Book Reviews

Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality

By Diane Wolfthal and Deirdre Jackson (curators). Cat. by Diane Wolfthal, with contributions by Steven A. Epstein and David Yoon, and an introduction by Deirdre Jackson.

Exh. Cat. The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, November 10, 2023 – March 10, 2024. New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, in association with D. Giles Limited, 2023. 232 pp, 153 color illus. ISBN 978-1-913875-37-4.

Review published April 2024

In 1525, the market price of a tapestry like “Honor” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.396) – made for Érard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liège – would approximate 108 years of a laborer’s wage. A [...] Read More

The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe; Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America

By Stephanie Porras; Aaron Hyman

Review published February 2024

Stephanie Porras, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp Print, and the Early Modern Globe. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023, 186 pp, ISBN 9780271092836. [...] Read More

Vermeer and the Art of Love (Northern Lights)

By Aneta Georgievska-Shine

London: Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd., 2022. 160pp, 93 col. illus. ISBN 978-1848224896.

Review published February 2024

When one looks deeply at a Vermeer, one often borrows – however contingently – a lover’s rapt gaze. As Edward Snow observed, the painter’s “most profoundly dialectical”[1] tendencies hold the viewer’s [...] Read More

Godefridus Schalcken: A Late 17th-Century Dutch Painter in Pursuit of Fame and Fortune (Northern Lights)

By Wayne Franits

London: Lund Humphries, 2023. 168 pp, 60 col. illus. ISBN 978-1848225466.

Review published February 2024

Wayne Franits’s second monograph on Godefridus Schalcken (1643-1706) reads as an ardent love letter to the late seventeenth-century Dutch artist. A meticulous analysis of a selection of paintings from [...] Read More

Baroque Influencers: Jesuits, Rubens and the Arts of Persuasion; Jesuit Art (Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies)

By Pierre Delsaerdt and Esther Van Thielen, eds.; Mia M. Mochizuki

Pierre Delsaerdt and Esther Van Thielen, eds., Baroque Influencers: Jesuits, Rubens and the Arts of Persuasion. Veurne, Belgium: Hannibal Books, 2023, 207 pp, richly illustrated. ISBN 978-9464666311.

Mia M. Mochizuki, Jesuit Art (Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies). Leiden: Brill, 2023, 219 pp, 71 illus. ISBN 978-9004462519.

Review published February 2024

The interest in the Society of Jesus has exploded in the last few decades. Jesuit art and religious culture have been the subjects of a remarkable number of books, exhibition catalogues, and [...] Read More

Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment: Solving a Conundrum

By Maryan W. Ainsworth, ed.

Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2022. 195 pp, 170 color illus. ISBN 978-2-503-59690-7.

Review published February 2024

In the course of a new research project on the Crucifixion and Last Judgment in The Metropolitan Museum of Art – star works, attributed to Jan van Eyck – Maryan Ainsworth and her colleagues made the [...] Read More