Book Reviews

Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy

Morgan Ng — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Morgan Ng’s Form and Fortification: The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy is a fascinating book; full of ideas, lavishly illustrated, and densely referenced but always a pleasure to read. It provides so many insights into the complex interrelated themes of Renaissance technology and culture—both military and civil—that it is difficult to know how best to focus a condensed review of his work. Ng himself makes it clear from the start that his book is “not a history of fortification,” even drawing back from labelling it a “work of architectural history.” Indeed, the book is not a standard history of fortification mapping out developments from the tall towers and walls of the Middle Ages to the bastions and ramparts that would dominate military architecture throughout the Early Modern centuries. So too, Ng is sharply critical of traditional approaches which present bastioned fortification as the product of a strictly rational (even inevitable) linear process. Nor does he deal with the siege operations which dominated European warfare, contributing to what political historians have identified as a much wider Military Revolution. Do not be put off by these disclaimers. Other books amply address these important considerations. Instead, this book presents a highly original investigation into carefully curated aspects of Italian fortification design and the creative networks that generated the new forms, their practical and intellectual roots, and—often surprisingly—their links and spin-offs into wider Renaissance culture.

Form and Fortification ranges far and wide within a relatively narrow time frame, from the mid-15th to mid-16th centuries. Its more detailed studies are drawn from the second quarter of the 16th century from amongst the projects of the Farnese pope, Paul III (1534–49). Designed and constructed by the creatively networked circle of relatives surrounding Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, these projects were further shaped in fierce debates among the equally creative network of the pope’s military and civilian advisers. Ng focuses on a period when Renaissance fortification had reached a highly developed if still experimental stage after decades of major power conflict in Italy. At its most advanced, it was probably already too complex and costly for full implementation at city scale, but appropriate for the citadels springing up across Europe, which offered—or seemed to offer—high levels of security for their owners and projected power, both actual and symbolic. For these reasons, they were often highly controversial.

The book is structured around paired thematic chapters. First, we are taken underground (chapters one and two) to the passageways, vertical access shafts, listening chambers, drainage channels, pipes, and ventilation ducts of the defensive countermine systems, which became critically important once gunpowder was added to the ancient tactic of undermining fortress walls. Archaeology also played a part. Roman and Medieval infrastructure contained lessons for those constructing countermines. Scholars and makers excavated, looted, and recorded classical sites, sharing their findings in newly founded learned societies and in printed treatises. Lessons drawn from mining and water engineering informed the design of fortifications as well as hospitals. New techniques in technical graphics allowed these ideas to be explored on paper. In chapters three and four we go out into the belt of open land surrounding the fortresses and the contested space they generated; contested, that is, between those charged with the maintenance of clear fields of fire on the approaches and the civilian colonizers of military land. Here, surprises are to be found in military themes borrowed for formal gardens and parks. Finally, in chapters five and six, we rise above ground to examine the factors which shaped the urban fortress and its high-level connections with outworks and palaces—ending an odyssey from subterranean tunnels to skyways.

The fascination of Form and Fortification is in the links and cultural connections it unearths, many of which will make even specialists think new thoughts. An enormously wide-ranging bibliography informs the book. Inevitably, perhaps, this leaves loose ends and questions unanswered, hopefully stimulating further research. Morgan Ng himself focuses his own most detailed research on two key projects from the 1540s: the bastion built near the Porta Ardeatina on Rome’s Aurelian Wall, and the project for the Rocca Paolina in Perugia, a classic urban citadel. These detailed case studies present two very different faces of Renaissance military architecture.

The Ardeatine bastion formed a small part of an ambitious scheme which set out to refortify on modern lines the entire 18-kilometre circuit of Rome’s city wall. The project engaged the best military and architectural minds of the time in often acrimonious (and much published) debate until it was abandoned to concentrate on the defenses of the Vatican. The Ardeatine bastion is unadorned, save for a prominent papal coat of arms. The bare curving deflective walls of the surviving bastion conceal one of the earliest fully developed countermines; with ground level galleries running inside the wall serving vertical shafts (pozzi or wells) dropping down to security “air locks” and countermines leading out towards a burrowing underground enemy, the whole system served by vertical ventilation ducts built into the thickness of the rampart’s outer wall. None of this can be guessed from outside but Morgan Ng brings it to life with his cutaway axonometric drawings illustrating the inner workings of the most sophisticated bastion of its day.

The Ardeatine bastion concealed its mysteries. The Rocca Paolina in Perugia was a highly visible hill-top fortress, a palace and a visual manifesto of power erected by Pope Paul III over the ruined houses of defeated rebel leaders. Brutal and destructive at one level, at another the Rocca retained in its lower levels the street structure and house plans of the Baglioni quarter and made conscious references to a more distant past by incorporating an Etruscan gate into the fabric. Overall, it was a complex structure comprising a fortified palace in the upper city, the separate Forte di San Cataldo below it at the edge of the lower city, and the two fortresses linked by a towering, fortified corridor. The need for the lower fort and, above all, the connecting corridor generated much contemporary design controversy and provides Morgan Ng with the central topic for his final chapters. Military men cautioned against the corridor because of its vulnerability to artillery fire and some (including the design team leader, Antonio da Sangallo) flip-flopped on the necessity for the lower fort. Paul III overrode his experts and insisted on the corridor which, by one of history’s ironies, is the only part of the complex which survived destruction when Perugia threw off Papal rule in the Risorgimento, and which today houses the moving stairway, taking visitors to the historic upper town. Whilst still a cardinal, Ng reminds us, the future pope had escaped the imperial troops sacking Rome in 1527 by running along the elevated corridor linking the Vatican with the Castel Sant’Angelo. For Paul III, he suggests, this visible connection (as well as another skyway in Perugia’s upper town, now lost) were important political signposts which outweighed any risks to the security of the city. Politics trumped high security in the early modern reinvention of a medieval defensive structure which again became a feature of princely urbanism. The Vatican to Sant’Angelo passageway and Vasari’s Florentine corridor connecting the Uffizi with the Palazzo Pitti by way of the Ponte Vecchio are the best-known surviving examples. Ng presents us with numerous others and an argument which mixes a concern for security with the visual signposting of a ruler’s status—the ability to walk above the crowded, dirty (and sometimes dangerous) streets, like a contemporary corporate mogul in a private helicopter.

Morgan Ng’s book—as he concedes—may not be a conventional history of fortification, but it is an important contribution. Ng has enormously extended our understanding of the range of specialists (civilian as well as military) who had parts to play in the design of fortresses. Underground offensive and defensive siege craft was well known, of course, but Ng’s work enlarges this sub-field in ways that will intrigue military historians as well as those focused on wider Renaissance culture. His exploration of the symbolism of the elevated corridors adds another dimension to military architecture, the internal security role of these skyways, as well as their symbolism. What of Ng’s post-Ruskinian hesitation to claim these issues for architecture? This question would probably not have worried Renaissance patrons or the military and building professionals who served them. Anyone still concerned after reading this book would do well to turn to the Preface to Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture, the classic statement of the breadth and interconnectedness of the Renaissance architectural world.

Simon Pepper
University of Liverpool

The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence

Susan Stronge — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Susan Stronge’s book, The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence, accompanying the brilliantly curated eponymous exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, provides, in Stronge’s words, “a fresh perspective on the arts made for the elite of the empire while highlighting the internationalist culture of the court.” Several landmark exhibitions of Mughal treasures have been mounted in the UK, US, and other countries in previous decades: In 1947, the omnibus Art of India and Pakistan exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, Burlington House, London, showcased a large number of paintings, illustrated manuscripts, carpets, textiles, and what were then regarded as “minor arts” from the Mughal era. Works were carefully selected from ruling houses, private collections, museums, and libraries from the Indian subcontinent and other countries including the UK. The catalog, edited by Sir Leigh Ashton, provided an excellent record of the prevailing state of knowledge on the wide variety and high quality of Mughal art and crafts to the wider public. In the 1960s, Stuart Cary Welch curated an exhibition at the Asia Society, New York, exclusively of Mughal treasures. Though drawn mostly from US collections, many unpublished and newly acquired, Welch also managed to borrow objects from the UK and India. A new benchmark was set by the 1982 exhibition, Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule, at the V & A Museum. Curated by Robert Skelton and Susan Stronge among others, the exhibition and accompanying catalog, The Indian Heritage, included an astonishingly large and varied selection of Mughal treasures from collections all over the world. Simultaneously, exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and the British Library showed a wide range of objects. Amongst the large number of exhibitions held under the Festival of India banner in the US, France, and USSR in subsequent years, the most noteworthy include Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory held in the Asia Society Galleries, New York, Cambridge, and Houston, and India, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence opens many new fronts. In the last four decades, new materials have been found, and new research has uncovered how the Mughal elite gradually moved from regional Indian and Iranian influences to a more internationalistic culture. A steady flow of European printed books, prints, and artefacts entered South Asia through Jesuit missionaries, merchants, travelers, and envoys. Much of this arrived by way of maritime exchange and left indelible marks on the quality and character of Mughal artistic production. Stronge has taken great care to include objects found in older European collections like the mother-of-pearl shield in the Muzeo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence that entered the collections of the Medici Grand Duke in 1599; jades and crystals from the collection of Colonel Guthrie acquired in Lahore in 1859 and in Delhi after 1857, bought by The India Museum, and transferred to South Kensington in 1879; the rare blue-ground “Ilchester” carpet acquired in the 17th century now in a private collection; a spectacular copy of the Koran written in monumental muhaqaqq script purchased by the V & A Museum in 1880; and the highly important dynastic sword made for Jahangir from the Royal Collection deposited before 1896. Other objects are equally interesting for their provenance, such as the bronze francolin-shaped incense burner given by Jahangir to his hunt-beater Imam-Vardi in 1624; the engraved and inlaid brass candlestick from Lahore made by Mirza Heydar ai-Hoseyni in 1618, both from the Iran-Zamin Collection, or the white glazed porcelain “Monk’s cap” ewer from the Aga Khan Museum. Many of these are exhibited and published here for the first time. The book is thus a fitting introduction to, and record of, objects carefully selected for the exhibition.

