Browse Recent Book Reviews

In this masterly new book, Gülru Necipoğlu examines completely afresh the centrality of Sinan, chief imperial Ottoman architect between 1538 and 1588, in the creation of what she calls “architectural culture.” Based on a wide variety of primary sources—including some not previously considered from the point of view of architectural history—this is the first exhaustive study offering a wealth of insights into Sinan’s architecture within the context of its own intellectual, political, and religious milieus. The production value of the book is equally remarkable. It is richly illustrated with excellent photographs by Reha Günay, himself an authority on… Full Review

Samuel Palmer, 1805–1881: Vision and Landscape is much more than a handsome catalogue for a splendid exhibition of the same name. It is a significant contribution to the steadily growing literature about the artist. Essays by eight different scholars place Palmer within his historical context, while detailed entries about each of the 164 exhibited works—these pictures and more, all excellently reproduced in color—give the catalogue a refreshingly visual focus. That so many authors have been asked to contribute to the publication speaks to several important characteristics of the artist’s career. Contrary to the familiar image of Palmer as… Full Review

In the final section of Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), Hans Belting discusses the crisis of the cult image in the early modern period when holy images of the past lost their power due to new aesthetic criteria that promoted the cult of art and the emerging role of the artist. While monumental in its scope and methodology, Belting’s text and specifically his characterization of the “era of art” have not remained without critical response. The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance… Full Review

The late antique city Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, was full of statues. Inhabitants and visitors to the city would have seen assemblies of sculpture on display in numerous public spaces throughout the city, in venues as varied as baths and civic basilicas, circus arenas and open forums. The collections were not only large, frequently bringing together dozens of individual sculptures, but they were also exceptionally varied, including subjects ranging from imperial portraits, to animals and traditional Greco-Roman gods, to abstract personifications. Perhaps most incredibly, however, is the fact that the vast majority of these statues, which were set… Full Review

Both these books are welcome; and for this reviewer, at least, there can never be enough material about Piero della Francesca if it helps draw us nearer to understanding a painter whose memorable, orderly art is a balm for the soul, and who still stands like a giant among the creators of the Renaissance. By his own admission, James Banker is less interested in the works of art than in the facts, some seemingly negligible, that create the context of the Quattrocento painter’s world. He is the historian, while Marilyn Aronberg Lavin is the iconographer, an acute interpreter of… Full Review

This volume is actually built more broadly than the title suggests: it deals in various ways with the whole lifetime of Giulio de’ Medici, rather than being narrowly confined to his incumbency as Pope Clement VII. One might superficially expect the volume to be of less immediate pertinence to the art historian than, say, Ashgate's splendid volumes devoted to the cultural world/politics of Cosimo I de' Medici and his duchess, Eleonora di Toledo. In fact, the scope of the essays is very wide in terms of historical, cultural, and critical concerns, and almost half of them—those collected in “Part 2… Full Review

As the field of American art emerged from second-class status in the 1960s, Wayne Craven’s wonderful volume on American sculpture helped define the field. Now, in this new book on Stanford White’s role as a decorator and antique dealer, Craven calls attention to a significant aspect of the American Gilded Age. Craven has produced a neat, careful volume documenting a half-dozen of White’s most opulent houses, those designed for William Collins Whitney, Colonel Oliver Hazard Payne, Payne Whitney, Clarence and Katherine Mackay, Henry Poor, and Stanford White’s own New York City house. The book allows for a closer study of… Full Review

“Every single standard-issue piece of mid-century modernist strategizing happened here,” says Michael Sorkin in the roundtable discussion appended to The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big. The book, a catalogue accompanying the homonymous exhibition held nearly two years ago at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, proves this claim beyond any doubt. Montreal not only thought big in the sense of pursuing large-scale urban projects intended to facilitate predictions of exponential population growth and geographic expansion, but it also experienced the kind of bold imagination that speaks to the sense of mission with which Montreal pursued its identity as an international metropolis… Full Review

Image, relic: our distinct terms may now imply discrete categories, but in pre-modern Italy such a division was often eroded, in practice. Think, for example, of the painted cross of San Damiano, which had addressed Francis as a young man and later became the property of the Clarisse. On the one hand, as Francis himself would later point out, it is nothing but paint and wood, inert; on the other hand, though, it was also seen as the discernible residue of a miraculous event. Both images and relics could thus embody the invisible—or they could be contained and even… Full Review

Prior to this study and annotated translation by Diana Chou, an Anglophone’s introduction to the person and work of Tang Hou would likely have been Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih’s Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). In that anthology, portions of Tang’s writings were excerpted and arranged thematically under headings such as “On Artists’ Styles” or “On Mounting and Collecting.” One of the significant contributions of Chou’s book is a complete translation. Here, in straightforward prose, we receive Tang’s slightly smug but well-intentioned instructions on how to become a superior judge of painting. We may… Full Review