (Cynthia Hahn, "Seeing… Full Review

As any bibliophile knows, art books can be both purveyors of information about objects and objects of beauty themselves. This is certainly the case with the exquisite catalogue created for the recent exhibition on early photographs of India held at the Smithsonian Institution's Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, DC. India through the Lens: Photography 1840-1911, edited by Vidya Dehejia, has a carefully coordinated aesthetic appeal—from the fold-out pages revealing the protracted splendor of panoramic photographs to the sepia-colored frontispieces of each section designed to match the sepia-toned photographs that follow. Eleven essays, written by seven contributors and varying from… Full Review

Christine Boeckl's Images of Plague and Pestilence: Iconography and Iconology is a concise overview of the visual and literary history of cultural responses to pestilential epidemics. In this study, Boeckl draws on her extensive knowledge of the scholarly literature on plague—pioneered by Jacqueline Brossollet and Henri Mollaret—and to which she has contributed several significant articles since completing her dissertation in 1990. Thus, the book draws on Boeckl's familiarity with the symptoms of the plague, its history of outbreaks, its causes, its folklore, the devotional images created to ward it off, and the iconographic conventions established for representing those stricken by… Full Review

Spirits Embodied: Art of the Congo; Selections from the Helmut F. Stern Collection was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title held in 1999 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. All the works came from the Congo. Helmut Stern purchased most of them from Marc Léo Félix, the Belgian connoisseur and African art dealer. The core of the collection, twenty-two out of seventy-one pieces, formerly belonged to the late Belgian artist Joseph Henrion; the rest came from French, Belgian, and Portuguese collectors. The quality of the works varies considerably: some are quite remarkable for their forms and… Full Review

For much of the twentieth century, the study of medieval Bible illustration was focused on the problem of origins. In the most systematic theory of the genre, Kurt Weitzmann argued in Roll and Codex (Princeton, 1947) that the earliest biblical manuscripts followed the conventions of ancient papyrus rolls in which narrative images were embedded within narrow columns of text, providing a dense sequence of pictorial equivalents to the principal episodes of the text. Establishing a rigorous method of "picture criticism," Weitzmann argued that one could detect in later cycles the different phases of adjustment that resulted from the gradual emancipation… Full Review

Mary Bergstein's The Sculpture of Nanni di Banco follows in the tradition of the great monographs like Sculpture of Donatello by H.W. Janson and Lorenzo Ghiberti by Richard Krautheimer, but on a more modest scale. Although Nanni di Banco (ca. 1374-1421) accomplished only six major works in his career, he, with Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Donatello, "self-consciously and deliberately set into motion the issues that would occupy painters, sculptors, and architects through out the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy" (3). This book finally revives Nanni from scholarly neglect, though Brunetti, Lanyi, Vaccarino, Janson, Wundram, and Bellosi previously had made attempts… Full Review

The Psalter of Robert de Lisle (London, British Library Arundel MS 83 II) has been mentioned in every major publication on the masterpieces of English manuscript illumination. Lucy Freeman Sandler's The Psalter of Robert de Lisle in the British Library, first published in 1983, is the first focused study of the Psalter, and condenses material from her 1964 doctoral dissertation. Scholarly reviews in the mid-1980s, such as those by Walter Cahn in the Art Bulletin (September 1987, 472-473) and Adelaide Bennett in Speculum (October 1987, 985-989), were positive and acted as venues for yet more useful material about the… Full Review

E. W. Godwin (1833-86) was a Victorian architect-designer who balanced historical precedent with innovation, "high" with "low" art, and exotic with vernacular to become the master of "judicious eclecticism." Two recent books on his practice, E. W. Godwin: Aesthetic Movement Architect and Designer and The Secular Furniture of E. W. Godwin, should be read as a pair. Undoubtedly, Susan Soros—editor of the first and author of the second—agrees, as she often refers the reader of one to the other. The former was published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title held at the Bard Graduate Center for… Full Review

In this fascinating book, John W. O'Malley, the eminent church historian, analyzes scholarship on Roman Catholicism from about 1517 until the French Revolution in order to problematize the "names," or terms, we use for religious developments of that time. As he notes, although the term "Reformation" is generally accepted for Protestantism of the era, consensus is lacking on what to term coeval Catholicism (1). O'Malley examines the biases revealed by the competing names for Catholicism—such as "Counter-Reformation," "Catholic Reformation," and "Catholic Restoration"—and suggests that we use a new term instead: "early modern Catholicism." In making this suggestion, O'Malley aims to… Full Review