Browse Recent Book Reviews

In 1970, Nicholas Negroponte dedicated his book about computer- and robot-aided design “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture” (The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1973, front matter). The book, a seminal collection of experiments and observations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, is a primary document in the history of the digitalization of architecture from a moment when clear distinctions between hardware and software had yet to be established. The role of “machines” (including computer programs, projective screens, and mechanical arms) in architectural culture was urgently felt… Full Review

The latest book by Hendrik W. Dey examines the afterlife of the Roman city in the territories of the erstwhile Roman Empire until roughly the ninth century. As a scholar with multiple threads of training in classics, Dey writes his book with a strong archaeological research method that emphasizes the perseverance of urban paradigms of the Greco-Roman world beyond literary tropes or oversimplified economical and demographical analyses. The Afterlife of the Roman City looks in particular at monumental architecture and urban topography by highlighting their importance in the definition of the urban space as a place of ceremonial manifestations of… Full Review

Jennifer L. Shaw’s Reading Claude Cahun’s Disavowals joins a group of recent publications on the female Surrealist artist Claude Cahun. However, this study is the first in-depth look at Cahun’s signature book, Aveux non avenus, written in the 1920s and published in 1930 in Paris. It appeared in English in 2008 as Disavowals: or, Cancelled Confessions, although the English title misses the double subtleties and punning play of “confessions” and “unconfessed” (trans. Susan de Muth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Shaw calls the book “Cahun’s manifesto” and argues convincingly that the artist saw it as an activist text… Full Review

Since the publication of his 1989 text Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press), Donald Preziosi has continued an internal interrogation of our discipline. After the recent appearance of a study jointly written with Claire Farago, Art Is Not What You Think It Is (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012; see my review in the Journal of Art Historiography 9 [December 2013]: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/verstegen-rev.pdf), we now have another complete statement of Preziosi’s views: Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity. In this book, he repeatedly thinks about the contemporary state of globalization and the way… Full Review

Jacques-Louis David casts a long shadow over portraiture during the period of the French Revolution, with the stern visages and intense gestures of members of the Third Estate in The Tennis Court Oath (1792); his iconic portrayal of Jean-Paul Marat lifeless in his bath (1793); his sensitive depiction of the Dutch republican Jacobus Blauw deep in thought at his desk (1795); and eventually his grandiloquent homages to Napoleon, including his portrayal of the Emperor’s coronation (1807). It is to Amy Freund’s immense credit that while she does not lose sight of David’s contributions to the genre, she gives the canonic… Full Review

Maia Wellington Gahtan, director of the MA program in Museum Studies at the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence, Italy, brings her professional interest in museological studies to this collection of essays, Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum. Indeed, all thirteen authors demonstrate not only a deep knowledge of Giorgio Vasari but also of art collecting in the Renaissance and the exhibition of Renaissance art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many of the essays were first presented at an international conference in Florence celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of Vasari’s birth, and most have long been the… Full Review

Elizabeth Childs’s Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti is several books in one: a survey of the European encounter with Tahiti from Captain Cook to the present; a focused examination of artistic (and to a lesser extent literary) representations of the island from about 1880 to 1901 (the year Paul Gauguin left Tahiti for the Marquesas and both Henry Adams and John La Farge published accounts of their visits); a critique of colonial received ideas about an always “vanishing paradise” in the South Pacific; a focused treatment of the art of Gauguin from his arrival in Tahiti in… Full Review

The retirement of the eminent architectural historian Deborah Howard from her position at the University of Cambridge, especially following that of Patricia Fortini Brown from Princeton University, marks a major turning point in the teaching of Venetian art and architecture in the academy. To honor Howard, recognized and admired for her rigorous, clear scholarship, as well as her kind, generous nature, some of her many students and friends have edited and contributed to this Festschrift. The volume covers a broad range of topics, both geographically and historically, but the essays are nonetheless tightly focused on particular subjects; many… Full Review

In Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain, Michael K. Schuessler proposes that a “visible bridge” developed between theater and mural painting in the early years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. To reveal the relationship between written and visual forms of expression and to create a vocabulary and methodology for describing it, Schuessler compares mural paintings in two Augustinian monasteries in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, to a religious play; a chronicle; service codices (documenting indigenous leaders’ military service to the crown); and a description of a staged La batalla de los salvajes (Battle of… Full Review

Most of the essays contained in Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, edited by Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman, were presented as lectures during a conference at Villa I Tatti in 2009 marking the fiftieth anniversary of Berenson’s death. As Connors both perceptively and tactfully observes in the introduction’s opening paragraph, the timing was propitious: by 2009 the “cult of personality” that had surrounded Berenson during his life had “dissipated for the most part,” and the approach to the study of art that he had espoused in such spirited fashion throughout his long career no longer stood “at the… Full Review