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Frédéric Cousinié’s Images et Méditation au XVIIe Siècle is a collection of six essays that focus on the relationship between devotional treatises and visual images in seventeenth-century France. This book has neither a formal introduction nor a conclusion, but in the last section (22–24) of the first essay, Cousinié provides an overview in which he briefly summarizes the questions raised in each essay. To best appreciate the book, the reader will need, in addition to knowledge of seventeenth-century imagery, familiarity with the religious history of the period, as well as the fundamentals of semiotics. Central to the study is… Full Review

The “doubt” of the title of this short but very interesting book is meant to be applied to art history. In Richard Shiff’s view, art historians and critics too often erect abstract systems on a partial apprehension of aspects of the artwork. He is as critical of interpretations that float somewhere above the particulars of an artwork as he is with those that do not admit exceptions to their own posited rules. For example, with respect to the ideas of Rosalind Krauss, he observes that “a differential or ‘critical’ term loses its efficacy . . . when we designate it… Full Review

The three volumes under review are part of the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard and produced by Harvard University Press. The expanding series covers the Alhambra, Westminster Abbey, and other major monuments. This series is designed not only to present the various monuments in their original contexts, but also to include the major events in their subsequent receptions throughout history. This important methodological choice allows for the assessment both of the material remains themselves and of how inflections from previous eras continue to shape present outlooks. Even though Cathy Gere, Simon Goldhill, and Keith Hopkins… Full Review

From 1690 on, children in colonial America were taught the letters of the alphabet with the New England Primer. Millions of copies of these primers formed the pedagogical cornerstone of elementary education for the next two centuries. These schoolroom textbooks iterated the basic building blocks of the English language—vowels, consonants, syllabariums—supplemented with woodcut illustrations and rhymed couplets that undergirded literacy with moral lessons imbued, in turn, with religious themes and catechisms gleaned from the King James Bible. Given this long tradition, had Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother not stumbled onto the Froebel system of kindergarten instruction as one alternative to… Full Review

A long-neglected fresco cycle by Battista Zelotti, decorating six rooms in the Obizzi Castle of Cataio, is stunningly revealed in Irma B. Jaffe’s richly illustrated new book. The cycle’s rediscovery becomes one element of a three-part narrative. First, in the acknowledgment, Jaffe relays the sense of adventure and excitement that followed a phone call from her colleague, Gernando Colombardo, who first visited the frescoes, newly open to the public in 2002, and urged her to grab the next flight to Venice in order to see them. Then in the first half of the book, two chapters contextualize the frescoes by… Full Review

A little over twenty-five years ago, Kobena Mercer published “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” an essay urging participants in the critical discourse around black artists’ work to check their discursivizing practices against the artistic and formal contents of art practices as such. Of course the project of Mercer’s essay is far vaster than an aestheticist reduction like “returning to the object” can suggest. Its target, rather, was a then-emergent multiculturalist movement lost in thrall to visibility discourse, and its simplest point was also its most valuable. Even visibility campaigns, Mercer warned, entail specific matters and problems of form… Full Review

By organizing this collection of essays around the concept of “social conflict” and insisting on the “representational capacity” of so-called “low” forms of cultural expression, Patricia Johnston puts her finger on two of the most prominent features of scholarship on American art today: the concern with the ideological implications of the visual and the corresponding drive to address the visual in its complex and diverse variations (1). Indeed, as she claims in her introduction, the “history of American art has typically emphasized quality less than the art history of other nations” and has “made more space for a variety of… Full Review

Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis, co-editors and curators of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition At Home in Renaissance Italy, begin their exhibition catalogue of the same name by posing this question: why hasn’t the “pivotal subject” of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian domestic interiors appeared more often in mainstream Renaissance studies? The text that follows seeks to help remedy the problem behind the question, and thus joins a growing list of recent contributions that have followed Peter Thornton’s The Italian Renaissance Interior, 1400–1600 (New York: Abrams), the monograph that issued a call-to-arms in 1991. These publications devoted to Italian… Full Review

Visual Shock is Michael Kammen's eighteenth book and like so many of the author's earlier forays into American cultural history, it strives for encyclopedic breadth. Kammen relates a host of well-known historical episodes, beginning with the jeering reception accorded Horatio Greenough's Zeus-like George Washington when it was installed in the Capitol Rotunda in 1841, and ending with the culture wars—Mapplethorpe! The West as America! Sensation!—of the last two decades. He also describes many obscure incidents, such as the carping criticism that greeted Kenneth Evett's murals for the Nebraska state capitol rotunda in 1954. Visual… Full Review

Alexander Roslin (1718–1793) is an artist whose better-known paintings are familiar to modern Anglo-American audiences; many will recognize the oft-reproduced portrait he made of his wife, the painter Marie-Suzanne Giroust, known colloquially as The Veiled Lady (1768; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum). But overall, Roslin is a marginalized figure whose lack of critical prominence has led to the perception that he is a minor painter. The facts suggest otherwise. Roslin was massively prolific, academically successful, internationally in demand, and recognized by contemporaries as one of his era’s premier portraitists. He died one of the wealthiest artists in all of Europe, abundantly praised, and… Full Review