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In Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain, Michael K. Schuessler proposes that a “visible bridge” developed between theater and mural painting in the early years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. To reveal the relationship between written and visual forms of expression and to create a vocabulary and methodology for describing it, Schuessler compares mural paintings in two Augustinian monasteries in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, to a religious play; a chronicle; service codices (documenting indigenous leaders’ military service to the crown); and a description of a staged La batalla de los salvajes (Battle of… Full Review

Most of the essays contained in Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman, were presented as lectures during a conference at Villa I Tatti in 2009 marking the fiftieth anniversary of Berenson’s death. As Connors both perceptively and tactfully observes in the introduction’s opening paragraph, the timing was propitious: by 2009 the “cult of personality” that had surrounded Berenson during his life had “dissipated for the most part,” and the approach to the study of art that he had espoused in such spirited fashion throughout his long career no longer stood “at the… Full Review

This compact 2012 paperback edition of Escultura monumental mexica (Monumental Mexica Sculpture) is considerably smaller than the hefty—over 11 inches square, 1 5/8 inches thick—hardback first edition of 2009, yet its importance is equally “monumental.” This stems in no small part from the expertise of its coauthors, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Leonardo López Luján, two Mexican archaeologists who, over the course of over three-and-a-half decades, have helped lead the effort to recover, reconstruct, and analyze the material culture of the indigenous Mexica (Aztec) peoples of Central Mexico. When the Spaniards led by Hernán Cortés arrived at the Mexica capital in… Full Review

In regards to documentary photography, the issue of responsibility—be it ethical, social, political, or a combination thereof—has been a central concern throughout its polemicized history. One could stretch that argument, along the line of memory, from the last photograph uploaded or tweeted onto the World Wide Web at precisely 00:00 tonight, to the first instances when human presence was registered on a photographic plate, as in the famous view of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, where a passerby stopped to have his shoes polished, seen from Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s window in 1838. Yet the fundamental difference between such instances and… Full Review

In the 1992 postscript to her essay “Patrilineage,” published in Art Journal the year prior, Mira Schor argued for the necessary interruption of male-dominated art history through the production of histories of and by women. “The method is really very simple,” she explained. “It will always be a man’s world unless one seeks out and values the women in it” (Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” in Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, 117). Despite the changes of nearly two and a half decades, this lesson remains relevant (sadly, so do many in Schor’s essay): unless… Full Review

In this absorbing yet brief book, Stephen Houston, a noted Maya epigrapher and archaeologist, seeks to map out one of the core issues of the anthropology of art—materiality—within the ancient Maya context. The volume highlights in particular native attitudes toward the spirits or energies that reside within certain materials with which the Maya fashioned their visual culture. Over three main chapters, The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence outlines varied dimensions of ancient Maya materiality, employing close visual analysis of artworks, interpretations of hieroglyphic texts, and ethnographic comparisons. The scope of visual culture addressed largely pertains to… Full Review

Art history would seem to be a discipline that could and should generate digital visualization projects—if only for the simple reason that the objects of study are already and easily found in digitized form. As evidenced by the number of workshops and conferences and the general buzz on the subject, the attention given to this type of project has intensified in the past few years; but there are still very few operational sites in the field. A close consideration of one such site, “What Jane Saw” (visited May 2015), raises important questions facing project developers and users of digital art-history… Full Review

What did Wassily Kandinsky mean by “the spiritual in art”? In his long-canonical treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Melerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) (Munich: R. Piper, 1912), the artist does not quite say, though he clearly conceives it in some opposition to the creeping materialism that he assails as the defining feature of the modern world. Scholars, seeking a tighter definition, have often seized on a short, early passage in the text that explicitly evokes Theosophy, even as they have also linked the painter to Eastern mysticism and diverse… Full Review

“Photography is not an Art. Neither is painting nor sculpture, literature nor music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings; the tools he uses in his creative art.” So Alfred Stieglitz provocatively proclaimed in his article “Is Photography a Failure?” printed in New York’s The Sun on March 14, 1922. For Stieglitz, a photographic image was a “picture” (rather than a mere “photograph,” which was the generic term he used to describe anything “drawn by the rays of light”) when it had succeeded as a work of art. Interestingly, almost half a century later… Full Review

As one walks down Oxford Road, the central artery of the University of Manchester’s campus, the imposing Gothic revival structure of the Manchester Museum creates a powerful impression of the ambitions of Victorian science. Samuel J. M. M. Alberti’s Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum goes inside Alfred Waterhouse’s building to interrogate the history of the institution as seen through the display of its specimens. In so doing, Alberti’s stated aim is to overlay a traditional approach to museology—that of focusing on a single institution—with an examination of the political and cultural forces at work. For Alberti… Full Review