Browse Recent Book Reviews

Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture offers a lucid and perspicacious examination of the evolving social lives of major Mughal monuments, an overlooked topic in the now-extensive corpus of literature on Mughal architectural history. In the early 1990s scholars revisited Mughal architecture, a subject that had been neglected since the colonial era. The best-known scholars of Mughal architecture, Ebba Koch and Catherine Asher, provided expansive studies that examine how patronage, politics, and religious concerns shaped the formal, decorative, spatial, and symbolic programs of various Mughal monuments (Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture, Oxford: Oxford… Full Review

Scholarship on Giotto’s architecture has focused on work such as the campanile in Florence (1334) as well as other buildings he is said to have designed, along with the origins of Giotto’s depicted structures, whether and how he based these renderings on actual buildings. To this point, Decio Gioseffi’s Giotto architetto (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1963) is the only monograph dedicated to the full span of Giotto’s painted architecture—in addition to discussing his role as architect. In Art and Architecture in Italy, 1250–1400 (3rd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), John White brilliantly analyses a few frescoes in the… Full Review

Arranged topically rather than chronologically, the English translation of Paul Zanker’s concise and highly accessible review of art in the Roman world is a valuable contribution and will appeal to students and general readers alike. Divided into seven main chapters, Zanker examines both political and non-political imagery as seminal elements in a “system” of visual communication. As he states in the introduction, much of his approach is indebted to the earlier studies of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli and, more recently, Tonio Hölscher (Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Center of Power. Roman Art to A.D. 200, trans. Peter Green, London: Thames… Full Review

Neal Keating has written a stimulating—and bold—book. Iroquois Art, Power, and History “describes and interprets the historical and current practices of visual expression carried out by indigenous Haudenosaunee and Iroquoian peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America.” (Haudenosaunee refers to the original six member nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.) Covering more than four centuries, Keating seeks “to demonstrate a significant cultural continuity between contemporary Haudenosaunee peoples and their pre-colonial and colonial-era ancestors.” Fortunately, he recognizes this is “an argument that is surprisingly contentious in the field of Iroquois studies” (3), and so his assertions are, on the whole, well… Full Review

The abundance of literature on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio published in the last four decades has shown not only an incredible divergence of attitudes toward the painter but also an increased number of interpretations that in some cases make it seem as if a new Caravaggio has emerged with no clear reference to the real one. It is these assessments of the painter that brought Sybille Ebert-Schifferer to take a step back and reexamine Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre in light of the sources and the documents known to us today. In that, Ebert-Schifferer’s purpose seems to be ambitious on the one… Full Review

The American author and artist Henry Darger, Jr. (1892–1973) lived in almost total seclusion for most of his adult life, earning subsistence income as a hospital custodian. His real life’s work, discovered posthumously, is the 15,145 page, single-spaced, illustrated manuscript for The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger’s epic and its accompanying graphics depict a fantasy universe in which the heroic Vivian Girls, young hermaphroditic sisters endowed with magical powers, venture to protect their world from attack by… Full Review

Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? is the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name that was mounted in 2011 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. With this project, Georges Didi-Huberman continues his exploration of the links between desire, collecting, images, and redemption (or at least remembrance). Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is the point of instigation for the exhibition and catalogue. Didi-Huberman has already written extensively on Warburg, whom he seems to claim as a kindred spirit. Warburg’s work resisted both scientism and aestheticism, though he was fully capable of dogged… Full Review

Jo Applin’s Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture in 1960s America argues for a more pluralistic take on American sculpture in the 1960s than the established dominant narrative figured in historical overviews such as Passages in Modern Sculpture by Rosalind Krauss (New York: Viking Press, 1977) or The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist by Alex Potts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), which privileges Minimalism. At the moment of this writing when mainstream contemporary art discourse seems to love Minimal art more than ever (James Turrell recently filled the Guggenheim rotunda while Carl Andre graced the cover of Artforum), Applin’s book… Full Review

In Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts Amelia Jones offers a rebuttal to the frequent claim that we are beyond identity and identity politics. Beliefs about identity are tied to the visual register—people make assumptions about other people based on what they look like. Seeing Differently opens with a recent and tragic example: the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian worker in London, who was murdered by the London police when he was mistaken for the suicide bomber Hussain Osman (xx–xxi). Jones uses the shocking circumstances of Menezes’s murder in order to… Full Review

Devin Fore’s Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature is an important book that addresses with real erudition and insight some very important issues regarding realism and modernism in European art, writing, and theater in the period between the two world wars. It offers a particularly compelling rethinking of the supposed return to realism in the later 1920s and the 1930s, focusing on Germany, where debate on the subject was played out with unusual intensity and sophistication. Fore argues persuasively against the standard view that there was a rehumanization of art and a return to order as avant-garde… Full Review