Book Reviews

Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art

By Andrea Pearson

Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 296; Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, 37. Leiden – Boston: Brill, 2019. xxii, 356 pp, 148 illus., mostly color. ISBN 978-90-04-39295-3 (hardback); 978-90-04-39310—3 (e-book).

Review published August 2019

Pearson sets out to expand and recalibrate the ways that art historians conceptualize early modern garden imagery. Specifically, she challenges an overemphasis on interiority that she sees in modern [...] Read More

Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer: Parallel Visions / Velázquez, Rembrandt, Vermeer: Miradas afines

By Alejandro Vergara, ed.

Exh. cat. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, June 24 – September 29, 2019. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2019. 252 pp, illustrated in color. ISBN 978-96-8167-048-3.

Review published August 2019

The title of the exhibition might suggest a gathering of crowd-pleasing Old Masters to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Prado. Instead, the curator Alejandro Vergara tackles an intellectually [...] Read More

Women. The Art of Power. Three Women from the House of Habsburg

By Sabine Haag, Dagmar Eichberger and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, eds.

Exh. Cat. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, June 14 – October 7, 2018. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2018. 190 pp, fully illustrated in color. ISBN 978-3-99020-178-7.

Review published August 2019

Women, the Art of Power. Three Women from the House of Habsburg translates into English the German catalogue to an exhibition at Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck in 2018. The catalogue explores the [...] Read More

Perfection’s Therapy. An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I

By Mitchell B. Merback

New York: Zone Books, 2017. 357 pp, 91 b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-942130-00-0.

Review published August 2019

Mitchell B. Merback’s most recent book, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, argues that this celebrated and much-discussed engraving incites a therapeutic or healing [...] Read More

Niederländische Maler in Italien: Künstlerreisen und Kunstrezeption im 16. Jahrhundert

By Maria Harnack

Reflexe der immateriellen und materiellen Kultur, 6. Berlin – Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 332 pp, fully illustrated, ISBN 978-3-11-0557428-8.

Review published July 2019

Maria Harnack offers a broad-view examination of sixteenth-century Netherlandish artists in Italy. She begins Chapter One’s first section, travel to the Eternal City, by citing a few key contributors [...] Read More

Prints in Translation, 1450-1750. Image, Materiality, Space

By Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk, eds.

London and New York: Routledge, 2017. 252 pp, 21 color pls., 93 b&w illus. ISBN 978-1-4724-8012-5.

Review published June 2019

Prints in Translation, 1450-1750, is a wide-ranging volume that aims to mark a fundamental shift in print scholarship. Edited by Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward H. Wouk, the volume grew out of a [...] Read More

Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews

Book Reviews