Browse Recent Book Reviews

The exhibition In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art featured thirty-four artists, most of whom live in Haiti, and, according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue, over “70 of their paintings, prints, sculptures, installations and mixed-media pieces drawn mainly from loans as well as the museum’s holdings” (8) representing a richer and complex set of cultural and spiritual histories. The well-illustrated catalogue, edited by Donald J. Cosentino (professor emeritus of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA), presents a rich analysis of the power of the visual and the complex relationships among regeneration, spirituality, and the livability of death. … Full Review

Douglas N. Dow’s Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform is a welcome contribution to scholarly literature on the under-researched topic of the relationships between Florentine art, devotion, and religious reform in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. As Dow observes on the first page of his introduction, the works, authors, and patrons that he examines have not simply been largely overlooked; they seem actively to have been avoided by scholars more preoccupied by earlier trends and later developments (1). Dow’s strategic response to this lacuna is a series of tightly focused case… Full Review

Sarah Patricia Hill and Giuliana Minghelli’s edited volume, Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the Meanings of Modernity, is the latest contribution to a growing body of English-language scholarship on photography in Italy. As Hill and Minghelli state in their introduction to the volume, their goal is to reveal something of “the current global culture of the image” (4) within the triangulation of Italian identity, photography, and modernity. Although not intended as a national history, the book nonetheless makes a claim for the particularity of the Italian case, arguing that Italy’s relationship to both photography and modernity has historically… Full Review

Francesco Vanni (1563/64–1610), the leading Sienese painter at the turn of the seventeenth century, was an innovative religious iconographer, a gifted draftsman, and an occasional printmaker. Despite his considerable accomplishments, he has never been the sole subject of a full monograph or exhibition—until now. Inspired by Yale University Art Gallery’s acquisition in 2003 of Vanni’s Madonna della Pappa painting (ca. 1599), the exhibition appeared only in New Haven. The accompanying catalogue provides an extensive examination of the artist’s works, focusing on his preparatory drawings for altarpieces, his three autograph etchings, and the many prints by other artists based on his… Full Review

Francisco de Hollanda (1517–84) begins Da Pintura Antigua (1548) by closely paraphrasing Vitruvius’s introduction to book 6 of De Architectura, in which the Roman author notes that the best preparation for the whims of Fortuna is knowledge—both education and the mastery of one’s profession. Hollanda’s knowledge of the theory and practice of art, however, seems to have offered him little protection from a poor critical fortune. After his work was finally published in the nineteenth century, many historians of art dismissed it as that of a pretentious and parochial artist. This reception, which is usefully outlined by Ángel González… Full Review

In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes famously refused to reprint what he referred to as the Winter Garden photograph of his mother as a child, but he reflected on its meaning and details extensively (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). In Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia, Craig Campbell reverses this strategy, presenting many photographs and photographic fragments of early twentieth-century Siberia, but refusing to analyze or discuss individual images. This is a deliberate choice, one that stems from Campbell’s assumption that photographs are… Full Review

From the outset, David Bindman makes it clear that Warm Flesh, Cold Marble: Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Their Critics is about the use and abuse of Immanuel Kant in interpretations of sculpture. In his preface, he states that the book constitutes a defense of a “discrete” Kantianism. He argues that Kant’s ideas circulated and trickled down, pervading theoretical aesthetics and artists’ discourses—but that the ideas were transformed in the process. Bindman’s convincing claim is that a vulgar or unauthorized Kantianism operated in the work of the main sculptors of Kant’s era, between about 1780 and 1840—including the medium’s two leading practitioners… Full Review

Aesthetic of the Cool: Afro-Atlantic Art and Music is arguably Robert Farris Thompson’s most canonical study of visual art, music, and dance in the Black Atlantic world. True to its subject, the book attempts to identify and examine commonly held traits among these modes of creative expression. Presented in twenty-five relatively short chapters (two of which are interviews), the book is effective in its aim by providing readers with a broad yet simultaneously succinct view of Afro-Atlantic music, dance, art, and, more importantly, the individualized and collective cultural meanings ascribed to each of these artistic outlets. Aesthetic of the Cool… Full Review

Scott Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit appears, at first glance, to be a book about the work of pioneering cartoonist, animator, and chalk-talker Winsor McCay (1867–1934). After all, McCay’s most celebrated work—Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–11)—is explicitly referenced in the title, and three illustrations from two distinct Little Nemo strips adorn the front and back cover. But Bukatman’s book, although organized around an extended examination of McCay’s life and work, is much more ambitious than this. For Bukatman, Slumberland is not merely a fictional nation visited by Nemo in the strip that bears… Full Review

A Companion to Ancient Egyptian Art, a volume of essays on a wide range of topics related to the study of Egyptian art, is part of Blackwell’s series “Companions to the Ancient World.” The book as a whole is impressive in its scope and theoretical sophistication, helpful to students of both Egyptology and art history, and vital as a snapshot of the current state of Egyptian art history. Its editor, Melinda Hartwig, is to be thanked for the thought and effort involved in producing such a volume, particularly in assembling the impressive list of contributors. The collection is organized… Full Review