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David Clarke’s Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World is composed of six essays in three sections: “Trajectories: Chinese Artists and the West,” “Imported Genres,” and “Returning Home: Cities between China and the World.” Earlier versions of five of the essays have appeared before, as has some of the information in the first. It is a good idea for a scholar to bring together individual essays and chronologically discontinuous views in a single volume since these then become more easily available for reference and present a kind of informational penumbra for the topics they discuss. The usefulness of this… Full Review

In Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China, Jonathan Hay strives to understand how the human body senses and interacts with ornament, or “pleasurable things,” as the essayist and comic writer Li Yu (1610–1680) put it. Hay imagines how the hand and eye connected with the shape and texture of a decorated cup or figurine, how a moving body experienced an “object landscape” in a residential interior where luxury goods were displayed and used. Moving outside conventional studies in connoisseurship and technology, Hay juxtaposes objects made from a variety of materials, ranging from ceramics and paintings to… Full Review

When she died at the age of 91 in 1968, Meta Warrick Fuller left behind a long and productive life as a sculptor, but she also bequeathed a formidable challenge to art historians. In 1910, a warehouse fire destroyed her early sculptures, including the student work she made while at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts and the sculptures from her three years (1899–1902) studying in Paris. The formative works stored in that warehouse are known today only through black-and-white photographs. Further complicating the scholar’s task is the fact that Fuller’s most public sculptures were made for fairs… Full Review

Two recent books on visual culture and civil rights envision the pathway through race and nation as an endeavor privileging the visual and utilizing the corporeal. However, these books diverge at the point of “seeing,” with Maurice Berger investing in the expansive range of twentieth-century visual culture as it pertains to African Americans and Martin Berger zeroing in on what he calls “the complex social dynamics of the civil rights movement” (4). The latter, in other words, examines how images aided and abetted racial hegemony and comfort, racial expectation, and national investment. Both For All the World to See… Full Review

Siena has long been recognized as one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, and it is for this reason that in 1995 its entire historic center was added to the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Between the advent of the commune in the twelfth century and the fall of the Guelph regime of the Nine Governors in 1355, the Sienese authorities erected architectural monuments of great significance, including the Palazzo Pubblico, new ramparts and gates, and several large-scale fountains, while the aristocratic and merchant elite constructed towers, tower-houses (casetorri), and… Full Review

The title Renaissance Theories of Vision immediately brings to mind a myriad of representational systems known collectively as perspective but more specifically labeled by type: atmospheric, single-point and multiple-point (also referred to as linear, scientific, and mathematical), intuitive, oblique, and reverse. Simultaneously, it conjures recollected textbook images of converging orthogonals superimposed on schematized masterworks like Fra Angelico’s San Marco Altarpiece (ca. 1438–40) and Pietro Perugino’s Sistine Chapel fresco Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter (1482). These fifteenth-century visions of carefully structured spaces inhabited by figures placed in calculated spatial and proportional relationship to one another as well as to… Full Review

At the close of The Clement Bible at the Medieval Courts of Naples and Avignon: A Study of Papal Power, Royal Prestige, and Patronage, Cathleen Fleck observes that the history of the Clement Bible can be understood in part through the pleasure and privilege of leafing through it, an experience that those who have sat turning its folios in the British Library, including the present reviewer, have shared with its earlier owners. Tracking the production and use of the codex through a series of inventories that reveal how highly valued ownership of the manuscript was, Fleck also makes a… Full Review

In his complex and disciplined book, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, Iftikhar Dadi provides a genuinely antifoundationalist history of the modern art of Muslim South Asia. Instead of viewing that history through one or more existing analytical frames—namely Pakistani nationalism, Islamic or artistic cosmopolitanism, global modernism, or, most predictably, the tradition of South Asian Islamicate art—Dadi describes how artistic practice was driven by the inherent instability of each of those categories. The “crisis-ridden quest” for an “adequate discursive and aesthetic ground” for modern artistic practice led Muslim South Asian artists to experiment with a tradition that… Full Review

More than ten years ago now, Gloria Groom’s exhibition Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 opened at the Art Institute of Chicago. Those who saw it or perused the meticulously documented catalogue can attest to the sustained and probing nature of Nabi artists’ engagement with ostensibly private, intimate modes of decorative painting. Groom made this especially clear with a stunning installation of four panels from Édouard Vuillard’s Album (1895). Vuillard’s canvases quietly vibrate with areas of pattern denoting things such as blouses, flowers, wallpaper, and linens in a restricted palette of deep reds, muted… Full Review

In an article entitled “Les musées ne sont pas à vendre” (“Museums Are Not For Sale”) published on December 12, 2006, in the daily French paper Le Monde, the art historians Françoise Cachin, Jean Clair, and Roland Recht strongly denounced the increasing commercialization of the national patrimony, epitomized by the Louvre’s plan to rent out part of its collection to a branch established in Abu Dhabi. The authors warned the French administration against the incoherence of its cultural policy: claiming to protect the nation’s artistic treasures, while at the same time using those treasures as commodities. The… Full Review