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By now it should be evident to artists that making art is not without some risk of exposure to harmful substances. But it is also evident that many artists do not pay much attention to the risk. Art students—even senior undergraduate and graduate students—are often wholly unprepared and uninformed about how to reduce their exposure to toxic materials, or even about what the risks are. This must mean that their teachers, who are also artists, do not discuss these issues with them and, perhaps, are relatively uninformed themselves. Mention health and safety issues to your colleagues… Full Review

As a first exposure to the subject of health hazards in the studio, Michael McCann’s book provides an excellent overview of the subject. His catchy chapter titles, such as “Is Your Art Killing You?” and “How Art Materials Can Hurt You,” are exactly the type of attention grabbers needed to encourage the artist or student to read more. As McCann notes in the introductory section, part 1, entitled “Chemical and Physical Hazards,” is meant as a general introduction, to be read first; part 2, “Art and Craft Techniques,” provides specific information organized by particular mediums and practices. … Full Review

In her recent book The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Pamela H. Smith contributes to a growing body of scholarship that reevaluates the relationship between art and science in early modern Europe. She argues that the roots of the Scientific Revolution may be found in the products and practices of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artisans. Equating active knowledge with handworkers, Smith sees the physical engagement of craftsmen with matter and nature as a particular, valuable form of cognition linked to what she calls a “vernacular” or “artisanal epistemology.” She proposes that we consider this… Full Review

The cover of Stephanie Dickey’s Rembrandt: Portraits in Prints reproduces the artist’s Self-Portrait at a Window from 1648, which is a cannily deceptive etching. The first impression it makes is of modest sobriety and straightforward presentation. But look a little further, a little longer, and the probing nature of Rembrandt’s self-examination, united with its representational ambiguity (Is he drawing? Is he etching?) lures the viewer into what is ultimately a virtuosic performance. This cover image not only stands as an appropriate, even intriguing introduction to the subject at hand, but it also hints at Dickey’s own achievements within. For this… Full Review

This book, a compilation of essays edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson, examines ideologies and issues associated with commemoration and the creation of Civil War monuments. The fourteen chapters, essays written by scholars in a number of disciplines, are divided into four parts: “The Rites of Memory: Differing Perspectives,” “Heroes and Heroines of the South,” Celebration and Responses to the North,” and “Changing Times, Reshaping History.” A recurring theme throughout the compendium is society’s need to celebrate, romanticize, and filter history through the memorializing process. The introduction, written by Mills, succinctly provides an overview of the contents. Although… Full Review

Christopher Pinney’s ‘Photos of the Gods’: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India traces the development of prints, mostly chromolithographs, from the late 1870s onward. Specifically, he focuses on the intersection of printed images and political struggles from the colonial period to present-day India. Chromolithographs, complex color images printed from multiple stone blocks, developed from the basic lithographic technique invented by Alois Senefelder in Munich in 1798 and first used in India in 1820. Far from a Gutenberg galaxy, South Asia is a region where the visual image has played a powerful role and where the written word has… Full Review

In recent decades the field of American art has seen a renewed interest in the art of the 1930s and, in particular, the work of artists who expressed a leftist political perspective. Fueled initially by the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, this scholarship examines a decade when activist or political art achieved legitimacy in the eyes not only of certain segments of the art world, but also of significant individuals in the federal government and, to a certain extent, the general public. A recent and welcome addition to this growing body of literature on leftist art of the… Full Review

This fascinating new look at Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) offers a thoroughly innovative approach to, and understanding of, the man Jacob Burckhardt called “a wholly recognizable prototype of modern man” (Civilization of the Renaissance, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore [New York: The Modern Library, 1935], 330). In Margaret Gallucci’s recent book, Cellini is no longer seen as the forerunner of European Romanticism and of the modern virtue of heroic individualism (as Goethe and Francesco De Sanctis had proposed, to give just two examples of nineteenth-century critics responsible for Cellini’s current reputation as a swashbuckling hero); instead, the artist is… Full Review

With Art and Piety in the Female Religious Communities of Renaissance Italy: Iconography, Space, and the Religious Woman’s Perspective, Anabel Thomas sets out to correct what she considers to be general misconceptions about art in female religious communities in Renaissance Tuscany and Umbria. Among the most significant of these suppositions is the view that female religious communities not only housed few works of art, but that those works were limited to the public areas of the conventual complex and were intended solely for a lay audience. Equally important is the assumption that no substantive difference exists between art produced… Full Review

Critical Perspectives on Classicism in Japanese Painting, 1600–1700 is a compilation of papers presented at a symposium, entitled “Classicism in Japanese Art of the Early Edo Period,” held at the Clark Center in Hanford, California, in June of 1999. The book comprises a number of essays addressing “classicism”: its definition, appropriation, and application in shaping later scholarship concerning the art of the early Edo period (1615–1868). Elizabeth Lillehoj, the editor of the project, provides a useful introduction, in which she explains how such terms as “classicism,” with its origins in a Western aesthetic and cultural discourse, became pivotal in the… Full Review