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In James Cahill’s own words, the goal of Pictures for Use and Pleasure is to facilitate “further, deeper, and altogether better studies” of the proposed category of vernacular paintings (199). The interest is in finding, sorting, and identifying such paintings according to their subject areas; in making (corrective) attributions with suggested dates, artists’ names, and styles; and in offering interpretations with respect to function, aesthetic concern, and regional variation. The paintings studied were kept mostly in the private quarters of elite households, the inner and secondary palace complexes, and in urban places of pleasure frequented by male elite. Their artists… Full Review

The field of Roman cartography has undergone a renaissance in recent years. This is due not only to the publication of books like The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Richard J. A. Talbert, ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), but also to a fundamental shift in how scholars understand the function of Roman maps. For decades, scholars assumed that the Romans used maps much like we do, as navigational aids to facilitate travel and warfare. This assumption, however, has proven to be both anachronistic and inaccurate. Unlike modern people, the Romans rarely used maps for navigation, instead… Full Review

Haim Steinbach’s latest artists’ book incorporates several of his sculptural themes into the codex form, exploring the choice and display of mass-market products and creating a dialectic between photobook and sculptural book. Object is a board book comprised of sixty-one color photographs featuring Steinbach’s signature found objects, mostly shot one per page, head-on, and silhouetted against a white background. Approximately the size and thickness of a stack of LP record albums, the book is made fully sculptural with rounded fore-edges and, most dramatically, a hole die-cut through the whole thing. This tension between book and sculpture constitutes the (empty) core… Full Review

This collection of essays (eleven in English, three in French) contributed by fourteen scholars of art history and Christian liturgy from eight countries is focused on the development of altarpieces/retables in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as explored at a 2006 symposium in Gröningen, Germany. Findings are derived from physical remains and records of creation and use, and reveal affinities and diversities across scattered European sites, while providing bases for further study of a previously under-explored but prominent type of late medieval decoration. In their introduction, editors Justin E. A. Kroesen and Victor M. Schmidt emphasize the importance… Full Review

From Vasari’s epitome of “grazia” at the culmination of art’s third, most perfect era to Wölfflin’s paragon of the Classic style, Raphael’s paintings have exemplified definitive formal perfection. Their sacred subject matter seemed incidental to this aesthetic achievement, so completely does the expression of beauty subsume the mere articulation of devotional content. Christian Kleinbub, in his magisterial book, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, thoroughly upends this outmoded view of the artist. He demonstrates how Raphael conceived his religious imagery, and especially visionary subjects, to mediate higher levels of spiritual contemplation. Kleinbub addresses the tension between the mimetic aims… Full Review

The focus of Anna Contadini’s A World of Beasts is the sole extant manuscript of the Kitāb Na‘t al-Ḥayawān (“Book of the Characteristics of Animals”), an Arabic treatise on the distinctive qualities of animals and their therapeutic value. Datable on stylistic grounds to ca. 1225 CE, “the Na‘t” was acquired by the British Museum in 1884 and is now held by the British Library under shelfmark Or. 2784. Contadini’s investigation exposes the manuscript as a unique witness to the convergence of Islamic illustrative traditions, pseudo-Aristotelian animal lore, and Greco-Arabic medical knowledge. In eight chapters and three appendices, she offers… Full Review

Stephen C. Pinson earned his PhD degree from Harvard University in 2002 with a dissertation on Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre that forms the nucleus of this book, nourished by over fifteen years of research and elaboration in several articles. Speculating Daguerre has been eagerly awaited; the last book-length study of Daguerre’s art, in any language, was Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype, first published in 1956 and revised in 1968 (New York: Dover). As Pinson notes, the Gernsheims’ book was primarily biographical and documentary. Like several smaller publications, it relied heavily… Full Review

Greg M. Thomas’s comprehensive Impressionist Children: Childhood, Family, and Modern Identity in French Art intelligently expands upon ground recently covered by others in scholarly literature: images of French nineteenth-century childhood. The finest parts of the book are his discussions of works by Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, about which he unearths new factual detail, and provides persuasive original readings of paintings both familiar and not. Drawing upon a wide socio-historical framework, Thomas analyzes images from the world of commodities associated with childhood, especially toys. His overarching thesis, that Impressionist images of childhood reveal the fundamental dilemma of the modern subject—“trying… Full Review

Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life was produced in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at the Art Institute of Chicago, which drew from the resources of that museum and other Chicago-area collections. The catalogue study is an important addition to the growing volume of literature that considers prints as functional, three-dimensional objects, rather than simply as flat images. The first footnote, in fact, offers a good overview of this specialized literature. The study’s primary author, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, completed her doctoral dissertation on similar material in 2006 (Yale University), Art—A User's Guide: Interactive and… Full Review

The phrase “the medicine of photography” may very well draw a blank in the minds of even the most experienced photographic historians. Photography’s development through the latter half of the nineteenth century is not usually told in terms of medicine, but in terms of art, with the camera styled as a “solar pencil” able to match painting’s aesthetic capabilities. Yet in this highly original book, Tanya Sheehan showcases a vast, alternative narrative in which cameras were seen as scalpels, developing chemicals as therapeutic drugs (3), and photographers as “doctors of photography” (30) possessing the ability to inspect, diagnose, and rehabilitate… Full Review