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For a series of six Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Pierre Rosenberg chose as his subject the drawings of five French artists—Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres—who worked over the span of years when France was transformed politically and socially, but understood their contributions within an unbroken cultural lineage. Rosenberg, along with his collaborator, Louis-Antoine Prat, for years has been preparing definitive catalogues raisonnés of the drawings of these five masters. The first volumes on Poussin and Watteau have appeared and the others are forthcoming. The Mellon lectures gave him just the… Full Review

Paul Hills's book deals with the aesthetics of color and its social history in Venice. These two ostensibly diverse agendas are interwoven through the author's examination of the cognitive skills of the patronal classes (Hills owes a great deal to Michael Baxandall's concept of the "period eye"), and the materials and processes involved in fashioning the visual environment of the city. As the title informs us, Hills deals with color in marble, mosaic, and glass in addition to painting. He also considers the role of color in architectural decoration, in textiles, and the significance of the restriction of color in… Full Review

Almost all post-War scholarship on Francisco Goya (1746-1828) has been concerned, in one way or another, with the artist's relation to the political, social, and cultural upheaval that wracked Spain from the 1780s through the 1820s. Over the past decade, the touchstone for thinking about these issues has been Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, organized by Eleanor A. Sayre and Alfonoso E. Pérez Sánchez (Madrid: Museo del Prado, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, and New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988-89). Under the guise of a retrospective, this exhibition presented a highly selective assortment of paintings, drawings, and… Full Review

In a letter to the curator of the 5th Biennale de Lyon, held in the summer of 2000, Partage d'exotismes (Sharing of Exoticisms), artist Hassan Musa declined an invitation to join the exhibition, claiming that, "Personally, as an artist born in Africa, but with no urge to bear the burden of an African artist, I know that the only opportunities open to me to present my work in public outside Africa are of the 'ethnic' type, where people assign to me the role of 'the African other' in places designed for the kind of seasonal ritual where a certain… Full Review

Death and the Emperor is an important new book that treats several familiar landmarks of the Eternal City in unfamiliar, stimulating, and insightful ways. The focus of the author's inquiry is the series of tombs and other memorials erected to honor deceased Roman emperors from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Because some of these monuments were built to house the remains of entire dynasties, this elite class of buildings has very few members—in fact, only seven (for eighteen emperors). The first—and the one that established many of the leitmotifs of the group—was the Mausoleum of Augustus, the great tumulus-tomb that Augustus… Full Review

Amidst the massive tombs of later doges, often reaching the entire height of a church from floor to vaulting, the rather more modest memorials to 13th- and 14th-century leaders of Venice may escape the notice of the general public, and indeed have largely escaped the attention of scholars. Debra Pincus amply demonstrates that they are, on the contrary, of considerable interest and importance. Most obviously, the early ducal tombs set the stage for the "grand, wall-filling tombs of the second half of the fifteenth century" (1), which expanded upon but did not greatly deviate from the themes introduced early on… Full Review

In 1972, David Huntington published an engaging and thought-provoking work, his Art and the Excited Spirit: America in the Romantic Period, a study of antebellum culture that has as its thesis the idea that "the American of the Romantic age was wakeful and on the qui vive." "His world was fraught with religion," Huntington told us, "his was an excited spirit." Having had the benefit of the late professor's teaching on this subject, I believe that Huntington felt a kind of electricity emanating from this country's artistic productions of the 1830s and '40s. He saw in a vast… Full Review

William Merritt Chase has long been considered a major American artist, if not a New York artist. Brooklyn Museum curator Barbara Dayer Gallati shows how Chase's reputation first evolved, taking no aspect of his art or identity for granted. The catalogue for William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes, 1886-1890 (which initiated at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in May 2000, and ends at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in March 2001) aims to reveal Chase's importance as a modern artist and as a "New York artist" by focusing on a group of urban landscapes with figures produced over… Full Review

"To me, images are images...They're images, and they can be moving or not. That's all there is to it." So stated the painter and photographer Ben Shahn in a 1965 interview, cited in an appendix of this excellent catalogue that was published to accompany an exhibition of Shahn's early photographs of street life in New York. Shahn's statement summarizes succinctly the main theme that the contributors to this volume wish to address: the relationship between Shahn's paintings and his photographic work, and more specifically, the place of his New York photographs in the development of his humanistic iconography. … Full Review

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that in order to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. Similarly, in order to write a good doctoral thesis, you have to choose a good subject. This book, like many another first book in the history of art, is the author's doctoral thesis (Yale, 1988) writ large, and she certainly picked a fantastic topic. The result is one of the most useful books ever written on Italian Renaissance drawings, albeit—it has to be admitted—scarcely one of the most approachable. In saying this, I do not… Full Review