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Paul Joannides’ elegantly written and superbly illustrated book constitutes a significant addition to the study of Renaissance art history. With substantial attention given to the vast body of earlier opinion—both recent and remote—he embraces the challenge of early cinquecento Venetian painting, an arena of far-reaching innovation but one that is exceptionally vexed with unresolved questions of authorship and date. The subject is therein vulnerable to speculation and subjectivity concerning directions of influence among the major protagonists and their responses and contributions to humanist culture and to Central Italian and Northern European art. Always keeping in sight the complexity of this… Full Review

During the last three decades, the topic of the female nude and its spectatorship has frequently been discussed. In fact, this issue has played a major role in far-reaching reevaluations by feminist and social art history as well as by studies in other fields. Although scholars have addressed the nude and spectatorship in relation to art of the nineteenth century and to the institutional barriers that limited women art students’ access to studying from nude models, most of these investigations have tended to focus on a particular artist, group of artists, theme, or institutional framework. Building on this body of… Full Review

Maryvelma Smith O’Neil’s Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome is the first monograph in English on this important but relatively unstudied artist. In five interpretive chapters accompanying a handlist of works, the author aims to raise the standing of Giovanni Baglione (1566–1643) in modern art history through a consideration of his artistic development—as painter and as draftsman—within a social and institutional context. In addition to this already ambitious project, O’Neil considers Baglione’s literary production: Le nove chiese (1639) and Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (1642). A book of this scope has long been… Full Review

Most of what remains of Cassiano Dal Pozzo’s collection of drawings—a collection that he referred to as the Museo Cartaceo (or “Paper Museum”)—survives as loose sheets and bound volumes in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and the British Museum in London. The surviving works include drawings of mineral samples, plants and animals from Mexico, and more familiar fauna and flora. In addition, there are more than 2,300 representations of ancient monuments and objects. Perhaps in response to a perceived overspecialization in contemporary academia, Dal Pozzo’s collection has been the object of much scholarly interest in the past two decades. After… Full Review

Published to accompany the first monographic exhibition of Hendrick Goltzius’s dazzling prints, drawings, penwercken, and paintings, this catalogue consists of a useful biographical sketch followed by brief essays and entries describing successive phases of the artist’s career. The book aims, in the words of the directors of the three host institutions, “to present a comprehensive and balanced picture of Hendrick Goltzius as a draughtsman, printmaker, and painter” (5). Given this stated objective, we might well ask what impression of the artist the visitor to the exhibition and reader of the catalogue are invited to form. Deeply susceptible to artistic… Full Review

Patricia Ann Berger’s Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China is not just the first monograph on court art of this period in Western language, but also a much-needed contribution to the study of Manchu court culture in general, an area enjoying something of renaissance in the last decade. Like recent publications by cultural historians, Berger’s work could be read as contrasting the “cynical” view on Manchu rulers, a view that dismisses the emperors’ cultural projects or religious practices as purely political manipulation or that explains them as a result of the rulers’ personal obsession with… Full Review

Writing historiography is one of the most self-revealing acts an art historian is likely to perform. That is probably why many eminent scholars have kept well away from it. To confront Giorgio Vasari’s personal prejudices, jealousies and hatreds, and silences and suppressions of fact is to come into critical conflict with the mainstream of art-historical interpretation—the lengthy, authoritative tradition of credence given to the biographer. Paul Barolsky found his own gentle and inimitable way around this problem in his valuable monographic reassessments of the literary themes in Vasari’s Vite. For most scholars, however, the way to expose Vasari’s animus… Full Review

The most substantial studies on the art and politics of Nazi Germany in English have been written, with few exceptions, by historians. Why art historians have not taken a stronger interest presumably has to do with a strongly rooted aversion to cultural artifacts so closely associated with modern dictatorial power, so alien from the things the profession has tended to think possess cognitive interest and aesthetic appeal. In any case, the longstanding discrepancy between the attention given to National Socialist Germany by historians and its neglect by art historians continues to exist. At a CAA Annual Conference session on German… Full Review

Capitalizing on a trend that has figured prominently in recent art-historical studies, Debra Higgs Strickland’s new book investigates the place of the Other in the art of the Middle Ages. She structures her tale around an ideological assertion that will be familiar to scholars of the medieval West: namely, that for theologians and artists in this period, the non-Christian was effectively nonhuman. Strickland’s study demonstrates how this ideology of dehumanization haunted medieval imagery in ways that are not always consistent or logical when viewed from the vantage point of the modern viewer. This simultaneous need for and hatred of outsiders… Full Review

Beauty returns and is redeemed (perhaps) in Arthur C. Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. The central concepts and examples, especially Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, will be familiar to those who know the philosopher’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). The readable Abuse of Beauty, based on the Paul Carus Lectures that Danto presented to the American Philosophical Association in 2001, connects earlier points—his query of… Full Review