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Is Art History Global? should be read by anyone interested in the history of art as a discipline, and especially anyone interested in its future. The question it asks is of fundamental importance. The problems are clearly outlined and much useful data is presented already in the first part, which includes, besides James Elkins’s introductory materials, three other “starting points” offered by Andrea Giunta (Argentina), Friedrich Teja Bach (Austria), and Ladislav Kesner (Czech Republic). There follows the core of the book: the transcript of a lively seminar that took place in Cork in 2005, involving besides these four figures, Sandra… Full Review

A number of essays and articles published in the last decade have examined the relationship between paintings produced in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (also called “colonial Mexico”) and their counterparts in peninsular Spain in early modernity. Reacting against earlier characterizations of viceregal works as uninteresting or amateurish copies of contemporaneous European prints and canvases, the more recent literature makes a claim that is by now very familiar to historians of colonial art: New Spanish painting partakes of an “Old World” tradition, but ultimately it is an autonomous phenomenon with its own history. Creating the Cult of Saint… Full Review

Astonishingly, The Unknown Monet delivers just what the title promises. Drawing upon a previously unavailable account of Monet’s life, the authors have been able to fill in many of the blanks so frustrating to modern biographers. This material not only provides a very new image of Monet, especially during the 1850s and 1860s, but it offers a new context for his drawings and pastels. The works on paper were included in the final volume of Daniel Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné (Claude Monet: biographie et catalogue raisonné, vol. 5, Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1991)—although not in the more accessible… Full Review

The fall 2007 issue of The Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly (vol. 18, no. 4) is devoted entirely to Taliesin, the famous architect’s retreat upon which he had begun construction in 1911 and to which he would invite apprentices to work and live in fellowship with him starting in 1932. (Perched just beneath the crest of a hilltop in southwestern Wisconsin, Taliesin derives its name from the Welsh word meaning “shining brow.”) To the delight of Wright aficionados, The Quarterly overflows with dozens of new photographs of this recently refurbished “national treasure” rendered in bright, luminescent color. One older photograph captures… Full Review

In the introduction to this beautifully designed and highly readable book, Alice Friedman asks: “Why were independent women clients such powerful catalysts for innovation in domestic projects?” (15). The most compelling answer she provides is that these clients’ goals were a close fit with the designers’ desire to completely rethink the home, “a redefinition of domesticity that was fundamentally spatial and physical” (16). Friedman outlines a variety of housing that women clients sought when turning to modern architects: some as showplaces for artistic, political, or social activism; others as experiments in non-traditional living, such as single women, lesbian couples, and… Full Review

Some of the most recognizable regional art forms in the United States today are New Mexican santos. These religious devotional objects include retablos (painted wood panels) and bultos (polychromed three-dimensional sculpture), and they originated in the Hispanic colonial period of New Mexico (late sixteenth–early nineteenth century). Their fabrication has continued into the twenty-first century, coinciding with a renewed interest in these objects. Numerous publications and exhibitions appearing since the early twentieth century attest to the popularity of santos, yet an understanding of them has plateaued in recent decades. Scholars have primarily focused on the santeros, or creators… Full Review

Jeannine Diddle Uzzi’s Children in the Visual Arts of the Roman Empire joins an increasingly crowded field of scholarship on ancient childhood, especially that concerned with the theme of its social “construction.” Recent work, from Beryl Rawson’s authoritative Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) to Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter’s new collection Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), has focused attention on how childhood was recognized and appreciated as a distinct developmental lifestage that, at the same time, was constantly reimagined (especially through art) to meet the needs… Full Review

Charmaine Nelson has produced an important book framing American Neoclassical sculpture within nineteenth-century discourses of race, gender, and colonialism. She explores the ways in which the intersecting categories of “blackness” and “femininity” are socially, politically, culturally, and psychically constructed in and through the representational practices of ideal statuary. As a black feminist scholar, Nelson wants to “render [her] methodological apparatus” transparent and is committed to pursuing a methodology that explores “race and racial signification as inextricable from sex and gender signification” (xvi, xxi). It is only recently that British, Canadian, and U.S. art historians have looked afresh at… Full Review

Véronique Plesch’s Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue provides a detailed iconographic study of the Passion cycle painted by Giovanni Canavesio in the pilgrimage chapel of Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines at La Brigue, an Alpine village in what is now France. Plesch provides ample context for the La Brigue cycle in terms of Savoyard Passion cycles in general, and she discusses in detail in both the text and an extensive appendix Canavesio’s various Passion cycles (although not his painted cycles on other subjects). The book’s organizing principle is less the cycle itself than Canavesio’s… Full Review

The Kimbell Museum’s Masterpiece Series introduces select works from the museum’s permanent collection to an audience both lay and specialist. As part of this series, Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s The Art of the Goldsmith in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany: The Kimbell Virgin and Her Bishop perfectly blends the often neglected art of careful connoisseurship with a wealth of visual and historical context. There is far more than one would suspect in the brief eighty-six-page text as Smith examines the silver-gilt Kimbell Virgin in exacting detail. He produces a rich visual analysis that explains technical production and describes the training and working methods… Full Review