Browse Recent Book Reviews

Guy Delmarcel's recent book is a survey of tapestries produced in what is now Belgium and Northern France from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Flemish Tapestries is a luxuriously illustrated book, including numerous tapestries which have not been reproduced previously. Published almost simultaneously in French, Dutch, and English, the book was financed by the Ministry of Flemish Culture. In contrast to some of his earlier specialized and minutely documented contributions to tapestry history (among many others, his study with Clifford M. Brown, Tapestries for the Courts of Federico II, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzago: 1522-1563, or his catalogue with… Full Review

In his new book, Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael, Walter Gibson takes the reader on an extensive wandeling that explores the diverse pleasures the seventeenth-century Dutch took in from images of their own familiar countryside. The book spans from the sixteenth-century "origins" of the "rustic" landscape in Antwerp to late seventeenth-century discussions of the picturesque, but developments associated with Haarlem are central. In the words of the author, "The rustic landscape born in Antwerp, came of age in Haarlem." The subject—rustic landscape—is very broadly conceived, and Gibson draws on a rich trove of historical evidence… Full Review

A cold, wintry, and grey afternoon in London might not be the best environment to begin thinking about whether and how beauty matters, or about what are the matters that form our definitions of Beauty. However, the eerie bleakness of the weather around me coincided with the need initially to consider one form of reaction to beauty: namely, our differing responses and reactions to nature. This question was considered in Marcia M. Eaton's discussion of "Kantian and Contextual Beauty." When she considers her own admiration for a flower growing on the banks of a lake, its purple form against the… Full Review

One of the most beautiful books to appear in recent years, this visual feast that is Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited pairs quotations from the three volumes of John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice (New York: Lovell, 1851-53) with Sarah Quill's dazzling photographs of the monuments that Ruskin observed. Every detail is appealing, from the dust jacket—a deftly chosen detail of the marble encrustation on the Ca' Dario that Ruskin would surely have favored—to the marble intarsia decoration on the end papers. The intended audiences of the book, one might speculate, are the modern-day travelers to Venice mentioned at the… Full Review

Two recent works significantly extend our understanding of the architectural history of London and English provincial towns and cities. Elizabeth McKellar's masterful study of the economic and statutory forces that shaped the appearance of London's domestic buildings offers the first major reconsideration of the metropolis since the publication of Sir John Summerson's 1945 Georgian London. James Ayres's overview of the technological innovations and craft traditions that enabled the emergence of the Georgian urban landscape stands as an important synthesis of information gathered by architectural and social historians over the past fifty years. Both books are important additions to the… Full Review

The Symbolist aesthetic in late nineteenth-century Europe demonstrates a particularly idiosyncratic complexity due to its interweaving of cultural, political, social, scientific, and aesthetic influences. Tracking these individual strands in the art and literature at the fin-de-siècle reveals a strong reaction against Enlightenment ideals of progress and rationalism that was often expressed in visual and verbal images of superstition and mysticism. During this period, subjective intuition replaced realist observation while suggestion was preferred to description for aesthetic effect. Compared to studies on Realism and Impressionism, those dedicated to Symbolism sometimes appear as slender and evasive as the effetely emaciated figures that… Full Review

Recent scholarship has produced a mounting bibliography in the area of court studies, helping to convince most scholars that, however important the great republics, the courts must be included in any complete evaluation of cultural history in the Renaissance. Yet the precise nature of the Italian Renaissance court remains hard to define, with many fundamental questions still inadequately answered. How institutionalized was the court? Who, exactly, were its members? Did they have specific roles and privileges? Hard facts on these topics are both scarce and scattered, making the document presented in Sabine Eiche's book especially precious: the Ordine et officij… Full Review

In her study of the "artful body" and aristocratic identity in the visual arts from Louis XIV to the Regency, Sarah Cohen investigates the role played by personal artifice and dance in the performance of status, power, and social interaction. Drawing on a wealth of historical, visual, and documentary material, an intimate familiarity with dance and art history, and methodologies on performance and identity in African and contemporary art, Cohen explores the significance and meaning of outward appearances, bodily movement, and cultural practice in art ranging from Versailles to the last paintings of Watteau. In chapter… Full Review

Although he spent nearly all of his professional life in the public eye, Jacob Lawrence has remained an elusive figure. A child of the Harlem Renaissance, Lawrence was born too late to be more than a perceptive eyewitness to that movement. A figurative artist whose small-scale paintings were driven by historical narratives, the artist reached maturity in an era that preferred grand, mute abstractions. Socially engaged but reticent to protest, a critical darling well removed from the centrism of his native New York, a regular in the commercial galleries, a bolsterer of thematic exhibitions, and the subject of several strong… Full Review

A bound volume of diverse studies does not necessarily constitute a book derived from a coherent idea. This thought arises when reading With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage 1434-1530. Even though the editors, Eckart Marchand and Alison Wright, introduce the publication with an intellectual framework, they fail to unify the articles within that framework. The alleged theme of the book is art patronage in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Tuscany, dominated by the Medici family. The studies that follow, however, address this theme only inconsistently. They are analyses of diverse Italian topics (not even Tuscan is… Full Review