The book contains essays on most of the objects mentioned above. Of particular interest are the short articles by Adriana Concin on the rare and magnificent wicker shield with intricate mother-of-pearl work of Gujarati craftsmanship; Avalon Fotheringham on the well-known and oft-reproduced Mughal hunting coat, and also on a recently discovered early Mughal silk velvet canopy with intricate zardozi work; Shailendra Bhandare on the rare gold zodiacal and portrait coins issued by Jahangir; Ricarda Brosch on four important Chinese porcelains collected at the Mughal court; Divia Patel on high quality souvenirs as portable monuments, faithful drawings of intricate designs of Sikandra, Taj Mahal and other important Mughal monuments; and four long and short texts by Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani on metalware, glazed tiles, jades, and the Jahangirshahi Atashbar sword.

In addition, Rajeev Kinra’s lucidly written essay introduces the reader to nuanced aspects of the Mughal culture, politics, and society that helped to produce such a wonderful array of artistic, architectural, and literary creations, arguing that the reason was the Mughals’ great capacity to accommodate and draw on the talents of all its subjects in all their cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity. This helped to create “a spectacular cultural efflorescence.”

Stronge divides the book into three distinct sections, each centered around the first three Great Mughals: Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. She opens the first section on Akbar with a quotation from one of the court historians, Muhammad Arif Qandhari, providing details of the wide array and variety of gifts offered to the Emperor on a ceremonial visit to the mansion of his Vizier Muzaffar Khan in September 1571. In addition to jeweled weapon belts, howdah and canopy, gold and silver trays, ewers, candlesticks and various other objects, there were jeweled gem caskets from the Deccan, gold brocades from Gujarat, Shahi muslins from Sonargaon, brocades from Anatolia, Yazd and eastern Turkestan, and velvets and brocades from Europe. Stronge rightly points out how early in Akbar’s reign this wide range of luxury materials from all over the subcontinent as well as from Iran, Central Asia, Turkey and Europe was arriving in Mughal India, and the extraordinary wealth of the leading South Asian nobles. She briefly narrates how Akbar was determined to make his empire politically coherent and economically stable, the best destination for its resources and splendor. She also notes how he paid special attention to building forts, palaces, mosques, caravanserais, landscape gardens, as well as a safe transport network. It was due to his prudent policy that India became a leading manufacturing center of luxury goods like pile carpets, figured velvets and brocades, painted textiles, and artistic metal and ivory wares. For this, he recruited skilled craftsmen from Iran and Central Asia and even employed visiting Europeans. The story of the sprawling kitabkhana included the taswirkhana where some of the finest and most versatile calligraphers, painters, illustrators, and bookbinders worked. These artists were drawn not only from Iran, Herat, and Bukhara but also from different parts of the Mughal realms and beyond, Kashmir, Gujarat, Gwaliar, to produce an enormous number of illustrated manuscripts and muraqqas which held individual portraits, court scenes, and nature studies.

The second part of the exhibition catalog is devoted to Jahangir, a serious connoisseur of paintings and other arts and crafts. Jahangir inherited a large and prosperous empire with a well-established administrative machinery and a group of efficient officials. Though he continued to support the ateliers started by his father, his personal interest leaned toward exclusively designed objects that suited his taste. We have a first-hand account of this from his own (not always) meticulously written memoir, the Jahangirnama, where he noted how he encouraged some of his painters to study and copy engravings and prints brought from European travelers, envoys, and Jesuit priests, rewarding them with gifts and lofty titles. Quite a few of the artworks produced by Jahangir’s artists are displayed in the exhibition and illustrated in the book. The ruler also noted rare and unusual objects, including European, Turkish and Persian brocades, velvets and figured silks, Chinese porcelain, rare and precious gemstones, jades, narwhal ivories, and different types of mechanical contraptions. These were procured for and presented to him from distant places like Surat, Goa or Bijapur, as well as from Bukhara, Herat, Isfahan, Venice, and Europe. As Stronge points out, Jahangir’s reign is characterized by a great diversity of style and extraordinary technical accomplishment. Most notable are an inscribed and dated thumb ring of Jahangir held today in the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, and a small silver casket for a miniature Koran with enameled decoration.

The section devoted to Jahangir is followed by important essays. The first one by Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani concerns the jade objects fashioned in Jahangir’s court with inscriptions by the celebrated goldsmith, poet, calligrapher, and engraver Sa’ida Gilani, who was awarded the title Bibadal Khan. Melikian-Chirvani argues with great conviction that it was Sa’ida who introduced the art of crafting jade vessels to India. Steven Cohen’s short essay on Mughal carpets that are distinctively different from the better-known Persian examples follows. He singles out three important weavings: the Ames carpet of pictorial design in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the blue-ground Ilchester carpet in a private collection, and one of the many carpets with floral and flowering plant design associated with the large well-documented repository in Amber-Jaipur. He also points out passages in Thomas Roe’s journal which reference carpets brought back from Mughal India to be given to the king of England “on behalf of the great mogul,” and a large one woven for himself with his personal coat-of-arms later bequeathed to a cousin, both unfortunately untraced. These two essays are followed by others concerning tiles with Sufi ode inscriptions from a vanished Lahore mosque of 1615–16 by Souren, and brief notes on the recently discovered early Mughal Zardozi canopy, and on the enigmatic oft-reproduced silk satin embroidered hunting coat from the V & A, both by Avalon Fotheringham. Finally, a short note on the gold zodiacal and portrait coins issued by Jahangir by Shailendra Bhandare draws attention to the vestiges of influence of European art in the coins involving human and half-human elements.

The third section of the book deals with the reign of Shah Jahan. As the author points out, Jahan, from an early age, took interest in architecture and landscape planning and was entrusted with many additions, alterations, and new constructions at various places of the empire by his father. This passion manifested in his patronage of unprecedented edifices, the Taj MahaI, the brand-new city of Shahjahanabad around the enormous Red Fort complex, and new palaces in the Lahore Fort within a few years after his accession. Shah Jahan was also keenly interested in gemology, and the fashioning of new thrones, ornaments, vessels, and weapons of exquisite designs. The author has provided details of the celebrated Peacock Throne and precious stones of rarity and great value. The catalog also discusses the new craft of enameling or minakari, as well as the inlaying of white marble with colored stones in parchinkari technique. Also included are examinations of hardstone cutting—like nephrite jades and rock crystals—and the extensive use of earthenware tiles, beautifully decorated with flowering plants and birds in the cuerda seca technique. Of special interest are the unique ibex-head handled stylized half-gourd-shaped white nephrite jade wine cup dated 1657, and the group of three delicately designed rock crystal wine bowls from the Guthrie collection. This is followed by two well-researched essays: one on textiles and dresses used at the Mughal court by Sylvia Houghteling, and one by Peter Jarman studying the wildlife shown in Mughal art, including the large number of birds and animals coming from Indonesian islands, from the Himalayas and Tibet in the north, as well as different regions of Africa. These are presented as individual studies, as well as on delicately ornamented borders of paintings. A brief survey of four well-known Chinese ceramic objects from the Ming dynasty collected by the Mughals by Ricarda Brosch stresses the importance and special meaning of the colors yellow and “sweet white” or tianbai associated with Ming emperors. The last essay by Divia Patel does not show any object from the courts of these three emperors, but faithful drawings and marble replicas of cenotaphs of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan from the interior of Taj Mahal. The Great Mughals covering every aspect of arts, crafts, and architectural splendour of the Mughals with its scholarly essays and breath-taking visuals, is definitely going to be an important addition to our knowledge of Mughal opulence.

Asok Kumar Das
Former Director, Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, Jaipur, India

Delacroix’s Moroccans: Art and Masculinity

Jennifer Olmsted — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Eugène Delacroix was the most controversial artist of his generation, discussed in journals and among literati throughout nineteenth-century Paris. As one of his critical admirers, Théophile Gautier, explained in an essay after the artist’s death: “Each of his works occasioned deafening clamors, storms, furious discussions. The artist was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever have been addressed to a thief or assassin . . .” (Correspondances esthétiques sur Delacroix, Editions Olbia,1998). Perhaps for this reason, art historians of nineteenth-century France have written legions of books and articles on Delacroix, and engaging in Delacroix scholarship has required a commitment to parsing through texts and interpretations that have come down through the ages. Working on Delacroix in the twenty-first century is a necessarily historiographical enterprise that is sustained by the passionate, colorful, and original works the artist produced throughout his career. Jennifer Olmstead’s Delacroix’s Moroccans: Art and Masculinity steps into this fray and coolly analyzes the complexities of Delacroix’s Moroccan oeuvre that follows a diplomatic mission to Morocco he accompanied in 1832. The thrust of Olmstead’s argument is to provide a new perspective and to rescue this artist from accusations surrounding Orientalism, while at the same time providing a calm and rational approach to explaining the complexities of a handful of paintings the artist produced featuring Moroccan subjects. By selecting her works carefully and building her arguments craftily, Olmstead provides a different view of the artist that steps out of the shadows of prior analyses based on his passion, his romanticism, and his unrepentant originality.

