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The aesthetic appropriation of psychic states and disorders has a distinguished pedigree. André Breton adopted hysteria in the early days of the Surrealist movement, while his colleague Salvador Dalí preferred paranoia. Anton Ehrenzweig pressed Melanie Klein’s manic and depressive moments of an infant’s life into a theory of creative processes in his influential book, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Of course, Sigmund Freud himself set the modern trend for this sort of borrowing in his analysis of the psychic energy underlying Leonardo da Vinci’s peculiar genius, but the tradition reaches as far back as… Full Review

Rebecca Zorach’s Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance offers a wide-ranging study of the elite visual culture of France under the Valois-Angoulême dynasty. In this book, based upon her dissertation at the University of Chicago, Zorach studies the many manifestations of the Fontainebleau style, from panel and wall paintings to sculpture, prints, ceramics, diplomatic gifts and royal entry decorations, costume, and the many copies after the antique that populated the galleries and gardens of the palace. The book’s plentiful, high-quality illustrations exemplify both the author’s arguments as well as the incredible fertility of artistic production… Full Review

Historians and art historians have a soft spot for Charles Sheeler, the American painter, filmmaker, and photographer who made a career out of his apparent love for industrial modernity during the interwar decades. It is customary for scholars of this period to bend their knees at his Machine Age altarpieces, because they so plainly depict the means and effects of the era’s mania for rational efficiency, and also because—let’s face it—the works are beautiful, all the more seducing in their tight-lipped, standoffish reserve. For Charles Sheeler: Across Media, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition by the same name, curator… Full Review

One can hardly think of Rome without picturing the massive dome of St. Peter’s. Clearly symbolic of Catholicism and, more subtly, of the transition from late pagan antiquity to the ascendancy of Christianity, the basilica has a rich and varied history. As Lex Bosman states in the introduction to The Power of Tradition, “The church of St. Peter’s in the Vatican is not special only because of its size and its splendor. It is also, more than any other building in Western Europe, a testimony to part of the history of Christianity in different types of stone” (9). … Full Review

Palladio’s Rome offers an unusual recreation of the Renaissance city in the words of the celebrated architect from northern Italy. Palladio made several visits to Rome when he was still an aspiring architect, producing a pair of guidebooks that were published in 1554—one an introduction to the ancient city (The Antiquities of Rome), and the other a companion guide to the churches of contemporary Rome (Description of the Churches). In keeping with standard practice of the time, the texts are brief and unillustrated, but the contents are surprising given the identity of the author. Vaughan… Full Review

It is a sign of the times, I suppose, to begin a book review, itself published online, with a reference to a website. For in many ways, Jane Geddes’s The St. Albans Psalter is a book that was spawned by a website. In 2003, the University of Aberdeen undertook, under the direction of Geddes, to publish the St. Albans Psalter on the internet as a virtual facsimile (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/stalbanspsalter/english/index.shtml). As academic websites go, this is a truly impressive accomplishment, for it provides high-quality color images of every page of this twelfth-century psalter (including the blank pages). For the first time… Full Review

A generation of Anglophone scholars has depended on Michael Baxandall’s masterwork, Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), for its inimitable introduction to the subject of the golden age of German carved altarpieces from around the turn of the sixteenth century. Now, a quarter-century later, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria, and South Tirol—perhaps one of the most beautiful books ever produced—reintroduces this material in a translation of the 2005 Hirmer edition, with the usual high production values of that Munich art publisher. In this case, the accompanying text is truly worthy… Full Review

In 1775 an artist named Nathaniel Hone submitted a painting called The Pictorial Conjuror, Displaying the Whole Art of Optical Deception (1775) to an upcoming exhibition at the British Royal Academy. The painting depicted in its top left corner an image of the Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman frolicking naked with other naked artists, among them her friend Joshua Reynolds, who is shown lewdly jabbing his oversized, trumpet-shaped hearing aid in the direction of Kauffman’s parted legs. Hone’s painting was understood by contemporaries to be an attack on Reynolds, the president of the Academy, a mockery of Reynolds’s rumored love affair… Full Review

A hypothetical reader familiar with the history of twentieth-century Europe but unfamiliar with the art produced in that period would be baffled by the leading survey texts of our day. The three major totalitarian regimes of the century—Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Stalinist Soviet Communism—brought down upon humanity the most severe cataclysm in recorded history. Even the aftermath lasted through the end of the century. Yet our imaginary reader would find little evidence for that in textbooks on art and architectural history. Except for Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Internationall (1919–20) and an occasional reference to the… Full Review

Because the appreciation of illustrated books requires direct contact between the object and the viewer, it is difficult to make the experience of viewing these books accessible to a wide audience—notwithstanding recent advances in digital “page turning.” Viewing a book is usually a solitary act; at most two people might be able to appreciate a volume at the same time. The images in them are encountered one by one in the sequence determined by the artist but at a pace set by the viewer. When a book is exhibited in a gallery, only one opening per volume may be displayed… Full Review