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In the opening three chapters of her study of late medieval painting in Cologne, Brigitte Corley sets the stage with impressive scenery and a promising cast of characters. Sancta Colonia was a beautiful city of relics, pilgrimage, trade, learning, and spectacular imperial visits, in which various groups—archbishops, patricians, and city councilors—competed for power and prestige. Shifts in power resulted in fluctuating “patterns of patronage” that left behind a rich material culture of altarpieces, chapels, and liturgical objects. As Corley writes: “As political power changed hands…so patronage changed its initiators and its agenda. The archbishops primarily expressed spiritual and worldly power,… Full Review

Aware that art history still remains all too traditional in its orientation, much too focused upon European art, many art historians would like to have a true world history of art. As a student at Yale University, David Summers was inspired by George Kubler’s classes on pre-Columbian art. Now, after publishing justly renowned books devoted to Michelangelo and Renaissance naturalism, he has written a postformalist history of world art. This enormously long, clearly written book is not easy to summarize. Ordinarily surveys are organized historically, taking the reader from the Egyptians to the ancient Greeks and… Full Review

In his Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956, Andrew Hemingway provides a materialist history of the left movement in the visual arts in the United States, beginning with the founding of the magazine New Masses in 1926. The year 1956 is a more symbolic terminus: the date the American Communist Party (CPUSA) “imploded,” to use the author’s oblique characterization. (Specifically, this was the year Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin, among other critical events, resulting in an exodus of members from an already weakened and contracted organization.) Extensively researched, this important and provocative book challenges… Full Review

The quincentenary of Agnolo Bronzino’s birth was celebrated this year at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Toronto. The sessions there, organized by Janet Cox-Rearick, sought to plumb an artistic intellect that produced some of the most challenging art of the early modern period. Bronzino, noted for aloofness, impenetrability, and extreme refinement in his art, emerged in presentations on his eroticism and varietà as a prolific exponent of bawdy, burlesque poetry parodying the neo-Petrarchan modes and expression that saturated the cultural circle in which he moved. This seeming paradox of refinement in his art and travesty in his… Full Review

Great Altarpieces: Gothic and Renaissance is one of the latest additions to the new wave of scholarship on the altarpiece as a genre. The last two decades of the twentieth century were marked by an increasing pace of publications on altarpieces—which had not been studied as such since the late nineteenth century, when Jacob Burckhardt wrote an article called “Das Altarbild.” Recently a number of monographs on altarpieces of various regions have appeared, including: Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function; Peter Humfrey, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice; Judith Berg Sobré, Behind the Altar Table: The… Full Review

The mundane word “clothes” in the title of Linda Baumgarten’s new book underscores one of her principal aims: to reconstruct lives from garments that only become “costume” when they enter museums. The longtime curator of textiles and costumes at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Baumgarten mines the institution’s extensive and varied collection of clothing, acquired over the last seven decades, initially to “accessorize the buildings” in the “Williamsburg Restoration” (as the historic site was first called) but eventually to display them as objects of interest in their own right. Through meticulous attention to textile types and sources, manufacture, and alteration or… Full Review

In the words of its editor, Byzantine Women and Their World “stands as the permanent document of the temporary display at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum” (9). Given the exhibition’s title and the gender of the catalogue’s six main contributors, one might suppose that feminism, not to speak of other critical theories of the twentieth century, had broadly penetrated the study of Byzantine art in this country. One would be largely wrong. Like the traditional Hegelian division of Byzantine history into three periods—Early, Middle, and Late—there have essentially been three successive phases of feminist art… Full Review

Gillian Mackie has written an ambitious study of the early Christian chapel with a focus on the regions of Italy and Istria in the fourth to seventh centuries. Impressive in its breadth of coverage and depth of research, Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function, and Patronage should become one of the primary resources for any reader interested in the development of art during this period. This well-illustrated book presents a typological and historical analysis of the early Christian chapel in its various manifestations (part 1) and a series of in-depth case studies of surviving examples (part 2). The… Full Review

In the last two decades the study of nineteenth-century American painting has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts. The same cannot be said, however, for the vast realm of nineteenth-century visual culture: the popular prints, book and magazine illustration, pictorial journalism, and ephemera that proliferated throughout the century and became increasingly important agents in the dissemination of news, information, and ideologies. For many ordinary Americans, pictures in books and newspapers had a far greater impact on understanding current events than contemporaneous paintings ever would. Yet, with relatively few exceptions, the “higher” art of painting has continued to occupy a privileged place… Full Review

The 1990s were an exciting period for those concerned with gender issues in Italian Renaissance art. Seemingly overnight, a group of scholars emerged determined to track down how, when, where, and why women created, commissioned, and utilized works of art. Such scholarship provided access to a world in which Renaissance women were seen to have a greater measure of the autonomy history has traditionally denied them. They became subjects, not objects, and evolved beyond the limited glance-and-gaze theory that dominated feminist scholarship of the 1980s. Moreover, the large number of symposia and conference sessions convened to examine this subject across… Full Review