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For decades the rich, dense heritage of medieval and Renaissance Venice has offered historians, art historians, and social scientists an array of subjects and an evolving methodological arsenal for their analysis. Building on the work of previous generations, recent scholars have expanded our understanding of the manner in which a society can use its visual culture to construct a variety of identities: civic, religious, class, familial, and even individual, conveying messages that were normative as well as informational. Yet despite intense activity, monuments such as the thirteenth-century mosaics of San Marco have awaited the application of approaches that reach beyond… Full Review

It was Édouard Manet's notoriety that caught the attention of the young writer Émile Zola in 1866 and galvanized him to write the first sustained polemic about his work. A fascination with the controversies surrounding the reception of Manet's paintings has inspired an entire strain of writing on the artist ever since. Although some of that journalistic skirmishing animates Beth Brombert's biography, this new account of his life does not dwell on Manet's public persona. Objecting to the "depersonalized" Manet that has emerged in recent scholarship, Brombert argues that many of the enigmatic aspects of his art can be explained… Full Review

One can only admire Karl Galinsky's courage and self-confidence in attempting a one-volume synoptic study of what is perhaps the single subject that has exerted most dominance within Roman studies for over a century (and particularly in recent years). In the 1990s, in the relatively narrow field of Augustan art alone (narrow by the very broad standards of Augustan Culture, where "art and architecture" receive one chapter out of eight), in the English language alone, we have seen at least four monographs devoted exclusively to the arts under Augustus—not to speak of innumerable articles (among which the present reviewer is… Full Review

The study of Dutch art presents a particular challenge: How best to organize the material? The extraordinary rate of pictorial production, at a high level of craft, in the northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century, the profusion of first- and second-rank masters, the expansion of the genres, and the existence of specialized local markets conspire to make the task of encompassing discussion difficult. This is true enough for a survey book, but takes on even greater importance in the world of museum exhibitions. In the last three decades, the response has been to examine Dutch art thematically, or by individual… Full Review

For a snapshot of the dominant directions of current Rembrandt research, particularly under the leadership of senior Dutch scholars, two recent publications provide a sensitive vision. Their very titles signal the degree of adulation accorded to the painter Rembrandt, a solitary "genius," whose wide-ranging influence, or "impact" diffused outward to a circle of talented but lesser painters who followed in his wake. Emphasis is on distinctive, individual artistic production in both books, though van de Wetering makes claims to "demythologizing" the artist's techniques, because of the scientific investigation of works themselves. The exhibition catalogue from Australia essentially reprises the outlook… Full Review

The appearance of a facsimile volume (costing around six thousand dollars) of the celebrated, partially destroyed "Turin-Milan Hours" (Turin, Museo Civico d'Arte Antico, inv. no. 47) is reason enough to rejoice for scholars, who would otherwise probably never have close contact with these celebrated miniatures, some of which (controversially) have been attributed to Jan van Eyck. Now there is still more reason for celebration: the accompanying commentary volume has appeared in three languages (nothing like having a Swiss publisher!). In addition to providing basic, small illustrations of all the images in the original manuscript (including the Paris folios of what… Full Review

This retrospective devoted to Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758–1823) begins with his Sign of the Hatmaker Charton (1774), a naive artifact painted before the artist left Cluny in 1774 for Dijon to study. Who knowing just this homely object could have imagined that its creator would do some of the lushest nudes of both sexes made by any artist? After then going on to Paris, Prud'hon in the 1780s spent three years, three months in Rome. Returning to Paris in 1788, after failing to compete with David and David's follower, Anne-Louis Girodet, he did a few works associated with the Revolution, but… Full Review

Online readers, and especially those not involved in the "Ivory Wars" clearly set out in the endnotes of The Color of Ivory, should be aware of at least two things before embarking on this review. First, that seven years ago Carolyn Connor wrote an article on traces of color on the Joshua plaques in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[1] interesting because it enlarged greatly on Kurt Weitzmann's observation in 1930 that their "rosette bands show traces of red and blue color of later date but which surely are [to be considered] modern only with difficulty."[2] Second, that I have already… Full Review

A person can learn quite a bit by watching neighbors working on a similar task, and David Bordwell's new book on the status of visual style in film history raises anew the issue for art historians, who supposedly invented the concept. Bordwell is a distinguished historian of film at the University of Wisconsin, who has authored and co-authored (usually with Kristin Thompson) monographs (The Cinema of Eisenstein), period histories (The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960), general histories (Film History: An Introduction), and critical appraisals of theory and method in his own discipline (Post-Theory: Reconstructing… Full Review

With remarkable visual clarity, the apse mosaics of the church of San Marco in Venice proclaim the issues involved in the monograph of Thomas Dale. As Otto Demus discusses and illustrates in his magisterial volumes, four saints stand there beneath an enthroned Christ. Peter and Mark share the central axis. Peter hands Mark his Gospel; Mark acknowledges the gift by his extended right hand and displays it in his left hand. On the right side of the apse, St. Hermagoras turns toward Mark and his Gospel. In the corresponding position at the left stands St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors… Full Review