The concept that Olmstead employs as a central axis in her analysis is “masculinity,” which she defines not only in its specific historical context of nineteenth-century France, but also by considering French projections of masculinity on North-African and Middle-Eastern subjects. She writes: “In 1832, Delacroix transposed his fascination with dress, horsemanship and manliness onto Moroccans, but he rejected the stereotypes he had previously associated with Turks. Instead of evoking the dandified villain, as Turks had [in his paintings from the 1820s], Moroccans embodied the classical model of masculinity for Delacroix” (41).

For any historian of nineteenth-century France, the term “classical” will be recognized as a super-charged theme that was continually rearticulated in both cultural and political contexts. Seeing themselves as the inheritors of the Roman republic (or empire depending on who was in charge), the term classical (classique) had many significations but the pairing of the adjective classical with pictorial works featuring North Africans—who would have been considered Oriental and therefore similar to the Turks—is an important analytical move for Olmstead. It signals that she is overcoming not only the prejudices of the nineteenth century, but the recent fascination with the politics of power in the history of art that has come to be prominent in both academic and museum studies, in this case following lines of argument laid down through Edward Said’s canonical text Orientalism (1978). Olmstead nods to Said in her introduction but generally steers clear of theoretical analyses in her text, favoring instead recent art historical scholarship, the artist’s own journals—including new material discovered by Michelle Hanoosh (Delacroix 2019) in the 1990s—and select contemporary criticism.

Upon first impression, masculinity, like femininity, seems a shopworn term whose singularity and universality have been thoroughly challenged in recent scholarship on gender and sexuality. Employing this concept without explaining the limitations of such a discourse carries risks. While Olmstead anchors the concept historically and considers multiple valences of masculinity she uncovers in Delacroix’s paintings, she never acknowledges this concept is itself an invention that covers over more than it reveals, particularly in the case of Delacroix, who was known by reputation for his virility. To cite but one example, Paul Mantz wrote in 1855 that Delacroix is known for the “sustained virility of his brush” (Sérullaz 1998). Masculinity, and manifestations of classical equipoise, are hardly the only kinds of masculinity relevant to Delacroix or the North African or more generally Orientalist paintings he created. Nevertheless, in Olmstead’s hands the concept is able to do some productive analytical work to clarify many of Delacroix’s paintings of Moroccan cavalrymen and their harrowing charges as well as of the Moroccan Emperor as featured in Delacroix’s 1845 painting, The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage. But it comes up against real limitations when Delacroix later turns to hunt paintings, using the same riders, steeds, and costumes in a far more imaginative vein. These later works, such as the Lion Hunt (1855), preserved as only a fragment today, were departures from the conscientious depictions of Moroccan figures from the 1830s and the 1840s.

Olmstead argues that “Delacroix’s paintings emphasize historically and culturally specific qualities of masculine virtuosity and military excellence that speak to the pictorial language of traditional history painting” (67–8). She contrasts such works with the “patronizing orientalism of his peers” (69) and rightly so. While there are countless examples of Orientalist painters in nineteenth-century France who sought to reproduce stereotypes rather than record actual inhabitants of the Middle East or North Africa, Delacroix was not among them. Olmstead seriously considers the history paintings of Horace Vernet from Algeria as a foil to Delacroix, noting that, unlike Vernet, Delacroix was not responding to government commissions to represent its victories in colonial Algeria but generating his own imagery from a neighboring state that was also a political ally in the region. Nevertheless, Delacroix himself was willing to pander to fashion and the taste for exoticism that his North African works provided. Though it is not reproduced in the book and barely mentioned for obvious reasons, it is important to remember that the most famous work that resulted from Delacroix’s Moroccan trip was undoubtedly his Women of Algiers (1834) and his later Lion Hunt (1855) and Tiger Hunt (1854) were not driven by an effort at authenticity but rather were generic scenes of Oriental masculinity that openly play with the man/beast dichotomy, one of Orientalism’s oldest and most fecund leitmotifs.

Olmstead wants to reveal another aspect of Delacroix’s work, and this book is successful in that regard. She discusses not only wild horses, but mild horses (and forms of masculinity) in her discussion of The Riding Lesson (1854) which shows a father teaching his son to ride on a trip to the country. Impressively, the author is able to discern the subtleties of dress and demeanor that signify this group as visiting travelers in this mountain landscape. She is also very well read on equine literature in nineteenth-century France, tracing the potential influences on Delacroix’s passion for North African Barb horses. But her rational, clear, well-studied approach cuts across the central vein of Delacroix scholarship that focuses on imagination, color, and passion that are so clearly central to the artist’s oeuvre. The study comes across as perhaps more focused on the literature about Delacroix than on the visual dynamics of his paintings, as far more text is focused on art historiography than formal analysis. While Olmstead casts new light on Delacroix’s Moroccan paintings, she provides the interpretation and the reader is mostly left to envision the works anew thanks to the elucidation of these new themes. But rational argumentation has its limitations.

Writing in reference to The Sultan of Morocco, she notes: “As I shall demonstrate, this devotion to detail maintains a degree of geographic purity that moves past the demands of authenticity to stake a claim for the political autonomy of the sultan” (101). While her argument is convincing, it is compelling to present these words beside those of one of Delacroix’s most fervent admirers, Charles Baudelaire. In his first Salon criticism from 1845, Baudelaire addresses this same painting on view at the Cour Carré of the Louvre: “Here is the painting that we would discuss right away when we affirm that M. Delacroix had progressed in the science of harmony—In effect, has anyone, in any period, deployed a greater musical charm?” (Curiosités esthétiques. Michel Levy frères,1868, 11).

While the interpretation of the art historian is illuminating, is it pictorial harmony or geographical purity that a viewer will take away from this painting? It does not have to be a choice, but knowledge and beauty (or musical charm) could work together to guide our interpretative faculties. If we focus on the message the artist intended to deliver, we might miss the very imagination that transforms such a concept to art.

John Zarobell
Professor and Chair of Global Studies, University of San Francisco

Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture

Alice Isabella Sullivan and Kyle G. Sweeney, eds. — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Gothic architecture never possessed a Vitruvian or Albertian treatise or manifesto defining its forms, proportions, or boundaries. This basic lacuna has long complicated its study, a problem exacerbated by the many centuries over which Gothic developed and coexisted with other artistic modes and styles. The imposition of anachronistic labels and external interpretive frameworks, reinforced by nationalist historiographies, effectively marginalized (and in many cases actively disparaged) much Gothic architecture produced after 1300, particularly beyond England and France. The recent anthology Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture seeks to counter the long shadow of historiography that has cast “lateness” as repetition, decadence, or decline, and “modernity” as its counterpart. While “lateness” has reemerged as a productive category in discussions of modern and contemporary art, often framed less as decline than as a condition of persistence, afterlife, and temporal return, its application here signals not a newly discovered condition but rather a reengagement with a long-standing problem in the historiography of medieval architecture. The essays collected here instead present Late Gothic architecture as a period of rich decorative experimentation, formal flexibility, and expansive expressive potential. In doing so, the volume reframes Gothic architecture as at the center of the period, presenting it not as a marginal or residual style of the early modern (formerly “Renaissance”) period, but as an artistic language actively flourishing alongside, and at times in dialogue with, the resurrection of classical forms. In their robust introduction, Alice Isabella Sullivan and Kyle Sweeney, the editors, propose understanding late Gothic as an architecture fully in bloom between roughly 1300 and 1600, shaped by local customs, cultural exchange, and sustained formal negotiation.

Rather than returning to the now-familiar problem of defining late Gothic architecture, the volume’s more productive contribution lies in the way it foregrounds current work in the field. By identifying flawed temporal frameworks and entrenched historiographic bias, the essays expand the traditionally narrow geographic focus of late Gothic studies, moving beyond France, England, and Germany to include Central and Eastern Europe, as well as regions shaped by colonial and transregional exchange.

Serving as a bridge between the introduction and the case studies, Robert Bork contributes a historiographic essay examining the post-Renaissance marginalization of late Gothic architecture. Tracing the rise of Italianate classicism, Bork shows how later Gothic forms were eclipsed in both scholarly and public discourse. His essay provides a valuable overview of the historiographic forces that shaped and distorted the field.

The twelve essays that follow address a wide range of questions, from historiography and reception to geographic dissemination and local adaptation. They explore Gothic architecture’s varied meanings and functions in specific contexts of use and display, often placing local traditions in dialogue with alternative architectural languages. Divided into three sections, each essay is followed by a bibliography, a valuable resource, particularly for scholarship on the less well-trodden architecture of Central and Eastern Europe.

The first section, “Space and Reception: Western Perspectives,” presents recent research on late Gothic architecture in France and England, with essays loosely connected by their engagement with textual traditions, whether manuscript culture, liturgy, or historiography. Maile Hutterer’s chapter on Jean Fouquet’s miniatures in the Grandes chroniques de France examines the signifying function of architectural imagery in manuscript painting, arguing convincingly for a high degree of architectural literacy among contemporary viewers. Abby McGehee’s essay focuses on the remarkable balustrade encircling the roofline of Notre-Dame de Caudebec-en-Caux (Normandy), where monumental, gilded inscriptions drawn from Marian devotional texts articulate the threshold between terrestrial and celestial realms. Zachary Stewart’s contribution examines the historiography of the transition from Decorated to Perpendicular architecture in England, critiquing earlier stylistic frameworks tied too rigidly to political or historical events. His essay reflects broader shifts toward recognizing stylistic pluralism, though it remains rooted largely in English-language scholarship. The section concludes with Flaminia Bardati’s study of the Château de Gaillon (Normandy), a hybrid structure combining Flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance motifs. Bardati traces how early openness to such hybridity gave way to later nationalist criticism, illuminating the historiographic construction of stylistic purity. Although the essays in this section do not cohere around a single theme, they collectively illustrate the diversity of subjects and approaches brought to late Gothic architecture.

