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Adrian Randolph’s Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics, and Public Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence possesses a most provocative and, indeed, engaging jacket: an image of the rear view of Donatello’s bronze David. The photograph is cropped, tantalizingly, so that the beholder (the expression Randolph himself uses consistently throughout his book, in place of viewer) is prevented from feasting his or her eyes on what are perhaps the most sexually charged pair of male buttocks ever produced by a Renaissance sculptor. When aligned with the content of the book, the cover’s chastened and desexualized David could be seen as somewhat disingenuous. Randolph’s… Full Review

The catalyst for this volume was the exhibition Private Prayers: Medieval and Renaissance Objects for Personal Devotion, held from September 23 to November 19, 1995, at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. Its editors, who also contributed to the volume, have brought together thirteen methodologically diverse essays that examine the relationship between images and lay and clerical devotion in Italy from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. In the foreword, the editors make it clear that their goal was not to tailor the book’s contents to the exhibition, but rather to produce “a collection of studies… Full Review

This cogently written book presents a forceful argument against an arts advocacy that is based on instrumentalist perspectives, and makes the case for supporting art on the basis of its fundamental role as a vehicle for the expression of creativity. Joli Jensen, professor of communication at the University of Tulsa, is ultimately interested in erasing the strict dichotomy between “high art” and “popular” or “mass culture” in favor of a more complex aesthetic and social point of view that encompasses all forms of art or creative production. The book, which reads like a long essay, is written in a clear… Full Review

This biography of Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) introduces to American art historians a neglected but significant writer on Renaissance Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture. While the book does not neglect Stokes’s wide-ranging social, cultural, and sexual involvements (much of the latter in detail), it primarily concentrates on his development as an art historian, ending with his first two important studies, The Quatro Cento: A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1932) and Stones of Rimini (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). It is for this aspect of Stokes’s achievement that Richard Read’s biography can be recommended, for Stokes… Full Review

Since the sixteenth century, historians have credited Masaccio—along with Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello—with changing the course of Western art. Indeed, Masaccio’s legacy is endlessly fascinating yet highly problematic. A medieval artist at the threshold of the Renaissance, he produced works both extraordinarily innovative and exceptionally traditional. The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio, with ten essays by eminent scholars and conservators, confronts this legacy head-on, making a sophisticated and substantial contribution to the field. The Companion, writes editor Diane Cole Ahl, “seeks to situate Masaccio’s career and contributions within the experiential and artistic… Full Review

Many readers of these reviews have passing knowledge of the salient facts of Portuguese cultural history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A list of such facts would include the rule of João V (1706–50), noteworthy for its duration and riches (thanks particularly to Brazilian gold), as well as the sustained (and ultimately successful) attempts by João to convince the Papacy to establish a patriarchate in Lisbon. Even better known are the king’s construction of the gigantic and oddly situated monastery-palace of Mafra; the horrible earthquake of 1755 that decimated Lisbon and so shook European culture that Madame de Pompadour… Full Review

This is the third major volume of collected essays on Italian confraternities to emerge in the space of two years (the others are John Patrick Donnelly S. J. and Michael W. Maher, S. J., eds., Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 44 [Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1999]; and Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). It is a tribute to the editors of this new volume that notwithstanding the appearance of these other… Full Review

This book offers what one would expect of a catalogue produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi: Father and Daughter Painters in Baroque Italy—a thorough study of the subject at hand, essays written by well-seasoned scholars, a complete bibliography, and good-quality color reproductions. As an added bonus, an appendix with pertinent documentation and a chronological chart for Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi are also included. The material is logically divided into two sections, the first on Orazio and… Full Review

The record prices that works by James Tissot have fetched at auction, as well as the appeal of his subjects to a general public, might well have turned contemporary critical attention away from an artist who, after all, no longer needs to be rediscovered (consider especially the writings of Michael Wentworth). Tissot’s immediate facility would seem to render critical analysis superfluous, analysis certainly less nimble than the artist’s brush. But with a taste for paradox, not the least of the devices available to aesthetic studies, the challenge has been taken up and—it has to be conceded straightaway—with a certain pertinence.… Full Review

In her preface, Mary Garrard declares that she wants her book to serve as an exemplary methodological model. She seeks to provide a new mode of connoisseurship, one that includes not only a thorough analysis of the formal elements within a given work of art, but also a detailed discussion of the social, psychological, gender-specific, and iconographic elements particular to the artist studied. In this volume, her latest contribution to Artemisia Gentileschi scholarship, Garrard has accomplished just that. The methodological mélange she employs results in a work that both engages the reader from beginning to end and thoroughly delivers what… Full Review