Recently Published Reviews

In 1985, Lucy Freeman Sandler began her examination of a corpus of illuminated manuscripts created for the noble English Bohun family in the second half of the fourteenth century. A very rich study of manuscript patronage and production, her Illuminators and Patrons in Fourteenth-Century England: The Psalter and Hours of Humphrey de Bohun and the Manuscripts of the Bohun Family is the culmination of thirty-five years of valuable research, analysis, and scholarship. The volume is densely illustrated with predominantly high-quality color images and includes essential reference materials, including an appendix of the manuscripts and the Bohun family tree. The… Full Review

In his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, the show’s curator Richard J. Powell writes, “Like Richard Wright, the Chicago painter Archibald J. Motley offers a fascinating glimpse into a modernity filtered through the colored lens and foci of a subjective, African American urban perspective” (110).This statement establishes the primary aim of the exhibition: to present Motley as a prominent voice of American modernism. Building upon previous studies of Motley’s life and art such as Amy M. Mooney’s monograph Archibald Motley Jr. (Petaluma: Pomegranate, 2004) and Jontyle Theresa Robinson and Wendy Greenhouse’s The… Full Review

In his long-awaited book, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire, Ahmet A. Ersoy provides an in-depth analysis of Usul-i Mi’mari-i Osmani (The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture, hereafter the Usul), a crucial initial scholarly volume about the history, theory, and compositional principles of Ottoman architecture, prepared as part of the exhibition representing the empire at the 1873 World Exhibition held in Vienna. Ersoy astutely uses the Usul to embark on a meticulous exploration of the various contexts of which it formed a part. In the process, he reconstructs… Full Review

Villard de Honnecourt’s drawings and accompanying commentary (BnF MS fr 19093) have generated tremendous interest since they first came to scholarly attention in the nineteenth century. Despite a century and a half of scrutiny, however, their purpose remains elusive. Initially thought to be a Gothic architect, Villard himself has fallen in status as modern studies have questioned his architectural knowledge. Following the work of Carl F. Barnes, Jr., the idea that Villard was not an architect has, as Jean Wirth notes, become virtually dogmatic among medievalists (10). As the title of this book signals, Wirth disagrees. He sets out, through… Full Review

The Inka Empire: A Multidisciplinary Approach aims to assemble the latest thinking about the largest indigenous state in the history of the Americas. Editor Izumi Shimada outlines four goals in his introductory chapter: 1) offer the latest data and interpretations regarding the rise of the Inka state; 2) present an updated overview of the material remains and the organizational and ideological features of the Inka state; 3) demonstrate the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to Inka studies; and 4) acquaint readers with important scholarship on the Inkas, including work usually not published in English. With some exceptions, Shimada admirably accomplishes his… Full Review

Architectural historian Vittoria Di Palma’s book Wasteland: A History examines the shift in the way wasteland was understood, classified, and managed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is both a wide-ranging survey of representations of wasteland in prints, paintings, maps, and elsewhere, and an alternative account of English improvement understood through developments in modern aesthetics. As such, it is of interest not only to art and architectural historians, but also to those concerned with environmental history and theories of aesthetics. Including twenty-three color and eighty-four black-and-white illustrations, Di Palma’s book relies heavily on visual representation to… Full Review

The terracotta army pits of the First Emperor’s (r. 221–210 BCE) mausoleum in China remain one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century; yet the story of the First Emperor, his tomb, and the rise of the Qin state did not end with that excavation. Instead, continuous archaeological activity in Shaanxi and Gansu Provinces has brought to light new sites, artifacts, and texts that have radically changed our understanding of the Qin state and its dramatic climb to power during the third century BCE. Beyond the First Emperor’s Mausoleum: New Perspectives on Qin Art… Full Review

Degas: A New Vision offered a rare, broad, and true career-spanning retrospective of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), whose body of work was produced over the course of half a century, in a trajectory that made many twists and turns. Degas was an artist deeply rooted in the traditions of the Renaissance and the Academy yet also one of the most avant-garde artists of his era. His innovations in monoprint, for example, both as a unique medium and in conjunction with pastel, show an experimental sensitivity to materials more commonly associated with modernists of the twentieth century. His interest in color theory… Full Review