The second section, “Experimentation and Innovation in Central Europe,” pivots toward Central Europe. Jakub Adamski opens with an overview of twentieth-century scholarship on later Gothic architecture in the region, noting its gradual incorporation into Anglophone discourse. Adamski suggests that concepts such as “modernity” or even “avant-garde” may more aptly describe Central European late Gothic, particularly in its embrace of innovation and technical experimentation. Marek Walczak’s essay examines the carved rope or braid motif found on fifteenth-century portals in and around Kraków, interpreting it as a learned allusion to Vitruvian ideas about architecture’s origins in human craft and nature.

Two essays address the Cathedral of Saint-Vitus in Prague, an ideal example of royal appropriation and transformation of the Gothic in historic Bohemia. Alice Klima examines the royal oratory constructed between 1490 and 1493 on the southeastern side of the building as both a political and symbolic intervention, which exemplifies late Gothic’s capacity to operate simultaneously on multiple semantic levels. The richly ornamented space, combining branchwork, heraldry, and vegetal motifs, projects Bohemian royal authority during a period of otherwise stalled construction. Jana Gajdošová’s essay focuses on the south transept portal, reading its combination of Gothic forms and Southern European mosaic as a negotiated compromise between patron and master. She argues that the mosaic program links the status of the city and the ambitions of the new Luxembourg dynasty to a consciously historicizing visual language, revealing the architectural and ideological negotiations required to align dynastic claims with architectural practice. What distinguishes these two focused case studies is not simply their related subject matter, but their ability to articulate how late Gothic architecture operates as a space of negotiation and invention, merging contrasting ideas and practices, a concern taken up again elsewhere in the volume.

The final section, “Global Gothics on the Margins of Europe and Beyond,” broadens the geographic scope of the volume further. Alice Sullivan’s essay examines Gothic forms in present-day Romania, considering their circulation as a form of cultural currency. While the essay gestures toward modes of transmission, it also underscores how marginal this material remains within mainstream historiography, pointing to the importance of the author’s larger research project. Michalis Olympios contributes an essay on the piazza at Famagusta, where Lusignan traditions and Venetian classicism were deliberately interwoven to assert political authority. Costanza Beltrami’s study of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo offers one of the clearest articulations of the volume’s central claims, arguing that the building’s intentional anachronism generates its own temporal logic and disrupts conventional periodization. Paul Niell’s essay on Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic further extends this perspective by bringing a long-overlooked colonial example into the broader discourse on late Gothic architecture. The volume closes with Jacqueline Jung’s reflections on lateness, modernity, style, and the paradox of Gothic, a mode that balances order and playfulness while resisting categorization.

Taken as a whole, Lateness and Modernity in Medieval Architecture, and the body of scholarship it represents, begins to fill a significant lacuna created by longstanding historiographic biases. Moving beyond the framework of lateness and modernity, the volume also recalibrates reception, both in the ways late Gothic architecture was understood in its own time and how it has subsequently been positioned within scholarship. Overall, the editors have succeeded in making a clear and important intervention through a sustained critique of the language and assumptions that have long marginalized late Gothic architecture, marking a significant step toward rethinking Gothic beyond traditional stylistic, temporal, and geographic boundaries. At the same time, further attention is needed on its expression in regions such as the Baltic, the Americas, and Asia. Viewed through such a global lens, Gothic as a whole emerges as a long-overlooked but equally substantial counterpart to the Classical, one whose mutable meanings facilitated its repeated adoption and adaptation across time and space.

Meredith Cohen
Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century Art and Modernism in Socialist China Unexplored International Encounters 1949–1979

Shengtian Zheng Shuyu Kong, Julia F. Andrews, and Shengtian Zheng, eds. — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Recent scholarship on transcultural exchanges among socialist-aligned countries during the Cold War has moved away from treating socialist realism as a Soviet model exported to other countries, instead emphasizing how global socialism was actively reinterpreted in diverse local contexts. Both Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century and Art and Modernism in Socialist China: Unexplored International Encounters 1949–1979 contribute to this shift by reexamining transnational networks that shaped Chinese art. By centering China within international circulations of ideas, artists, exhibitions, and so forth, these volumes move beyond the framework of “socialist cosmopolitanism,” which remains bounded by the socialist world and shaped by Cold War divisions within the canon of global modernism, where China is cast as part of the Second World, (Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2020)). Rather than confining Chinese art to the Second World, these two books situate Chinese modern art within the broader field of transnational modernism. Moreover, parallel to the burgeoning discourse on global Maoism, these studies reverse the direction of inquiry, remaining grounded in China’s specific sociopolitical conditions.

Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century offers a richly documented account of the artistic dialogues between China and Mexico across the 20th century. Zheng Shengtian’s own experience as an artist, curator, and scholar is woven throughout the narrative, with the book’s autobiographical dimension deeply intertwined with its scholarly inquiry, positioning the author as both observer and participant. Rather than advancing a singular, tightly argued thesis as a conventional academic monograph, the book functions as an expansive sourcebook, offering meticulous documentation of exchanges between the two countries and laying important groundwork for future research.

Zheng highlights the significance of Mexican art to Chinese artistic developments, from revolutionary art movements during the Republican era (1911–1949) to mural practices emerging after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. The chapters are organized in roughly chronological order. Chapters one and two serve as preludes to the later development of Sino-Mexican art exchanges, which Zheng suggests did not gain broader public visibility until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Chapter one discusses how Lu Xun introduced Mexican muralism, especially the work of Diego Rivera, to Chinese audiences through illustrated literary journals in early 1930s Shanghai. Chapter two turns to the Mexican cartoonist Miguel Covarrubias, whose illustrations in magazines circulating in Shanghai influenced artists such as Ye Qianyu and Zhang Guangyu, contributing to their development of new visual styles that combined Covarrubias’s influence with traditional decorative arts.

Chapters three through seven examine Sino-Mexican artistic exchanges during the Mao era (1949–1976). Chapter three discusses an exhibition held alongside the Peace Conference of Asian and Pacific Regions in Beijing in 1952, which strengthened ties with Latin American delegates and eventually led to the founding of the Mexican Society of Friendship with People’s China two years later. Chapter six demonstrates the outcomes of these institutional ties through case studies tracing the travels of individual Mexican artists.

Chapters four and five focus on the period of the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956–1957), when China was more open to international cultural exchanges. Chapter four discusses two major Mexican art exhibitions in China in 1956, which Zheng argues exposed Chinese audiences to models of social/socialist art beyond the Soviet paradigm. The line of inquiry continues in chapter five, which discusses the 1956 visit of David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of los tres grandes and a committed communist whose reputation had already preceded him in China. While his talks circulated in art journals, he held a discussion in Beijing, which advanced a vision of art that combined different mediums and styles with local traditions.

Zheng suggests these ideas resonated with younger Chinese artists of the late 1970s, although their influence was curtailed by the subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign (1957–1959) and Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). This delayed influence is taken up in chapter eight, which examines the revival of murals led by artists such as Zhang Ding, Yuan Yunsheng, and Yuan Yunfu, focusing on the murals commissioned for the Beijing International Airport in 1979. The chapter concludes with a reflection on mural art from a contemporary perspective, including discussions of Zheng’s own work and exhibition.

Chapter seven appears somewhat out of place within the book’s overall structure, as it focuses on the Chilean artist Jose Venturelli, who lived in Beijing in the 1950–60s. Zheng contends that, despite not being Mexican, Venturelli helped facilitate Sino-Mexican exchange by introducing Mexican artists and Mexican muralism to China. Zheng highlights the discussions surrounding Venturelli’s mural Cienfuegos (1962) in Havana, presented at a 1962 symposium in Beijing, as an important moment in exposing Chinese artists to modernist visual languages.

This section could stand independently—indeed, it is more fully developed as a chapter in Art and Modernism in Socialist China—since Venturelli’s undoubted significance has already been addressed throughout the book. Meanwhile, his somewhat “awkward” placement within the Sino-Mexican exchanges raises broader questions about the book’s scope, pointing to a wider network of artistic exchanges between China and Latin America, where Mexican muralism also functioned as a key reference across the region. Although the title Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century suggests a reciprocal exchange between the two countries, its emphasis falls more heavily on the Mexican influence on Chinese art. Nevertheless, the study makes a valuable contribution by recovering an overlooked transnational art history. The appendices are especially useful, offering timelines, Siqueiros’ talk transcripts, and artist interviews that complicate any straightforward narrative of Mexican muralism as the sole influence on late-1970s artistic developments.

Art and Modernism in Socialist China: Unexplored International Encounters 1949–1979 similarly foregrounds China as a recipient of postwar artistic circulations and exchanges, bringing together a collection of essays that reexamines the art of Maoist China. Spanning the period from the establishment of the PRC and into the early years of economic reform, the edited volume emphasizes cross-cultural encounters and proposes moving beyond the framework of socialist realism toward a broader conception of socialist modernism or modernity. The anthology is divided into two thematic parts: “Art Exchanges,” which traces foreign exhibitions held in China, and “Alternative Practices,” which focuses on individual artists whose careers and works complicate official narratives of socialist realism.

The first section presents exhibitions that were all organized with some level of official involvement, whether through diplomatic relations between China and other nations or via political organizations, such as the British Labour Party or Italy’s Communist Party. The essays position international exhibitions as a primary vehicle for cultural exchanges in Maoist China, even though access to them was often limited to select audiences. Despite the constraints of the political environment, these exhibitions, many of which were largely forgotten until recently, had a significance, if not immediately visible, impact on artistic development in the period.

