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Few institutions have influenced the course of European art or the writing of art history as decisively as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Its pulse animated the visual extravagance of Versailles, the popularity of public art exhibitions, the emergence of art criticism, and the codification of an approach to arts instruction that persists to this day. The Academy’s legacy extends even to the enduring assumption that a centralized system of arts administration distinguishes a functioning nation-state. It is no surprise, then, that the Academy should cast a strong shadow in so many histories of post-Renaissance European art… Full Review

Book artists of all times and types have taken literally the idea that we experience books as buildings. Gutenberg’s first Bible was laid out according to the architectural proportions of the golden rectangle; title pages of many early printed books featured etchings of highly wrought façades. These archways invited readers to step through a manifest “door” and into the imaginary spaces—even entire worlds—that books have always provided. More recently, both architecture and literature have been influenced by the philosophy of deconstruction, and contemporary book artists have been reconstructing the book to give new physical forms to old “volumes.” … Full Review

This densely informative and inspiring book engages two scholarly discourses: namely, the visual histories of the regions broadly known as South Asia (India, Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and the Islamic world (mainly referring to the eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Iran). By moving between these major bodies of knowledge, Finbarr B. Flood demonstrates in a more than usually compelling way that academic specialties are artificial constructs designed by and for the convenience of modern scholars; such specialties are often inadequate to the challenge of treating the fluidly mobile people and things that are, ultimately, the actual subjects/objects of… Full Review

In Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800–2000, Charlotte Klonk traces across three urban centers—London, Berlin, and New York—changing exhibition displays in gallery interiors in relation to shifting aesthetic ideals and their public, as well as larger historical and scientific dialogues. This well-illustrated study seeks to address the phenomenon of the modern gallery space, defined as the white cube, and how it differs from “powerful alternatives” (6) that existed historically. Chapters examine the formation of the National Gallery in London; the German museum reform movement around 1900; German exhibitions in the 1920s; their influence and cooptation in the… Full Review

In describing the arrival of Shah ‘Abbas to his capital city, Isfahan, in 1595, the court historian, Afushteh Natanzi, wrote about the marvelous architectural contraptions and other wonders that were designed by the “masters of the arts . . . artists of pure creativity, and devisers of sublime disposition” who were “assembled in the City of Kingship of Iraq [Isfahan] from all parts of Iraq and Fars” (R. D. McChesney, “Four Sources on Shah ‘Abbas's Building of Isfahan,” Muqarnas 5 (1988): 103–134, 107). They were displayed in the main plaza, Maydan-i Naqsh-i Jahan (“Image of the World”), which represented the… Full Review

Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England, 1500–1750 tells a story of social class played out in math class. In the exhibition and catalogue, Anthony Gerbino and Stephen Johnston chart the rise of the professional architect in the early modern era by presenting the tools of the trade. Subtitle notwithstanding, Compass and Rule does not focus on architecture itself but rather on architectural drawing, describing the development of drafting techniques and instruments which led to a division between the design and construction phases of building. Although Gerbino and Johnston are not the first scholars to make this argument… Full Review

Barbara Lane’s Hans Memling: Master Painter in Fifteenth-Century Bruges explores the life and oeuvre of Hans Memling, one of the most important Flemish artists of the fifteenth century. In it, Lane argues that despite various exhibitions of the artist’s works, “many of the tantalizing problems surrounding Memling’s life and work remain unresolved” (10). She offers her book as a remedy to the lingering gaps in Memling scholarship and provides a comprehensive treatment of the artist by dividing her study into four main sections. Section 1, “Wanderjahre,” traces Memling’s early career from his apprentice days through his journeyman years… Full Review

An elegant facsimile edition from Trent and a sophisticated exhibition in Rome are two of the events that celebrate the third centenary of the death of Andrea Pozzo (born Trent, 1642), the renowned Jesuit architect and theoretician whose written work and artistic creations are the focus of this review’s attention. Another exhibition was held in Trent, at the Diocesan Museum, dedicated principally to painting, but is not reviewed here: Eugenio Bianchi et al., eds., Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) (Trent: Tipografia Editrice e Temi, 2009). The centennial celebrations began in 2009 when Pozzo’s treatise, published in Rome in two versions or… Full Review

Madness and Modernity is an exceptionally well-conceived group effort that succeeds in avoiding the more speculative generalities often found in studies of “madness and art” in the twentieth century. By tracing the effects of specific contacts and commissions, the book offers a persuasive account of the intermingling of the city’s intellectuals and artists at such modern sites as “the coffeehouse, the cabaret, the sanatorium, and the secession building” (8). The result is a sound defense for including the sanatorium in any list of Vienna’s intriguing new modern attractions. Madness and Modernity originated as a research project begun by Lesley Topp… Full Review

With this welcome volume, Janet Wolff, author of a number of studies bringing an expanded sociological perspective to the study of the visual arts, delivers a salutary reminder of a fact often sensed but rarely articulated: the uncertain, the indirect, and the oblique are especially at home in our contemporary context of artistic creation and interpretation, and we would do well to investigate them for what they are in and of themselves, rather than seeing them merely as obstacles to be gotten beyond in pursuit of something more perceptually stable and, we too easily think, epistemologically worthy. Wolff… Full Review