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Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona open their fascinating book on the Arena Chapel by citing both Dante’s famous description in the Inferno of the notorious usurer Reginaldo Scrovegni, and the epitaph from the tomb of his son Enrico (d. 1336), who was buried in the Arena Chapel—the chapel in which Giotto, commissioned by Enrico just after 1302, painted in fresco events from the lives of Anna, Joachim, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, along with a monumental Last Judgment. Derbes and Sandona highlight the radically different opinions offered by these two sources about the fate of usurers in the Scrovegni… Full Review

In the field of Japanese woodblock prints, monographs on single artists, as opposed to catalogues, by academically trained authors—rather than collectors or dealers—are still a relative novelty: Julie Nelson Davis’s is only the third, all appearing in the last decade. But hers has significantly raised the bar. Her study is meticulously researched and documented and has a clear and well-framed thesis and approach. She benefits, of course, from the superlative catalogue by Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark for the 1995 Utamaro retrospective at the British Museum (Asano Shûgô and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro, London: British… Full Review

In 2006, Tate Britain, in collaboration with the Louvre, organized a major exhibition of William Hogarth’s work which travelled to Paris and Barcelona. The exhibition was a hit at the Tate, but its success in drawing both crowds and critical attention to this canonically English artist among continental audiences was unprecedented. Co-curators Mark Hallett and Christine Riding’s accompanying catalogue, Hogarth, reflects the dual purpose of many Tate catalogues, providing a summa of recent research in the fertile field of Hogarth studies for academically inclined readers, while serving as an accessible introduction to the artist for a wider audience, including… Full Review

In an unpublished 1966 lecture on the centennial of Aby Warburg’s birth, Max Adolph, Aby’s only son and at one time his designated successor as director of the Warburg Library, remarked that his father had embodied like no other the virtue Chancellor Bismarck sorely missed in his fellow citizens, namely, Zivilcourage: “Had there been more Germans like this German Jew, we might have been spared the horrors of Nazism and our second war.” The chief merit of Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism, first published in Germany in 1998, is to have drawn renewed attention to this side of Warburg’s… Full Review

Margaret Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe is a collection of six studies of familiar and lesser-known masterworks by Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, Peter Paul Rubens, Frans Snyders, and Otto van Schrieck. The author skillfully elicits the various political aspects of these works, in terms of gender relations, marriage, social relations, governance, and philosophy; and does so for art objects spanning three centuries, made under and for widely differing circumstances. This range is one measure of Carroll’s erudition. Another is the tools she brings to this complex task: skill in locating the apt source in classical or Renaissance… Full Review

In this rich and complex book, a senior scholar in the field of Franciscan textual studies draws together the leading currents of scholarship on the history of Saint Francis and the earliest decades of the order he founded, fusing studies on visual images and relics with those on lives of the saint, stories of his miracles, and versions of his rhythmical feast, i.e., the text and music devised for his liturgical celebration. In the process Rosalind Brooke provides extensive analysis of large panel images of the saint with scenes of his life and miracles, as well as the frescoes and… Full Review

The American architectural educator Joseph Hudnut (1886–1968) lived long enough to know the place he would occupy in history: the man who brought Walter Gropius to Harvard. The founding dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) had indeed recruited the creator of the Bauhaus to head the school’s department of architecture in 1937 as part of his own crusade to wipe out Beaux-Arts methods in the United States. By the time both men retired in the 1950s, they had long been at odds. Yet the “recruiter” role was a logical one for Hudnut in a historiography where the… Full Review

In January 1902, the German art dealer Paul Cassirer, a major proponent of Berlin Secession artists, as well as the conduit through which French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism gained currency in Germany, presented a show at his Berlin gallery (Galerie Paul Cassirer) in which he juxtaposed two highly original yet antithetical artists. Both artists were rather unknown at the time, but one-half of this visionary curatorial diptych would become a household name, instantly recognizable for his bold colors, thick brushwork, and troubled life. The other artist would gain little recognition and appreciation outside of the German-speaking world for much of his… Full Review

Among contemporary art ceramists and potters in various countries, there are few who are unfamiliar with the ceramics technique known as “raku.” This method of custom-firing pieces at low temperatures gained popularity in Europe and the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century, and today raku kilns are a common fixture at university and art-school ceramics programs around the world. While most makers of raku ceramics are aware that “raku” is a term that originated in Japan, they use the firing technique in ways that owe little to Asian traditions. As a result, Western raku bears faint… Full Review

Multi-authored volumes seem to be rather difficult to publish these days, and yet they can be among the most important resources for scholars and students alike. The Artist as Professional in Japan is one such volume. The series of essays in this book consists of individual case studies, ranging in time from the seventh century to the twentieth, and covering the fields of sculpture, painting, pottery, printmaking, and architecture. The authors tackle a variety of questions pertinent to the idea of artist as professional: How did producers of art conduct their business? How did they learn their art and/or become… Full Review