Three essays by Yanfei Yin, Yunning Teng, and Shuyu Kong demonstrate how exhibitions were carefully curated to align with shifting official narratives shaped by specific historical contexts. All three authors are particularly attentive to the questions of reception and impact. In chapter two, Yin shows how Japanese and Chinese interpretations of the same Sesshū exhibition diverged according to political agendas, with Japanese critics emphasizing modernist qualities while Chinese critics foregrounding realism. Teng’s chapter four argues that a rare 1960 exhibition of British modernism failed to gain broader acceptance because audiences interpreted it through prevailing political frameworks. In chapter six, Kong links the differing receptions of Canadian, Australian, and French landscape exhibitions in the 1970s to China’s changing sociopolitical climate during the transition out of the Cultural Revolution and into the post-Mao era.

Contributions by Shengtian Zheng and Yang Wang likewise center on specific exhibitions by tracing the itineraries of artists who visited China in the 1950s, revealing a more dynamic field of exchange that extended socialist internationalism to the West and the global south. Zheng argues in chapter one that José Venturelli’s 1962 exhibition helped connect China with Latin America and introduced modernist visual languages to Chinese artists. Wang, in chapter five, examines the 1956 visit of five Italian artists associated with the Communist Party, who organized an exhibition in Beijing collaborated with Chinese artists on a scroll painting. She highlights the asymmetry of this exchange: while China framed the visit as an official cultural mission, the Italian artists experienced it more as a personal and exploratory encounter that visibly shaped their own artistic practices.

The second section further develops the volume’s emphasis on stylistic diversity, foregrounding artistic practices that depart from the conventions of socialist realism. Zaixin Hong, in chapter seven, analyzes Huang Binhong’s correspondences with foreign artists, arguing that his “traditionalist” stance could be understood as part of socialist modernism in the 1950s. Tao Cai’s chapter eight turns to the understudied Tan Huamu, whose work reflects a synthesis of modernist tendencies shaped by his previous training in Japan and his two sojourns in Macao. In chapter ten, Claire Roberts explores Ye Qianyu’s late-1940s works of dance and situates the series within his creative partnership with his wife Dai Ailian.

The arbitrariness of socialist realism is further illustrated in the career of the artist Huang Xinbo, whose woodcut was praised for its realism while his oil painting was condemned as formalist. As Bin Hu argues in chapter nine, such divergences reflect not aesthetic inconsistency but the political frameworks through which art was interpreted. A related dynamic emerges in Xueshan Wu’s chapter eleven, which examines how Zhang Ding navigated these constraints. As a founding figure of the Central Academy of Arts and Crafts in the 1950s, Zhang incorporated modernist elements into the discourse of “decorative painting,” a category that functioned within the socialist context as a form of fine art capable of accommodating abstraction while remaining institutionally acceptable.

Bridging two sections of the anthology are two chapters on the Romanian oil painting class taught by Eugen Popa at the China Academy of Art from 1960 to 1962. Nan Ma’s chapter three reconstructs the program’s almost-forgotten graduation exhibition, while Juliane Noth’s chapter twelve examines Popa’s pedagogy. Both authors show how the class was initially conceived as an alternative to the Soviet model but was subsequently marginalized despite its lasting influence, complicating established narratives that trace socialist oil paintings in Maoist China primarily to Soviet system associated with Konstantin Maksimov and Pavel Chistyakov.

The anthology’s two-part structure effectively combines institutional and individual perspectives, expanding discussions of socialist art in Maoist China through a global framework and newly available archival materials that reveal overlooked international connections. While the volume engages with the discourse of global Maoism, it remains more firmly centered on China and the historical conditions of the PRC than works such as Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2019). The coda by Barbara Mittler gestures outward by examining contemporary monuments of Mao and proposing “Maoist Modern,” and/or “Monumental Mao” as frameworks for global legacy of Mao-era visual culture. However, her concepts of “Radical Universal” and “Global Monuments” at times blur distinctions between revolutionary modernity and global Maoism, leaving the terms somewhat ambiguous and underdeveloped.

The coda ultimately underscores the need for clearer definitions of key terms such as “socialist modernism” and “socialist modernity,” which the volume presents as interchangeable alternatives to socialist realism and a major conceptual contribution. As Julia Andrews notes, “socialist modernism” is adapted from Eastern European architectural discourse, yet it remains unevenly theorized across the essays, often defined loosely against Western modernism or as a modernism operating within socialist constraints. “Socialist modernity” is invoked even more ambiguously. While both terms aim to move beyond a strictly stylistic and presumably rigid understanding of socialist realism, scholarship on Soviet and Eastern European contexts has already expanded socialist realism to encompass broader aesthetic and social dimensions. Thus, the book would benefit from a more precise articulation of how these terms differ from both socialist realism and their earlier uses in other socialist contexts.

Despite its emphasis on transnational exchanges, the volume remains largely centered on artistic production within Maoist China, raising the question of why frameworks such as “Maoist modernism” or “Maoist modernity” are not adopted as alternative frameworks, especially given Maoism’s established resonance within scholarship on global Maoism and in the volume’s own coda. While “socialist modernism/modernity” suggests reciprocal circulation within socialist networks, the case studies often reveal a more unilateral flow from the world to China. Meanwhile, the anthology’s key contribution lies in moving beyond the conventional Sino-Soviet or Sino-Second World focus to include exchanges with countries such as Italy, the UK, and Japan. This expanded scope makes a clearer and more consistent conceptualization of “socialist modernism/modernity” all the more pressing to clarify the volume’s broader intervention.

While the volume foregrounds “international encounters” and situates China within networks of exchanges, the essays remain largely framed within a Chinese context, following a linear chronology from the Republican to the socialist period, consistent with the canon of modern Chinese history. The reliance on major political events such as the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution as anchors for transnational movements could be enriched by connecting domestic developments to global histories, including, for instance, China’s role in the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement, as highlighted in Global Cold War studies.

For both Sino-Mexican Art and Cultural Exchanges in the Twentieth Century and Art and Modernism in Socialist China: Unexplored International Encounters 1949–1979, the use of newly available archives explains their emphasis on sociopolitical transitions and ideological conditions. However, institutional frameworks consequently emerge as key forces in shaping artistic production, even for individual cases, reinforcing an established paradigm in which art is read as a response to or resistance against the socialist system. In this framework, artistic production risks being reduced to a reflection of broader social transformations across the long 20th century. Such an approach, along with the tendency to trace influence across artists, movements, and nations, can flatten the more dynamic relationship between art and politics.

Jin Wang
PhD Candidate, Department of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center

A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects

Robell Awake — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

In this admirable celebration of Black US artisanship, the furniture maker and author Robell Awake advances a welcome, forceful argument for the recognition of Black makers in the history—material and otherwise—of the United States. Awake declares early on, “I’m not an academic. I never even finished college” (13). Yet his casual tone and accessible language belie the eye of a meticulous craftsperson who conveys complex material processes with the legibility of a skilled storyteller. Combining incisive visual analysis with anecdotal history, Awake’s engrossing capsule narratives animate his selected artifacts, affirming the vibrancy of the communities and traditions that produced them.

The things that Awake includes in A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects are ciphers, each illustrative of stories and rich in historical layers awaiting explication. The set of ten is as follows: “pictorial” quilts; ceramic jugs; wooden cabinets; wooden chairs; “abstract” quilts; wooden porches; reed baskets; iron gates; fabric dresses; and found-object displays. Some of the objects turn out to be plural categories of things, more collections than particularities. Some are designated with authorial attribution—more on which below—while others remain generic.

Awake presents these ten objects, acknowledging his purview is as much recovery and dissemination as discovery or archaeology. (Recognizing the often-meaningful scholarly distinction between “object” and “thing,” for the sake of convenience here I use the terms interchangeably.) Comparable to John Michael Vlach’s seminal The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), or Vlach’s By the Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), or, more recently, David Hackett Fischer’s sections on building and making in African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), Awake draws deserved attention to works that, though not unfamiliar, appear here as a curated collection. Likewise, the book falls in the now-familiar genre of material histories that offer readers a discrete number of tangible artifacts, analyzed almost anthropologically for their symbolic qualities to elucidate historical phenomena, exemplified by the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC 4, 2010). Analyzing material culture in scenarios where conventional written records are limited or biased is a powerful method, not least because it exposes the ideological assumptions we bring to bear on textual sources. The means of interpretation of texts are self-evident, as one dissects denotative and connotative meanings, variably dependent on historical or biographical context. To write about a text is to reproduce the medium of the source material, and thus to affirm the supremacy of written language as the bearer of historical memory. This relegates historical subjects who never wrote to minor roles, if not anonymity or erasure. Yet when the object of study is a physical thing, for instance a woven textile, its obdurate tangibility affirms its maker’s irrefutable existence. It is then incumbent on the historian to develop forms of scrutiny appropriate to the artifact at hand, and while presumptively “modern” customs of historical knowledge dictate that scholarship takes the form of writing (as opposed to, for example, weaving a textile about a textile), objects are anything but prescriptive in their denotations, let alone their connotations. Notable exceptions appear in works of Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Routledge, 2013), Pamela H. Smith, From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World (The University of Chicago Press, 2022), or others who argue that making is itself a legitimate form of knowledge. Awake asserts a version of this position: “Craft remains a powerful form of art, as well as knowledge production and dissemination. I believe in the power that objects have to keep histories, tell stories, and express things that words cannot” (13). Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021) offers one recent apogee of this type of history, using just a single object to unravel an entire world of materiality, from craft objects to personal care practices to agriculture to family structures. Things have meaning and, like any act of translation, rendering their significance in words at once distorts, supplements, and reconfigures their physical properties.

