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Over the past thirty years, James E. Young, who recently retired from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has studied and written on modern memorial art, most notably that devoted to the Holocaust. For much of his career, he held a joint appointment in English and Judaic studies at that university, and also served as the founding director of its Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Over this time, Young has become a significant scholar in each of these fields. In three important books and countless essays, he continues to demonstrate the importance of cultural artifacts to the field of… Full Review

During the Renaissance, illustrated maps became important epistemological tools for Europeans seeking information about the inhabitants of the Americas. Surekha Davies’s Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters considers the relationship between a variety of written and illustrated sources (travel accounts, costume books, encyclopedias, and prints) and maps. The book demonstrates how the latter visually synthesized—in one place—“ethnographic knowledge” that ultimately functioned to justify European colonialism, expansion, and enslavement of indigenous peoples. Addressing the period from roughly 1492 to 1650, and having considered some two thousand maps and atlases, primarily made and consumed in… Full Review

The questions that black males are asked each day by white America (or world consumers of blackness) are often debilitating in their reduction of our complex capacities and our ideologically inspired identities: questions that only scratch at the surface of a humanity forged by the depth of our roots, struggle, and emergent culture. These questions do not sincerely ask but seek to define the very nature of who we are. But, the questions that black males ask other black males are questions about soul searching; questions that begin to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that have evolved around race and… Full Review

Elizabeth Morán’s Sacred Consumption is a study of the place of food in Aztec ritual. The foods examined by Morán were ephemeral, and the performances that characterized ceremonial life in Tenochtitlan and its provinces are similarly elusive in the archaeological record. Fortunately for scholars, indigenous artists, often directed by European friar missionaries, created manuscript paintings that represent elements of Aztec ritual. These illuminated books constitute the primary visual evidence for Morán’s study, though a few works of preconquest stone sculpture are discussed as well. Reading these images in light of colonial-period texts leads to a wide range of assertions about… Full Review

In the edited volume Global and World Art in the Practice of the University Museum, scholars Jane Chin Davidson and Sandra Esslinger share several essays that trace the role of university museums in developing new ways of thinking about art within a larger, global context. This framework acknowledges the complexity of contemporary geopolitical and social interfaces and how these affect the production and reception of works of art. Occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the Fowler Museum UCLA, the book focuses on the museum’s relationship with the University of California Los Angeles as a means for grounding the… Full Review

Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 magnum opus, the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, created a very specific and biased account of the development of art in the early modern period. Artists such as Carlo Crivelli were decidedly absent. It has been the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians to recuperate and reframe artists like Crivelli. Developed over the course of fifteen years, Thomas Golsenne’s erudite treatment of Crivelli’s oeuvre makes use of historical anthropology to investigate the artist with methods and approaches borrowed from social science, sociology, and philosophy. Golsenne, for example, borrows the term “material mysticism”… Full Review

A long tradition of scholarship extending back to antiquity praises the surviving monuments in Rome despite their evident alterations. Even the city’s basic infrastructure has received careful attention, since such features as the urban walls originally made for Emperor Aurelian continue to fascinate. In the sixth century CE, Cassiodorus celebrated the still functioning sewers built centuries earlier, remarking: “Rome, what cities would dare contend with you in their heights when they cannot even match you in their depths” (41). Rome: An Urban History from Antiquity to the Present is a major accomplishment in tracing the city’s physical developments from its… Full Review

James McNeill Whistler’s first artistic affiliations were French: the “Société des Trois” he formed with Henri Jean Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros in 1858; Edgar Degas’s invitation to participate in the Impressionists’ first exhibition; and his close friendship with French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, whom Whistler called “my second self” (140). Perhaps most tellingly of all, Whistler was furious when the French government displayed his Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother (1871) as a “foreign” work. Today, it hangs in the Musée d’Orsay alongside the work of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Degas, but Suzanne Singletary’s fascinating study is the… Full Review

A collection of essays by African, American, and European scholars, A Companion to Modern African Art is a welcome addition to the subject. The volume consists of twenty-nine chapters, arranged in a “roughly chronological order” and subdivided into nine parts. The introduction by the editors (part I, chapter 1) provides the reader a road map for navigating the contents of the book. Part II consists of one essay (chapter 2) by Henry John Drewal on local transformations and global inspirations. According to him, “modernity is not a European invention . . . [but] the result of the interactions and exchanges… Full Review

Mitchell Merback’s latest book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, precisely does not reveal what the enigma of the master engraving is “about.” Rather, it reveals mystery itself as a sixteenth-century therapeutic practice. In so doing, the book provides insight into the endurance and pervasiveness of a lingering stereotype: that transformative wisdom lies concealed in old books, old paintings, and old diagrams from old Europe. This stereotype brings with it rich fantasies about coded riddles that mask transhistorical conspiracies. As Merback is aware, for he uses a fitting epigraph from Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol to kick… Full Review