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Mark Cheetham's book, Kant, Art, and Art History: Moments of Discipline, addresses the problem implied by the critic Thomas McEvilley's quip: "Kant and Greenberg are both things of the past and we should just get over them. Yet somehow, they keep arising from the grave like zombies" ("The Tomb of the Zombie," Art Criticism, 1998). Other critics and historians, such as Paul Crowther, want to excise Immanuel Kant from art history, due to amply documented misreadings of the philosopher's work, but Cheetham seeks rigorously to explore the uses to which Kant has been put--appropriately or not. By so… Full Review

Though it seems impossible to imagine today, there was a time, just thirty years ago, when major exhibitions of historical photographs were rare, and their sumptuously reproduced, oversize catalogues even rarer. With the exception of John Szarkowski's small, seminal The Photographer and the American Landscape (1963), nineteenth-century American landscape photography--now a boom business and a gilt-edge genre--had little or no exposure. If you wanted to see the work of Timothy O'Sullivan or William Henry Jackson, you went to the halftone insert pages of history books like William Goetzmann's enormously influential Exploration and Empire, first published in 1966. You couldn't… Full Review

In his preface, the author states that he intends to provide a "comprehensive account" (vii) of the place of images in sixteenth-century religious reformations--a laudable goal, though one that this volume ultimately falls short of delivering. John Dillenberger, a noted scholar of theological history, continues his contributions to the study of Reformation history, while taking a different angle by focusing on the role and perception of images in the sixteenth century. The author's endeavor, particularly in extending his efforts beyond his established area of expertise, is praiseworthy. Unfortunately, this foray into the visual arts frequently reveals the potential dangers that… Full Review

It is difficult to imagine a more stimulating and challenging meditation on visual theory than the one presented in this book. We are offered an initially unfamiliar vision of Mieke Bal's work: early writing on narrative theory; chapters from Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Prepostrous History (University of Chicago Press, 1999); aspects of her underappreciated but seminal work on museums; and some of Bal's most recent thinking on Marcel Proust and on contemporary art. Bal links these chapters with clarity and honesty, providing something of a narrative of her primary… Full Review

In late eleventh-century China, a group of disaffected government officials, their careers in disarray and their lives sometimes at risk, found ways to express political dissent and personal grievances through the use of literary allusions. Expressing dissatisfaction could be dangerous, so these allusions had to be oblique; a reference to spotted bamboo, for instance, evoked an ancient legend about loyal wives searching in vain for their dead lord. Recognizing such an allusion in a poem or in a painting, and understanding its implications in the contemporary context, required considerable erudition as well as a sympathetic alertness to the author's intentions… Full Review

Densely illustrated manuscripts of the lives and miracles of the saints constituted a distinct category of artistic production during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Of particular interest for the study of narrative and the relationship between text and image, these works also offer important evidence for scholars of political and religious history. Once deemed less aesthetically significant and intellectually sophisticated than illuminated Bibles and liturgical manuscripts, illustrated vitae have recently been the subject of much thought-provoking work by scholars such as Cynthia Hahn and Barbara Abou-El-Haj. Dominic Marner's book is devoted to one of the latest of these hagiographic cycles… Full Review

The title of Kamil Khan Mumtaz's book is in keeping with architectural debates in South Asia, which for almost a century have remained anchored in questions about modernity and tradition. This book is a collection of sixteen short polemical essays by Mumtaz, a well-known Pakistani architect, written between 1967 and 1997. The essays chronicle the gradual shift in his position "from a committed 'modernist' to a believer in the essential value of traditional wisdom." Mumtaz's argument does not adequately problematize issues such as economic and cultural domination, or religious nationalism and secular identity. Instead, he remains satisfied with the limitations… Full Review

See Stephen Fine's review of this book. As its title suggests, Kalman P. Bland's The Artless Jew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual revisits the evidence on Jewish aniconism and uncovers the origins and meanings of this most prevalent of modern myths. The conventional wisdom Bland seeks to overturn is now a profoundly internalized truism formulated during the course of the last 200 years by a broad range of writers, thinkers, artists, and scholars of all stripes (Jew and Gentile alike). The truism holds that Jews are a people without art. Judaism's presumed… Full Review

This book systematically examines the ways in which the sun was understood metaphorically, symbolically, and scientifically in a range of texts and images available to Michelangelo during the period in which he designed and painted the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel (1534-41). Observing that Michelangelo's Last Judgment differs from previous renditions in that it offers a circular composition with figures rising and falling in a clockwise pattern around a figure of Christ before a sun-like mandorla, Valerie Shrimplin hypothesizes that the artist might have had a heliocentric model of the universe in mind. Each of her ten chapters addresses… Full Review

In a manner appropriate to its subject, The Theatrical Baroque is slender in size but broad in scope. The catalogue, like the exhibition it accompanied at the University of Chicago's David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, explores a wide range of interactions between the visual and performing arts in Western Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The project's structure also sets forth an ambitious agenda, as it proposes that faculty and students working together across disciplinary boundaries can generate new and meaningful insights into the often neglected collections of a university art museum. An introductory… Full Review