Browse Recent Book Reviews

Scholarship about art and culture in the 1980s Central European socialist bloc often evinces a certain impatience motivated by hindsight. Simply put, we know what is coming to Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in 1989. As a result, inquiry is approached through the lens of the imminent political change and sets as its task the diagnosis of the terminal symptoms preceding these events. In Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany, Sara Blaylock, associate professor of art history at University of Minnesota Duluth, invites us to slow down and approach this era outside this teleological frame. By engaging… Full Review

In this finely produced monograph, Jennifer Borland offers a compelling case study of medical illustration and bookmaking in the later Middle Ages. This case consists of seven deluxe manuscripts of a French-language medical regimen, all bearing initials richly illuminated with scenes of medicine and domestic life. These initials provide Borland with evidence for the active part of women in caregiving and domestic management. Visualizing Household Health: Medieval Women, Art, and Knowledge in the ‘Régime du corps’ places this seven-manuscript corpus at the center of its investigations and expands outward from there, from the finely wrought design of historiated initials to… Full Review

Painted Cloth offers a new dimension to the study of the Spanish Americas by asking how colonial subjects used fashion and fabric—painted, sculpted, woven, and worn—to think productively about the social and spiritual worlds around them. This stunning exhibition catalog showcases a selection of artworks and artifacts from primarily seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Spain and Peru and was the result of fruitful collaboration with private collections worldwide. Thoughtfully curated and edited by Rosario I. Granados, Marilynn Thoma associate curator for art of the Spanish Americas at the Blanton Museum, the catalog marks the occasion of the first large-scale exhibition of… Full Review

Michaelina Wautier and ‘The Five Senses’: Innovation in 17th-Century Flemish Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MFA) is the first exhibition in the United States devoted to the Brussels-based female painter who, despite her unmistakable artistic talent and successful career, fell into obscurity after her death. Only recently have experts rediscovered and revalued the oeuvre of Michaelina Wautier (1604­–1684), mainly thanks to the scholarship of Katlijne van der Stichelen, professor in art history at the University of Leuven in Belgium. A pioneer in the study of female artists, Van der Stichelen began researching Wautier after she… Full Review

In 1783, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner posed a question to the Berlinische Monatsschrift’s readers: “What is the Enlightenment?” One year later, Immanuel Kant, professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, responded with an aphorism: “Sapere aude!” or “Dare to Know!” Kant went on to define the Enlightenment as the “resolution and courage” to use one’s own reason to comprehend the world, unrestricted by prejudice and the guidance of others. Two hundred years after Kant’s response, Michel Foucault called attention to the temporal structure of this question. Zöllner and Kant, Foucault argued, described the Enlightenment in the present tense… Full Review

In the penultimate paragraph of my Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the Art of Agostino Brunias (Manchester University Press, 2018), I admitted—with no small degree of shame—that not until I came to the very end of the project did it ever even occur to me to ask, “What did the brown and black women working in Sir William Young’s plantation home see in Brunias’s canvases?” (233). Jennifer Van Horn’s Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery makes such questions the very focus of its inquiry. In doing so, this important book at once advocates for and models a critical recentering… Full Review

Susan Taylor-Leduc begins with a question that readers in the field of eighteenth-century studies may have already wondered: why another book dedicated to Marie-Antoinette (12)? Taylor-Leduc answers by sidestepping overworked themes in the rococo queen’s world: explorations of Marie-Antoinette’s biography, examinations of garden aesthetics, and correlations between royal patronage and contemporary politics. Instead, she creates an interdisciplinary framework that unites garden history with spatial, anthropological, and cultural memory studies to reassess Marie-Antoinette’s pivotal role in defining the French picturesque garden style at the Petit Trianon. Moreover, Taylor-Leduc traces the lasting effects of the queen’s garden legacy across three generations of… Full Review

Few early modern European ruling dynasties generate such fascination as the Spanish Habsburgs. In particular, the figures of Charles V and Philip II are well-known as monarchs who understood how architecture could be employed to propagate an image of empire and did so by patronizing such works as El Escorial, the Alcázar de Toledo, the Alcázar de Madrid, and Charles’s palace at La Alhambra, while Philip reimagined Madrid as the empire’s capital city. Turning away from these figures, in Jesús Escobar’s new book, Habsburg Madrid: Architecture and the Spanish Monarchy, the author focuses on the period from 1620 to… Full Review

As the twenty-first century progresses, imperial ties continue to loosen, but not without controversy and protest: the recent coronation of Charles III, for example, was greeted with enthusiasm by many—but not all—of his British subjects, and around Britain’s former imperial territories has prompted critical reflection on the legacies of British governance, including invasion, violence, slavery, and many other cultural practices and institutions now more universally recognized as exploitative and oppressive. The proposal that loyal subjects everywhere pledge their allegiance out loud to the King was greeted with particular astonishment, although some welcomed this as a participatory and inclusive new… Full Review

Brigitte Buettner explores the cultural significance of gemstones in the European Middle Ages in her brilliant and eagerly anticipated book The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture. Medieval inventories of people’s belongings demonstrate that the majority of the net worth of elite individuals often was tied up in gold and silver plate and in jewelry set with sumptuous rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and pearls. The inherent value of these objects tempted owners throughout the centuries to melt them down whenever a financial crisis arose, so only a small percentage of goldsmiths’ gem-laden masterpieces that once existed… Full Review