Favoring factual context over historiographic introspection, A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects nevertheless provides intriguing practical modes of unfurling the cultural world embedded in the objects’ construction and what makes them worthy of esteem beyond their use- or exchange-value. Take, for example, Awake’s careful analysis of Richard Poynor’s ladder-back chairs, surely a chapter with some special weight given the author’s vocation as a chairmaker himself. He explains the artisanship of combining seasoned and green lumber: tenoned green rungs slotted into drier, mortised rails, tightening their joints as the receiving parts absorbed moisture. “This,” Awake tells us, “created the tightest possible joint without the need for glue to fortify it” (51). His succinct descriptions of such processes convey the skill of a maker able to decipher the intricacies of crafted objects. Without affectations or pretension, the reader gets a sense of manual and mechanical expertise and labor that woodworking requires.

Somewhat less persuasively, biography comprises more of the book than might be expected of a history of objects. While their integration is never awkward, these capsule narratives feel more rote than essential and tend in the direction of appeals for canonization over critical appraisal. “Because many ladder-back chairmakers weren’t professional woodworkers,” Awake writes, “the style was defined by a very utilitarian aesthetic—that is, until Richard Poynor began making chairs” (49–50). Awake supports this rhetorical flourish with the fact that Poynor invented a horse-powered lathe that enabled mass production, thereby “creat[ing] an object that was sought after by wealthy enslavers and common folk alike” (50). The book cites an 1849 advertisement posted by “Original maker of the celebrated ‘Poyner [sic] chairs’” (54), demonstrating that Poynor achieved assimilation into systems of mechanized commodity manufacture. A critical approach might draw out the tension between the apparent multiplicity of products like these and the impulse to distinguish the maker as a singular, praiseworthy figure. Giving Poynor credit as a master carpenter is an ethical and historical imperative. But what of the masses of makers whose work is less identifiable?

Six of the ten objects are attributed to specific, named people. Perhaps self-evidently, a component of this project is to recuperate ingenuity from anonymity, to give these makers their due. Indeed, in the few instances that Awake finds signatures, such markers were “a bold statement of authorship that resists the erasure of Black life and contributions” (40; see also 13, 34). Restoring the dignity of making to makers is an arguably urgent task. But must doing so entail elevation of individual producers? The four categories of things—“Gee’s Bend Quilts,” “the Front Porch,” “Sweetgrass Baskets,” and “Yard Shows”—imply a more capacious relationship to making than the mythologies of individual genius that have been the traditional province of consolidated power. These are less “objects” than “types”: no one invented them. They are triumphs of collective imagination and practice. They can absorb hybridization and transmutation.

The book is at its best when, instead of asserting claims to originality, it pays tribute to, for example, Gee’s Bend “quilts [that] embody a unique collective art practice that centered and cultivated the interiority, brilliance, and self-reliance of the women who made them” (63), or the diffused authorship of yard shows, where “self-expression and individuality are not at odds with the spiritual and communal; rather, they bolster and support each other” (134). The impressiveness of the skill in making becomes ever more wondrous when we recognize the irreducibility of an unacknowledged, innumerable community of contributors.

As an object itself, the book is a delight. Johnalynn Holland’s sumptuous illustrations provide a wonderful visual backdrop to Awake’s compelling prose. Often, however, supplementary photographs would help the reader who may be less familiar with the visual objects comprehend the textual references.

A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects is a laudable collection of works, realized here in caring depth. Much like the objects it portrays, though, it cannot stand alone.

Jonah Rowen
Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Vassar College

Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor

Samantha Baskind — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

In August 2017, as white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, a statue of Thomas Jefferson by the Jewish sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844–1917) at the University of Virginia became an unlikely focal point as the crowds led chants including “Jews will not replace us.” While the immediate impact of this event was understood as a flashpoint in the racial tensions and resurgent nationalism that consumed the United States in 2020, it also exposed the antisemitism that has only intensified in the years since. In the political climate following the October 7 attacks and the subsequent wars in Gaza and Iran, questions of Jewish national identity and belonging have taken on a renewed urgency. That this confrontation unfolded around a nineteenth-century monument by a Jewish artist underscores the extent to which such works and their makers remain active agents in contemporary political life.

Samantha Baskind’s Moses Jacob Ezekiel: Jewish, Confederate, Expatriate Sculptor emerges from this shifting terrain, offering a study that is as instructive now as it was at the height of the monument debates in 2020, if not more so. The book’s immediate impetus was an exhibition Baskind planned to curate at Princeton University, but which was ultimately cancelled amid protests over Ezekiel’s involvement in several Confederate monuments. If that cancellation underscored the volatility of Ezekiel’s reputation, this monograph insists on the necessity of confronting, rather than avoiding, the complexities his work embodies. Baskind reconstructs a figure whose overlapping identities, as a Jewish American, a Confederate Army veteran, and a cosmopolitan expatriate in Rome, challenge the boundaries that organise nineteenth-century art history.

Baskind positions Ezekiel as a figure whose complex affiliations illuminate broader questions of national identity, religious belonging, and artistic practice in the long nineteenth century. In doing so, the book contributes to a growing body of scholarship attentive to the entanglement of artistic production with multiple, intersecting identities, while remaining grounded in rigorous archival research and object-based analysis.

One of Baskind’s most significant interventions is her insistence that Ezekiel’s career cannot be reduced to his Confederate monuments, despite their prominence in both public memory and recent controversy. While these works, most notably New South (1914)—the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery—are treated with lucid critical nuance, Baskind broadens the scope to encompass the full range of Ezekiel’s production: allegorical monuments, biblical subjects, portrait busts, and commemorations of political and cultural figures. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, the book’s chapters trace recurring concerns across his oeuvre, including “Ezekiel and the Bible,” “Ezekiel and the Presidents,” and his engagements with classical antiquity, nineteenth-century Zionism, and American nationalism. This structure allows Baskind to analyse patterns of thought, motifs, and personal and professional obstacles that might otherwise remain obscured within a strictly linear account.

Throughout, Baskind demonstrates both the strengths and limitations of Ezekiel’s sculptural language. His tendency toward dense allegory and elaborate symbolic programmes could, at its most effective, produce works of considerable conceptual richness, such as Religious Liberty (1876), created for the Centennial Exhibition. At other moments, however, this same impulse resulted in compositional and interpretive overload, as seen in the allegorical programme for the Thomas Jefferson monument, where the weight of competing iconographies made the monument largely incomprehensible to critics. Baskind’s willingness to assess these failures alongside successes is one of the study’s strengths, situating Ezekiel within the broader trajectory of nineteenth-century sculpture. In many ways, Ezekiel extended the cosmopolitan model of the generation of expatriate sculptors in Rome before him, namely William Wetmore Story, Harriet Hosmer, and Hiram Powers, but in remaining allied with their dated stylistic tendencies, he was largely unintegrated into the ascendant modernist histories of sculptors such as Auguste Rodin and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Particularly compelling is Baskind’s analysis of works that engage with Jewish subjects and themes. As she carefully notes, most explicitly in the epilogue, such works should not be too readily categorised as “Jewish art,” a designation that risks imposing retrospective coherence on a more fluid set of concerns. Instead, Baskind traces how Ezekiel incorporated coded references to Jewish religious practice, texts, and history while responding to the shifting conditions of American Jewish life in the nineteenth century. His sculptures often reflected a desire to align Jewish identity with broader civic ideals of tolerance and separation of church and state, a strategy that both facilitated integration into American society and distanced that community from the antisemitic pressures associated with Europe.

This dynamic is especially evident in Ezekiel’s bust of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1899), a founding figure of the Reform Judaism movement. Baskind highlights the tensions embedded in this work: although Ezekiel himself held Zionist sympathies, he worked for American patrons who, at this time, rejected the notion of a Jewish homeland. Such engagements underscore the artist’s willingness to navigate ideological differences within Jewish thought, rather than retreat into a singular position. Equally illuminating are his representations of Jesus Christ, shaped in part by his experience as a religious minority in Catholic Rome, as well as a unique engagement with religious imagery beyond his own tradition.

The book also draws out a productive tension between Ezekiel’s fervent American patriotism and his cosmopolitan lifestyle. Trained at the Prussian Academy of Art and long resident in Rome, working in the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, Ezekiel cultivated a self-conscious aesthetic mode of life that aligned him with broader currents of European artistic culture. However, this internationalism did not diminish his identification with the United States, and absence certainly made his heart grow fonder. Baskind presents Ezekiel’s mobility between these contexts as central to his artistic identity, suggesting that his nationalism was inflected by a cosmopolitan appreciation of art, music, and architecture.

The chapter addressing Ezekiel’s Confederate monuments is carefully situated towards the end of the book. Writing with an awareness of both historical context and contemporary sensitivities, Baskind neither dismisses nor excuses these works. Instead, she places them within the artist’s lived experience as a Confederate soldier and his enduring commitment to the values associated with that cause. In certain instances, such as Virginia Mourning Her Dead (1870), Baskind identifies elements that invite readings around the traumas of the Civil War. At the same time, she does not shy away from confronting the racist imagery embedded within these monuments or the ways in which they contribute to the visual language of Lost Cause ideology, particularly in works connected to figures such as Robert E. Lee.

The broader relevance of Baskind’s study extends beyond the historiography of American sculpture. As recent scholarship, including Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Will Fall (2025), has argued, monuments are not static artefacts but active participants in ongoing political and cultural struggles. Baskind’s book reinforces this point, while also demonstrating how the meanings of such works shift over time. While the controversies surrounding Confederate monuments provided the immediate impetus for her project, its conclusions resonate equally with more recent debates concerning nationalism and religious identity. The figure of Ezekiel, at once Jewish, American, Southern, and expatriate, offers a particularly potent lens through which to examine these entanglements.

