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Art and the Culture of Love in Seventeenth-Century Holland is rich in ideas and, at least to this reader, sometimes provocative in method. This beautifully produced book raises the important matter of ambivalence in seventeenth-century Dutch works of art, using the theme of love in genre paintings, prints, and book illustrations to show how this ambivalence takes shape. Nevitt’s main explanation is that works of art “accommodate the complexity of the culture that produced them” (183). This is not very illuminating, however, as it only moves the cause of the ambivalence from the realm of painting to the broader realm… Full Review

There is much to recommend about Gary Shapiro’s latest book to readers of these reviews. It is well written, liberally illustrated, and thoroughly researched, and it clarifies insights that have not yet come to the attention of most authors. In short, this book is original and compelling, warranting the attention of those seeking a philosophical basis for their art-critical perspectives. Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying is, above all, a philosophy book. It sets out to correct the professional myopia that regards Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault—and the whole field of aesthetics—as only… Full Review

In graduate school, a fellow student once told me, “Rosalind Krauss exists for you to react against.” In his recent book, David Carrier assumes a similar stance, portraying Krauss as a critic who is brilliant, provocative, and constantly refining her ideas in order to challenge accepted beliefs. Carrier works from the premise that Krauss’s rise in the post-Greenberg era parallels the rise of American philosophical art criticism, and that the story of both offers insight into the contemporary art world. He states clearly that it is not his intent to gossip about his subject; instead he relies solely on Krauss’s… Full Review

This book, published to accompany the touring exhibition of ninth- to thirteenth-century south Indian bronzes that opened at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., follows the trend of recontextualizing works of Indian sculpture that began with the Asia Society exhibition, Gods, Guardians, and Lovers: Temple Sculptures from Northern India, A.D. 700–1200 (1993). These bronze figures of deities and saints are examined against the backdrop of the religious and literary world in which they were created and used, when the Chola dynasty dominated the Tamil Nadu region of south India. It seems remarkable that these exquisite works… Full Review

See Bernd Nicolai’s review of this book “All nationalist architecture is bad, but all good architecture is national.” Bruno Taut, 1938. The formation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk may be seen as one of the most radical and revolutionary moments in twentieth-century world history. With it came the end of the six-hundred-year-old Ottoman imperium, the abolishment of Islamic law, or shari’a, and the cultural transformation of a region spanning from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from Istanbul to Diyarbakir.… Full Review

Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597) of Bologna was among the most important ecclesiastical reformers and writers on sacred art in post-Tridentine Italy. After receiving a degree in canon law from the Studio di Bologna in 1546, he was appointed an uditore di Rota in Rome in 1556. He subsequently served as the Rota’s counselor to the papal legates during the final session of the Council of Trent (1561–63). Pope Pius IV appointed Paleotti to the Congregation of the Council to study the approval and implementation of Trent’s decrees, which the Congregation issued in print in 1565. In March 1565, Pius elevated Paleotti… Full Review

The concept of difference unites the essays in Theorizing Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture. Though comprised of six papers from a day-long seminar at the 1998 International Congress at Leeds, this collection arrives in two parts: essays by Jane Hawkes and Catherine E. Karkov look at relatively little-known examples of Anglo-Saxon eighth and ninth-century sculpture, and contributions by Fred Orton, Richard N. Bailey, Ian Wood, and Éamonn Ò Carragáin engage in an often-argumentative conversation about approaches to the two best-known early-Anglo-Saxon stone sculptures, the monuments at Ruthwell and Bewcastle. The benefit of the collection lies in the chance for the contributors… Full Review

Jay DeFeo and The Rose is the long-awaited monograph dedicated solely to this artist and her best-known painting. Its eleven essays from a prestigious roster of authors work together to situate DeFeo’s achievements within American postwar art, and its thirteen color plates and seventy-eight black-and-white photographs sustain these texts and enhance the reader’s experience. Challenging art-historical essays by her biographer Richard Cándida-Smith and art critic Carter Ratcliff are particularly significant contributions to the body of DeFeo scholarship. The inclusion of Lucy Lippard, whose essay positions the artist within the context of the critic’s previous writing, is impressive. The… Full Review

In his Ten Books on Architecture, Vitruvius provides the earliest surviving account of the origins of what we have called, since the Renaissance, the orders of Greek architecture. Vitruvius, however, wrote during the early years of the Roman Empire—some six hundred years after the orders first developed—and his first-hand experience of early Greek architecture must have been limited at best. The numerous Greek treatises on architecture that he had at his disposal and to which he routinely refers in his writings were for the most part relatively late, dating by and large to the Hellenistic period, again, long after… Full Review

Klaske Muizelaar and Derek Phillips’s Picturing Men and Women in the Dutch Golden Age: Paintings and People in Historical Perspective is a curious book: while largely synoptic, written by two nonspecialists who rely heavily on previously published research, it also constitutes an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the reception of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings among contemporary viewers. Issues of audience response have received increasing scholarly attention in recent years. The authors take their cue from the likes of Alison Kettering and Elizabeth Honig, among others, who have already investigated questions of audience reception vis-à-vis seventeenth-century Dutch art. But although Muizelaar and Phillips… Full Review