“What is nihonga, where did it come from, and why is it still around?” (12). These questions comprise the final sentence of the introduction to Chelsea Foxwell’s impressive book and serve as our point of departure into the emergence and evolution of nihonga or “modern Japanese painting” in late nineteenth-century Japan. As Foxwell compellingly argues, the emergence of nihonga was not simply the result of Japan’s shedding its feudal past at the precise moment of the Restoration (1868) but rather a process that began in the diverse, hybrid artistic milieu of the late Edo period (1615–1868). By focusing on… Full Review

Dansaekhwa is a style of abstract painting in which Korean artists explore monotones using various materials. There has been little agreement among Korean theorists on the term, which demonstrates the difficulties of defining it. Although Joan Kee transliterates it as Tansaekhwa in her book Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, ever since the 2012 exhibition Dansaekhwa at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, Dansaekhwa has been widely used. Dansaekhwa emerged in the mid-1970s, continues to influence contemporary Korean artists, and recently has been recognized abroad. Though scholarship and criticism about Dansaekhwa is plentiful in… Full Review

In the last few years, nineteenth-century Japanese souvenir photography from the port city of Yokohama has witnessed increasing public interest after decades of neglect in institutional archives. In the current decade alone, there have been more than five special exhibitions across Europe dedicated to these photographic works. This unexpected emergence of so-called “Yokohama photography” was pioneered by new critical scholarship. Building upon the persistent research efforts on the visual souvenir industry of a small group of historians and photo historians since the 1980s (e.g., Saitō Takio, Terry Bennett, and Sebastian Dobson, to name a few), the scholarship has seen a… Full Review

The exhibition Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael celebrates the collaboration between the celebrated papal court painter Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) and the lesser-known but respected Bolognese metal engraver and goldsmith Marcantonio Raimondi (ca. 1480–ca. 1534). Tracing the development of the close working partnership shared between artist and craftsman, the exhibition reveals how this unique relationship benefited both men in their chosen artistic fields. Marcantonio Raimondi and Raphael centers on a number of exquisitely executed engravings in which the vision presented through Raphael’s drawings is transposed through the mastery of Marcantonio’s burin. Borrowed from collections throughout England, most notably from Manchester’s own… Full Review

Tara Zanardi’s Framing Majismo examines the cultural phenomenon of majismo, the eighteenth-century movement that defined Spanish types drawn from the urban lower classes. She emphasizes that majismo was a product of the Enlightenment as well as a xenophobic reaction to foreign influences, and argues that majismo imagery provides a view into the tensions between gender and class, as well as between tradition and modernity, in eighteenth-century Bourbon Spain. Zanardi brings together an impressive collection of sources in her interdisciplinary research, and this book will be of interest to scholars and students of many disciplines beyond art history. Visual representation… Full Review

Seventeenth-century Naples was the largest city in Italy, and the second largest in Europe after London. It was also home to a thriving school of painting, with homegrown artists such as Massimo Stanzione, Bernardo Cavallino, and Luca Giordano, as well as foreigners such as Caravaggio, Jusepe de Ribera, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Yet Neapolitan painting has been overshadowed by that of Bologna, Rome, or other schools of Italian painting. Although there has been no shortage of interest in particular artists or monuments, there exists no broader scholarly framework for understanding the development, production, and patronage of painting in Naples. This gap… Full Review

The topic of ‘Alid shrines in medieval Syria has an established scholarly framework of sectarian arguments. These include, on the one hand, a debate concerning the role of Shi’i doctrine in the proliferation of shrines from the tenth century onward, and on the other, bold statements concerning the culturally transformative impact of the so-called Sunni Revival from the eleventh century. In her introduction to The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi‘is and the Architecture of Coexistence, Stephennie Mulder is very careful not to entirely dismiss any particular arguments within this framework, but refreshingly suggests an alternative… Full Review