By recovering the full scope of Ezekiel’s career, Baskind has produced a study that is both timely and methodologically significant. By moving beyond reductive frameworks and attending to the multiplicity of the artist’s affiliations, she not only repositions Ezekiel within the field of nineteenth-century sculpture but also models an approach sensitive to the complexities of artistic identity. For art historians working across periods and geographies, this book offers a compelling example of how to integrate object-based analysis with broader cultural and political concerns, without sacrificing nuance or historical specificity.

Maddie Hewitson
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, University of Birmingham

Illustrated Sheet Music in the U.S., 1830–1930

Theresa Leininger-Miller and Kenneth Hartvigsen, eds. — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Given the mongrel status of illustration—in practice, a fusion of image, text, and type—illustrated printed matter can prove daunting to critics and historians. Determinations of authorship, creative intent, and influence are often difficult, if not impossible, to establish. Perhaps for this reason, conventional accounts of the history of illustration have emphasized pictorial contributions to books and periodicals from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such materials are better preserved, and their contributors likelier to have been documented, than less literary, more ephemeral forms of print culture. Theresa Leininger-Miller and Kenneth Hartvigsen argue that contemporary surveyors of the field, whose coverage by now has widened beyond the editorial, still neglect an important subject area: illustrated sheet music, a form which “facilitated the circulation of hundreds of thousands of individual pictures during pivotal moments of development of the U.S.” (1). Their edited collection, Illustrated Sheet Music in the United States 1830–1930, rewards engagement and invites reflection on what we talk about when we talk about illustration.

The book is an entry in Bloomsbury’s Research in Illustration series, which evinces rising interest in illustration studies, a catchall term extending from cultural history to methodological issues in illustration practice. This volume provides historical case studies organized by period. Chapters one through seven cover the years 1830–1900 with several essays addressing enslavement and its aftermath. Chapters ten through eighteen cover the twentieth century to 1930, including World War I and the early nativist era. In an apparent gesture to musical performance, chapters seven and eight are set aside as an “Intermission,” consisting of interviews with collectors of illustrated sheet music. In addition to an introduction, Leininger-Miller and Hartvigsen have each contributed two essays and collaborated on an interview with Kevin Hugh Lynch.

From a particularly useful first chapter by Erin Pauwels we learn about the social history of music publishing, including a refocusing from professional clienteles before 1800 to the cultivation of amateur audiences and performers in domestic settings; the growing popularity of the parlor piano and its smaller, more reasonably priced counterpart the melodeon; and the emergence of specialized furniture called the Canterbury, a low table with open spindles to facilitate music display. In addition to the importance of lithographic printing firms, certain of which specialized in illustrated sheet music covers, the evolution of presentation formats points to an implicit purpose for such illustrations: sales. Just as illustrated magazine covers later sought to attract readers at newsstands, lithographic sheet music covers were designed to entice buyers in music shops.

Unlike magazines, however—the covers which were expected to satisfy the implicit editorial contract between reader and publisher, issue after issue—songs were published as one-offs. The interview transcripts with plentiful reproductions, capture the appealing yet grab-bag quality of the form, filled with attractive curiosities. There are certainly essays in this book that treat illustrators as cultural actors and give them something like art historical consideration, or dip into illustrative gig work by celebrated artists for clues about other things. Georgia Barnhill’s exploration of young lithographer-turned-painter Fitz Hugh Lane’s vignettes for sheet music provides an example of the latter. Daniel Goldmark’s efficient “Rust Belt Alley: Cleveland as Sheet Music Nexus (1890s–1930)” captures the frequently regional dimension of illustration practice and contrasts the biographies of two artists: Ora Coltman, a watercolorist who created elegant, complex music cover illustrations for H.N. White and successfully operated on varied levels of the city’s art scene for many decades; and Ray Parmelee, who worked with the local Sam Fox Music Company and other music publishers around the country from 1907 into the 1920s, when the commercial work fell off. He succumbed to despondency in 1936. Goldmark speculates on the likely alienation associated with commercial art practice, which dogged Parmelee, from which Coltman was seemingly free. And Leininger-Miller investigates the sheet music illustration of the versatile Albert Alexander Smith in some depth. Smith, a Black artist who completed projects for The Crisis and Opportunity—periodicals for the NAACP and the Urban League, respectively—worked extensively in sheet music from 1919 to 1925.

But these are exceptions; most of the essays engage synthetic questions about larger matters. Erin Smith’s chapter explores the stylish New Woman of 1895. Many others contend with questions of racial representation and interpretation. It may not be an accident that the century of coverage coincides with the birth of minstrelsy, Indian removal, a land grab driven by the new economics of the cotton gin, and the Nat Turner Rebellion.

For example, Emily C. Burns’s chapter on the Black and white American expatriates in Paris explores the fluidity of Belle Epoque minstrelsy, focusing on the American Art Association of Paris by surveying the illustrated sheet music they employed in their own minstrel performances. An anonymous cover design for “I Don’t Like No Cheap Man,” published by Joseph Stern in New York in 1897 celebrates Bert Williams and George Walker as “real coons” in script lettering (“words and music”) while showing a staged photograph of James McIntyre and Thomas Kurton Heath, two white performers in blackface. The transcultural layers fairly astound: Black and white American, Indigenous, Caribbean, and French. For Burns, minstrelsy is “reveal[ed as] . . . diasporic performance rather than cultural truth (192).”

Most representative might be Hartvigsen’s chapter explicating “Reconstruction! Grand March” (composed by Charles Young, printed by Duval & Sons Lithographers, Philadelphia, 1868), which highlights the relevance of such materials and simultaneously suggests the difficulty of treating them as central. The cover illustration, richly rendered in litho crayon, presents a divided visual field: one third of the image shows a heavenly chorus of angels equipped with musical instruments floating on a misty cloud; below, occupying a lower register, we see a nighttime witches’ sabbath attended by cretinous figures and monstrous composite animals. Captioning tells us how to read the picture: above, “AS IT SHOULD BE,” and below, “AS IT IS.”

Hartvigsen interprets the illustration to show white fears of miscegenation, a term coined in 1864. Amalgamation, “the previously preferred term . . . had been adapted from metallurgy to describe interracial sexual relationships” (94). He argues that the Frankensteinian zoological composites shown in “AS IT IS” suggest unnatural combinations. (The densely populated Duval lithograph takes up two-thirds of the page. One can wish for full bleeds and/or magnified detail shots to increase the legibility of such images for readers). He cites a common charge that abolitionist white women sought Black sexual partners, and reproduces an Edward William Clay lithograph titled An Amalgamation Waltz (1839) peopled by interracial dancing couples to illustrate the point. Hartvigsen also explores examples of illustrations used in an ethnological tract to advance racial theories invoking “caucasian” superiority, a cultural geography explored in Sarah Lewis’s The Unseen Truth (2024). “Scientific” representations of Blacks’ heads filtered through the iconography of minstrelsy follow, juxtaposed with simian profiles. The use of racial tropes to differentiate between human and implicitly subhuman species, and to advance claims about Anglo-Saxon “civilization,” predate the Civil War. They spread to school geography texts in the decades following. Cumulatively, the essay suggests plausible connections between the horrifying phantasmagoria fronting the lower register of “Reconstruction! Grand March” with other pictorial evidence of racial fear.

Ultimately, Hartvigsen reverses the polarity of who might have reasonably feared whom. Citing the bloody history of 1868, he shows that Southern Blacks, not whites, were the people subject to growing racial violence marring Reconstruction, to say nothing of the state-sponsored terrorism by which they were later beset during the Jim Crow era. And while the putative subject of the chapter is the Duval lithograph for Young’s song, it might be more accurate to say that the essay explores methods and iconographies through which the Southern racial order was inscribed in illustrated printed matter between roughly 1840 and 1870.

It is possible that a volume titled Sheet Music in the United States might make a compelling book, but the inclusion of illustrations brings heightened interest to this one. Culturally speaking, is illustrated sheet music a medium of consequence? Ought there be a roster of canonical works or practitioners? Or should it be seen primarily as an engaging form of evidence illuminating the history of the music publishing business or tangentially capturing forgotten fads? Leininger-Miller and Hartvigsen’s book stakes a claim that the form highlights bigger themes in American social history, above all race, alternately crystallizing and undermining narratives of enslavement and liberation, scrambling yet reinscribing the old racial order in the Jim Crow era, and secondarily documenting the evolution of popular music and emerging design practice. Inarguably, the medium enlivens and enriches historical and social inquiry. That is good enough. The aesthetic status of the “individual pictures” seen by many cannot be disentangled from context: the fusion of image, text, type, and musical notation basic to the form. Hartvigsen admits as much by (rightly) characterizing illustrated sheet music as an example of a “composite object.” Inevitably, what we talk about when we talk about illustration is contingency, which weakens its case for stand-alone aesthetic significance. That has always been held against it, but such objections have become outdated, and more importantly, beside the point. The scholarship in this volume, including admirable contributions beyond the scope of this review, suggests a bright future for properly contextualized illustration as a form of evidence in cultural history.

Douglas Dowd
Washington University

The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique

Amanda Cachia — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Books concerning disability are often, out of necessity, polemical. They point out physical and social obstacles encountered daily by those with disabilities to promote understanding and improve accessibility. In this regard, Amanda Cachia’s The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique is no exception. Considering herself a “crip curator” and “advocate,” Cachia points out flaws in contemporary attempts to address accessibility in museums and galleries. Were it to end here, this would be an admirable undertaking and significant contribution to the field. Cachia’s intention, however, is to move beyond practical access to consider more expansive ways of thinking and being through sense experience.

