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One of Spain’s most intriguing monuments is the royal monastery church of San Isidore in Léon. It is well known for its extensive cycles of capitals, its Romanesque portals, and above all the paintings in the so-called Pantheon de los Reyes at the west end of the church. Previous scholars have usually held the Infanta Urraca (d. 1101), sister of King Alfonso VI, responsible for the rebuilding of the church, or have considered the Infanta Sancha (d. 1159) as the patron of the building. The latter view is based on the evidence provided by a dedicatory relief in the… Full Review

Poet, urban chronicler, and queer dandy about town, Salvador Novo helped give modernism in Mexico its shape while never quite fitting in. A consummate insider-outsider, he found perches in the government and at various publications throughout his career, though he never stayed for very long. In the 1920s and 1930s, Novo was a member of the Contemporáneos literary circle, which was known for its high-meets-low tastes and cosmopolitan orientation. He published prodigiously—“promiscuously” according to his critics who advocated a folkloric cultural nationalism—with writings ranging from the cunning to tongue-in-cheek. Many of his stories circulated in the new illustrated magazines that… Full Review

The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true: the author is a scholar and teacher of respected and possibly unchallenged authority in the field. But the impressive tome is perhaps more a landmark in the sense of being the last monument in a tradition than wholly a volume for the future. Christoph Luitpold Frommel writes from a formidable vantage point, Rome, where he has spent decades in meticulous and groundbreaking research, documented in his vast… Full Review

This useful collection of previously published essays appears in a series of course readers in museum studies edited by Simon Knell. The goal of this particular anthology is to illuminate the impact of digital media on museum exhibitions and on the conserving of digital artifacts in museums. Knell’s explanation of the general goals of the series ends with a citation from Michel Foucault as a guide to each volume's efforts to update museum studies curricula. With that directive, it is inevitable that the series will have to navigate between the most mundane practical concerns, in this case how to run… Full Review

This is a beautifully designed book, and the credit goes to Janet Wood, who has given us a distinctively shaped volume, eight by six inches, which rests comfortably in the hand. The layout of the book, the typeface and margins, are pleasing to the eye, as are the copious illustrations, mostly in color. One cannot begin to imagine an electronic version of this book nearly so inviting as this lovely tome. The enticing dust jacket, set against a field of salad green, features an illustration of Pieter Aertsen’s Market Woman at a Vegetable Stand (1567). Aertsen’s woman gestures with one… Full Review

On August 27, 2005, a large crowd including residents of a psychiatric facility in Mexicali gathered just to the south of a jagged, oceanside metal fence in Playas di Tijuana, Mexico. The crowd counted down and watched, cheering, as David “The Bullet” Smith shot out of a cannon, flew through the air, and landed, bouncing several times, in a net slung in San Diego’s Border Field State Park. This event, staged to critique U.S. immigration policy while exposing “mental and spatial borders,” was also an artwork created by Javier Tèllez to inaugurate inSITE’s “anti-biennial” contemporary art exhibition. One Flew Over… Full Review

In his magisterial survey of British art, commissioned for the gold standard Pelican History of Art and first published in 1953, Ellis Waterhouse paused in his discussion of Thomas Gainsborough and made the following admission: “Unpleasant as it still is for some of us to introduce the shade of Marx into the history of art, it may contribute to the understanding of Gainsborough” (261). This passage attests to the anxiety of the art historian in introducing even the most innocuous hint of social analysis into the study of art during the post-war period. Waterhouse’s colleague and contemporary Anthony Blunt would… Full Review

Regarding Romantic Rome, a series of ten essays edited and introduced by Richard Wrigley, casts new light on a subject almost as well trodden as the streets of the famed city itself. The fruit of a conference held in 2003 at the British School in Rome with the cooperation of the Art History Department of Oxford Brookes University, this slim tome brings together scholars from a wide variety of fields including literature, graphic design, women’s studies, and European history. Despite the many previous books on the subject,[1] the introduction states that the authors return to Rome, not to revisit… Full Review

William E. Jones’s artists’ book Selections from “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton is an intelligent, well-executed triple appropriation synthesized into a multi-layered, transhistorical meditation on 1970s-era leather culture. It is the third of four Jones books published by 2nd Cannons, along with Is It Really So Strange? (2006), Tearoom (2008), and Heliogabalus (2009). All reflect a dominant theme in the artist’s considerable body of work: interrogating the socially constructed nature of homosexuality through appropriation of its representations in historical and contemporary media. As such the book is an excellent complement to Jones’s time-based work in film, video,… Full Review

Photography, Roland Barthes argued, is most potent when considered through the lens of death. Or as Geoffrey Batchen’s new edited collection suggests, photography is most potent when considered through the lens of Roland Barthes’s death. As this elegant volume makes evident, contemporary photography studies is simultaneously enervated by Barthes’s continuing, towering presence and yet not ready to let him go. Such is the interminable work of mourning. As the title implies, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida” gathers together writing that is specifically focused on Barthes’s last book to be published during his lifetime. If … Full Review