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Winner of CAA's "Charles Rufus Morey Book Award":http://www.collegeart.org/caa/aboutcaa/morey.html Jeffrey Hamburger's collection of essays, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, examines the function of religious images in the context of female enclosure in the later Middle Ages. Hamburger's stated objective is twofold: to explore art that medieval women commissioned, or that their superiors commissioned for them; and to situate this art in the context of enclosure. Hamburger began research that led to this publication in 1989. Six of these nine essays have been previously published, but revised for this collection. Though… Full Review

This is an ambitious book on the historiography of seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture, containing essays written by many of the most influential Dutch archivists, art historians and historians at work in the 1990s: Marten Jan Bok, Jeroen Boomgaard, Dedalo Carasso, Frans Grijzenhout, E. de Jongh (with two essays), J.J. Kloek, Eveline Koolhaas and Sandra de Vries, E.H. Kossmann, Debora J. Meijers, N.C.F. van Sas, Eric J. Sluijter, and Lyckle de Vries. Edited by Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen, it originally appeared in a Dutch edition of 1992, and was written in conjunction with… Full Review

For tourists driving to Acadia National Park on Maine's coastal Route 1, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland has become an increasingly popular and rewarding stop. Having long enjoyed a regional reputation for its noteworthy collection of American art, the institution (which includes the adjacent Farnsworth Homestead and the Olson House in nearby Cushing) recently attracted national attention with the opening of the Wyeth Center in 1998. Maine artists and subjects figure prominently at the Farnsworth, but this emphasis by no means constitutes provincialism. Quite the contrary, enriched by the late philanthropist Elizabeth Noyce's bequest of seventy Maine paintings by… Full Review

In 1126, Fujiwara no Kiyohira dedicated a Buddhist Canon in more than 5,000 fascicles copied in alternating columns of gold and silver ink on indigo paper. This Canon is unique in Japan because of the gold and silver script and also because Kiyohira was the only commoner of his day to sponsor an entire Buddhist Canon. Kiyohira, the descendant of Emishi ("toad barbarians"), ruled from Hiraizumi, capital of a stronghold in northern Honshu that has been variously identified as a kingdom, a polity, a military government, and as "the Buddhist heaven of the eastern barbarians" (202). Kiyohira's son Motohira and… Full Review

Thomas Crow is one of the most exacting and vigilant of art historians, never prone to following received opinions, methods, or practices. His way of thinking has sometimes produced works that are exemplary in their circumspection and nuance; the theory of society and art embedded in the opening chapter of Modern Art in the Common Culture has yet to be adequately answered. The Intelligence of Art is an attempt to say more generally, but with the precision afforded by individual examples, where the discipline of art history might find promising models. Crow is especially concerned with what he… Full Review

This book takes on the challenging topic of Italian (despite its title) Renaissance portraiture and self-fashioning, but with a particular focus, that of artists' self-portraits. The author's premise is that the increasing number of such self-portraits over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marks the changing status of the artist within the culture from craftsman to intellect. Such an evolutionary claim is certainly supported by historical evidence familiar to students of the period, most notably the application of the epithet of "divino" to artists like Michelangelo and Titian toward the end of the period Woods-Marsden discusses and by Castiglione's assertion in… Full Review

Lisa Peters begins her beautifully illustrated book John Henry Twachtman: An American Impressionist with strong language: "A painter of intimate landscapes rendered in an original and expressive style, John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902) was the epitome of the modern American artist in the late nineteenth century" (13). This position is antithetical to the usual understanding of Twachtman within the canon of American art. In Wayne Craven's textbook American Art: History and Culture (1994), we learn that Twachtman "never received the critical acclaim he hoped for, and he died at age forty-nine" (353). In Milton Brown et al.'s text American Art: Painting,… Full Review

This CD-ROM opens with a visual witticism too canny not to have been intentional. When the disk is installed (easily done), the first screen reproduces part of Pieter Bruegel's Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, one of the real treasures of the Courtauld's collection. In the detail, taken from the painting's right-hand side, the user encounters a micro-crowd of onlookers, who bend forward, all eyes, all focus, all attention. These figures gaze toward a point at the screen's lower left, while the foremost among them gapes in astonishment and tips a long-fingered hand downward, emphasizing the trajectory of… Full Review

The American public has not given works by Barbizon artists star billing in a little over a century. Where once Americans were proud of themselves for having recognized Millet's talents early, they are now harder to please. Since Impressionist art has risen to blockbuster fame, it takes a monumental effort to call attention to the considerable but subtle charm of what Millet referred to as "rustic art." The subtitle of this exhibition, "Drawn into the Light," implies that Millet could be considered an artist who anticipated the goals of the Impressionists. It is unfortunate, in my view, to remove this… Full Review

Most Americans will know about Tilman Riemenschneider from the wonderful 1980 publication, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, by Michael Baxandall, one of the rare discussions of German wood sculpture in English, or perhaps from the scattered fragments of the artist's works in American museums, such as Cleveland or Raleigh (an essay by William Wixom in the present catalogue chronicles "Riemenschneider in America" and offers a useful checklist). Now viewers have the opportunity to visit an unprecedented exhibition of the artist's works, first in Washington and then in New York, thanks to the remarkable organizational, curatorial, and editorial skills of Julien… Full Review