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The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. Katherine Welch’s The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum is such a book. Welch’s splendid volume is a culmination of her amphitheatre studies and provides a much-needed examination of the building type’s origins in Republican Rome and its development up to and including the Colosseum. In her introduction Welch sets out her intentions—to examine the… Full Review

Many years ago one of my dissertation advisors in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University proclaimed that there was no such thing as Jewish art in antiquity and the late Roman world, there was only Jewish iconography. His claim reflected the view of the generation of scholars that Steven Fine characterizes, somewhat ungenerously, as following the “Jews don’t do art” school of thought (2). The leading figure in this historiography is Erwin R. Goodenough, whose monumental Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (13 vols., New York: Pantheon, 1953–68), argued that Jewish imagery was created by “another… Full Review

What constitutes modernity? More to the point, what did modernity mean to the Impressionists? What concept of it did they admit or celebrate in their paintings? The usual and by now routine answers to these questions revolve around the subject of bourgeois recreation. Beginning with Meyer Schapiro’s essay “The Nature of Abstract Art” (Marxist Quarterly 1 [January–March 1937]: 77–98) and continuing a half-century later in the work of T. J. Clark (The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, New York: Knopf, 1984) and Robert Herbert (Impressionism: Art, Leisure and… Full Review

More than a quarter of a century has elapsed since the last attempts to write the Gothic Summa. I think particularly of Jean Bony’s French Gothic Architecture of the 12th and 13th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), much criticized at the time for its “modernistic” viewpoint and for detaching buildings from their historical context in the construction of the big, style-based story of Gothic; also relevant is Die gotische Architektur in Frankreich 1130–1270 by Dieter Kimpel and Robert Suckale (Descrizione libro: Hirmer Verlag, 1985), which veered in the opposite direction, locating architecture within ideologies of power and… Full Review

In Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), Millard Meiss argued that Tuscan society regarded the various calamities of the mid-trecento as divine punishment for its worldly ways, which led to a rejection of what he regarded as the human-centered, naturalistic pictorial style of early trecento art and a revival of the spiritually-centered, abstract style of the previous century. Early criticism notwithstanding (Benjamin Rowland, Jr., The Art Bulletin 34 (1952): 319–22), Meiss’s theory became the paradigm under which a generation of historians worked. However, in the 1970s, challenges to the theory mounted, beginning… Full Review

What is the meaning of the guillotine? The question crossed my mind as I read through the material that makes up this heterogeneous yet fascinating volume, along with some others: What is the ethical weight of dismemberment? How much of pain and loss survives in the remains of broken things, how much of a thrilling sense of freedom? The Fragment: An Incomplete History, which contains ten essays written by scholars of art history, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, numismatics, topography, and film, with one contribution by the artist Cornelia Parker, provokes such questions. Of course to not finish something because… Full Review

Scenes of everyday life, commonly called genre scenes, were enormously popular in early nineteenth-century Britain. But their narrative emphasis, often with a strong moral message, and their humorous anecdotal detail damaged their reception in the modern era. As a result, this important subject has generally been neglected in serious art-historical studies. David Solkin’s new book, Painting Out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, happily rectifies this. While steeped in recent scholarship, Solkin brings a wealth of new information, a remarkably observant eye, and an insightful, even adventurous analysis to this material… Full Review

“Do not live in a town without a temple,” says the Tamil epigraph with which Gods on the Move begins. In the Tamil region of South India, large temple complexes can be recognized today in almost every small and big city by their red-and-white striped walls; tall, gaudily painted gateways (gopuras); and a bustle of pilgrims, beggars, and flower-sellers. Branfoot’s interest in the subject was piqued by marketplaces in Cairo, as he states in the acknowledgments. The book explains how and why temples became similarly pervasive spaces for public gathering in the Tamil region; it does so by… Full Review

The title of this far-reaching book suggests a simple journey through time and place. Given the impressive number of sites, authors, and disciplines it engages, however, the reader should envisage a comfortable vehicle and a good deal of time to take everything in, because, more than telling the story of French fascination with the lost world of Pompeii, From Paris to Pompeii explores how archaeology functioned as a metaphor that inspired Romantic cultural productions stretching from literature to art to history. The reader-cum-armchair archaeologist encounters a sprawling complex as rich as the famous buried city itself. While Victor Hugo and… Full Review

There was a time when architecture existed mainly in the physical reality of the built environment and in the imagination. That was before it became a standard ingredient of the contemporary media, and a subject attracting the interest of historians, travelers, writers, and the general population. Exactly how this happened is not easy to reconstruct, but it seems very likely that some major changes took place in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the modern public and its attendant configuration of public and private spheres. In this important book, Richard Wittman suggests that many of the defining… Full Review