Recently Published Reviews

For a snapshot of the dominant directions of current Rembrandt research, particularly under the leadership of senior Dutch scholars, two recent publications provide a sensitive vision. Their very titles signal the degree of adulation accorded to the painter Rembrandt, a solitary "genius," whose wide-ranging influence, or "impact" diffused outward to a circle of talented but lesser painters who followed in his wake. Emphasis is on distinctive, individual artistic production in both books, though van de Wetering makes claims to "demythologizing" the artist's techniques, because of the scientific investigation of works themselves. The exhibition catalogue from Australia essentially reprises the outlook… Full Review

The appearance of a facsimile volume (costing around six thousand dollars) of the celebrated, partially destroyed "Turin-Milan Hours" (Turin, Museo Civico d'Arte Antico, inv. no. 47) is reason enough to rejoice for scholars, who would otherwise probably never have close contact with these celebrated miniatures, some of which (controversially) have been attributed to Jan van Eyck. Now there is still more reason for celebration: the accompanying commentary volume has appeared in three languages (nothing like having a Swiss publisher!). In addition to providing basic, small illustrations of all the images in the original manuscript (including the Paris folios of what… Full Review

This retrospective devoted to Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823) begins with his Sign of the Hatmaker Charton (1774), a naive artifact painted before the artist left Cluny in 1774 for Dijon to study. Who knowing just this homely object could have imagined that its creator would do some of the lushest nudes of both sexes made by any artist? After then going on to Paris, Prud'hon in the 1780s spent three years, three months in Rome. Returning to Paris in 1788, after failing to compete with David and David's follower, Anne-Louis Girodet, he did a few works associated with the Revolution, but… Full Review

Online readers, and especially those not involved in the "Ivory Wars" clearly set out in the endnotes of The Color of Ivory, should be aware of at least two things before embarking on this review. First, that seven years ago Carolyn Connor wrote an article on traces of color on the Joshua plaques in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[1] interesting because it enlarged greatly on Kurt Weitzmann's observation in 1930 that their "rosette bands show traces of red and blue color of later date but which surely are [to be considered] modern only with difficulty."[2] Second, that I have already… Full Review

A person can learn quite a bit by watching neighbors working on a similar task, and David Bordwell's new book on the status of visual style in film history raises anew the issue for art historians, who supposedly invented the concept. Bordwell is a distinguished historian of film at the University of Wisconsin, who has authored and co-authored (usually with Kristin Thompson) monographs (The Cinema of Eisenstein), period histories (The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960), general histories (Film History: An Introduction), and critical appraisals of theory and method in his own discipline (Post-Theory: Reconstructing… Full Review

With remarkable visual clarity, the apse mosaics of the church of San Marco in Venice proclaim the issues involved in the monograph of Thomas Dale. As Otto Demus discusses and illustrates in his magisterial volumes, four saints stand there beneath an enthroned Christ. Peter and Mark share the central axis. Peter hands Mark his Gospel; Mark acknowledges the gift by his extended right hand and displays it in his left hand. On the right side of the apse, St. Hermagoras turns toward Mark and his Gospel. In the corresponding position at the left stands St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors… Full Review

As the authors point out in their preface (and this is a book in which preface and introduction deserve the same reader's attention as its insightful text): "This book has had a long gestation . . . developing over continuous years of thinking, teaching, and writing about Poussin in particular and the art of the seventeenth century in general" (xvii). This is both an honest proposal and a fair warning; the book in hand is nearly as much about important general artistic developments and aesthetic attitudes in seicento Rome as it is about Poussin. The date of the… Full Review

This sumptuously illustrated volume on Hans Holbein the Younger is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on this important artist. Holbein is known for precise rendering of color, texture, and physical likeness in his celebrated portraits of wealthy merchants, aristocracy, and royalty. In addition to such renowned portraits as Thomas More of 1527 and the so-called French Ambassadors of 1533, among others, Bätschmann and Griener also include Holbein's less familiar book illustrations and his "monumental decorative" work, such as designs for murals in Basle from the 1520s. The virtue of this new volume, which sets out to be "neither a… Full Review