Reaching beyond the traditional tendency in disability studies to bifurcate the field into medical versus social models, Cachia discusses how artists have contributed to understanding access through their work, particularly by expanding sensory experiences with what she considers access aesthetics. Phenomenologically based, Cachia’s book explores how audiences can be immersed in a sensory-expanding experience that includes multiple viewpoints. Informed by years of curatorial practice, and by her own experience as someone with brachyolmia dwarfism, Cachia focuses on how individual artists have introduced us to new ways of experiencing sense perception in the museum, gallery, and performance setting, often criticizing what have traditionally been considered adequate viewpoint-neutral accommodations.

Translations and standard written and audio descriptions are acknowledged as essential but explored as “systems of exclusion” that are potentially biased and have unintended consequences for disabled audiences. As Cachia explains, standardized visual descriptions, while helpful, generally offer a limited viewpoint. Despite the illusion of neutrality, descriptions are inevitably informed by the interpreter’s experience. The effect is revealed in Carmen Papalia’s work for See for Yourself (2015) as part of a project curated by Cachia for Arts and Disability Ireland. Papalia commissioned seven written and audio descriptions of significant two-dimensional artworks, then had seven artists recreate those works based only on the descriptions. The differing results are fascinating in their diverse representations that stray far from the original paintings. In Rozzell Medina’s visual translation of John Muse’s audio description of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), for instance, strewn academic renderings of nude and semi-nude bodies become a photographic collage of contemporary bodybuilders posing on a refined painted raft. Similarly absurd, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (ca. 1485), described by Janet Whyte then visually translated by Bruce Ray, becomes a cowering woman ashamed of her nudity. Through such examples, Cachia explains how Papalia’s work makes us aware of the limits of current audio and written translations taking place in museums and highlights the benefits of multiple-viewpoint translations.

One of The Agency of Access’s core strengths lies in acknowledging that progress has been made in museum and gallery accessibility while also revealing limitations. In this regard, Christine Sun Kim’s work is poignantly examined as a complex comment on sensorial translation through ASL and captions. From the perspective of someone who is deaf, Kim’s captions introduce the hearing public to new ways of experiencing sense perception, providing them with an expanded sensorial experience. Cachia points out that Kim’s work has dual significance as both revealing translation limitations while also considering opportunities for contributing a disabled perspective. In Closer Captions, Kim presents creative captions that encourage a somewhat mystical sensorial understanding of sound based not on her lived experience as a deaf person but rather on an imagined synesthetic perception of something unavailable to her and, indeed, to many of us. In an example provided by Cachia, Kim’s translation reads “the sound of sun entering the bedroom,” a description that conveys the ambiguity of audio and written translations from the position of other senses. In another example of creative ambiguity, Kim translates musical notations to take into account ASL language. Cachia’s intent here is to demonstrate how we can not only learn from the perspective of someone who is disabled but also enhance our experience by discerning the complexity of how the senses can come together, which she compares to synesthesia.

Cachia’s interest in expanding our sense experience through spoken and written language extends to considering the work of those whose background lies outside Western tradition to embrace multiple perspectives. Vanessa Dion Fletcher, a Lenape and Potawatomi neurodiverse artist, is considered for her porcupine quillwork, which reflects on how an Indigenous feminist body can contribute to a decolonization of traditional audio and written translation. Similarly, the work of Pelenakeke Brown, an interdisciplinary artist with cerebral palsy from Aotearoa (New Zealand), is explored for its integration of the Samoan concept of vā and crip time. Cachia’s book is ambitious, sometimes veering into aspects of intersectional identity, race, colonialism, immigration, and care in the work of artists such as Brown, Corban Walker, and Shawanda Corbett. These are important areas that beg for further investigation, perhaps in another venue where the discussion can be pursued more fully.

Significantly, Cachia questions Western culture’s a priori understanding of the senses that puts sight first. She finds historical precedents that disrupted this order in the work of movements such as Surrealism and Fluxus—not in their inclusion of disability viewpoints, but in their experimentation with altering sense experience. Among contemporary disabled artists, this alteration can be found in the work of Papalia, whose Blind Field Shuttle allows participants to experience a nonvisual walking tour with their eyes shut. Led by the artist and his white cane, a line of people following each other, guided only by an arm on the shoulder of the person in front of them, allows them to experience the public landscape through senses other than sight. Other examples of works that disrupt ocularcentrism can be found in the chapter entitled “Please Touch,” which laments contemporary museum policies that prohibit the touching of artworks. Here again, Cachia is adept at balancing practical contributions by disabled artists with political intent. Encouraging what she considers “haptic activism,” she promotes the sense of touch as an important means to engage with art objects, analyzing works by artists Fayen D’Evie, Sugandha Gupta, and Wendy Jacobs that challenge the emphasis on ocular primacy.

Cachia’s tome is a thoughtful and valuable contribution to wider discussions about how to increase access to art in institutional settings. In particular, it calls attention to how an expanded appreciation of the senses, through the work of artists with disabilities, highlights deficits in our current attempts at accessibility. Perhaps most importantly, the book also draws attention to the complexities involved as we account for and appreciate human variation. This is evidenced with considerable clarity in Park McArthur’s solo exhibition Projects 195: Park McArthur (2018–19) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where, within the museum’s renovation and expansion, the artist proposed a housing project that would encourage mutual support for disabled and nondisabled people. Emphasizing the multifaceted and individualistic needs of the occupants, McArthur allowed for flexibility and reconfiguration. As this suggests, and as Cachia makes clear in the book as a whole, there is no template for accessibility, only adaptability based upon embodied experience. And perhaps the artist, whose perception often constitutes the essence of their work, is best suited to expanding our understanding of the agency of access.

Ultimately, Cachia’s aim is twofold: first, to encourage those in the museum world to meet the needs of disabled individuals more meaningfully; and second, to bring attention to how disabled artists are contributing to sense perception and thus accessibility. As she readily admits, the former is enormously complex and involves a reconsideration of not only a hierarchy of the senses but also assumptions about what significant accessibility means. The latter indicates an expansion of our sensorium capabilities by learning from those who see the world in multiple and unique ways. On both counts, the Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art & Institutional Critique is an important step forward.

Tim W. Hiles
Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England

Asa Simon Mittman — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:00:00 GMT

The Hereford Map, a large world map or mappamundi made for Hereford Cathedral shortly after 1300, is a dense network of over five hundred vignettes that depict historical and sacred sites, scenes, figures, flora, and fauna. A nearly inexhaustible bounty of iconography, both familiar and abstruse, it has invited and continues to stimulate many readings. To an already rich historiography can now be added the distinctive approach of Cartographies of Exclusion: Anti-Semitic Mapping in Medieval England, in which Asa Simon Mittman examines how the dehumanized depictions of Jews on the Hereford map and other contemporary English world maps evince the period’s virulent anti-Semitism and expose how racialized thinking contributed to the formation of English national identity. Mittman’s insights into the map’s images, its historical context, and the troubling survival of its fixation on racial hatred, and into the ways these elements are fundamentally intertwined, make for a personal, provocative, and very painful book.

Mittman brings his cartographic and teratologic expertise to bear as he examines the Hereford Map and related images through the lens of race, and in particular, its depiction of what its earliest viewers believed were the most local of monsters: Jews. His account is suitably grim: mapmakers debased the representation of Jews in every register available to them. Mittman deftly demonstrates how Christian fantasies and paranoia about Jews (rather than actual Jewish beliefs and practices) generated not only these distorted and hateful images, but also led to acts of violence, oppression, segregation, exploitation, and ultimately the expulsion of the Jewish population from England in 1290.

Mittman’s selective, corrective reading of the Hereford Map is both focused and expansive; he addresses only a small number of the map’s vignettes, but he argues for their centrality in the map’s overall message. For readers who are new to the Hereford Map, Cartographies of Exclusion might not be the best introduction to the subject; while it must by necessity recount the basic facts—such as they have been pieced together—about the object and the context of its production, it is not (nor does it claim to be) a comprehensive canvass of the map’s history nor of the motifs on its surface. Instead, Mittman offers more of a meditation on the ways maps make and convey meaning, arguing that this unusual world map, sited in a church, and surmounted by a scene of the Last Judgment, communicates not only a comprehensive image of the world and its history, but also a very particular and lacerating view of the place of Jews in that history.

Readers hitherto unaware of the powerful potentiality of maps to make arguments will find Mittman’s approach both stimulating and unsettling—he argues that this sacred view of God’s creation is structured not only by geography, but also by biblical and historical imagery that recounts the history of the world, foresees its doom, and casts “The Jews” as the monstrous antithesis to all that is good, Christian, and English. Because the map was produced at a time when only a very small number of Jews remained in England, Mittman emphasizes how the map’s construction of Jews and Jewishness is not based on real experience or encounters with Jewish people, but instead constitutes a fearful, hateful and violent projection of Christian anxieties onto a now-absent and fictive population, “The Jews,” at once trapped in the biblical past and still heretically haunting the present.

Mittman’s dynamic and engaging approach to medieval world maps grounds its innovative interpretation in recent work about race and identity in the Middle Ages. Mittman anchors his approach to the medieval English world maps in well-established positions about the way that ideas of race were constructed in the Middle Ages, as framed in the work of scholars including but not confined to Debra Strickland, Kathy Lavezzo, Geraldine Heng, Sharon Kinoshita, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. His careful use of this earlier work assures that his distinctive reading of the map can be positioned in a broader historical and historiographical context.

Mittman begins by situating the Hereford map in the traditions of medieval mapping that precede it. In the introduction, he presents what is known about the map’s production context: where, perhaps by whom, perhaps for what it might have been made, discusses medieval mapping conventions, and some historiographical and methodological questions. In the first chapter, he develops the idea of cartographic race, considering how “The Jews” are mythologized not only by means of their clothing and appearance, but also through where they are situated on the surface of the earth. Mittman argues that the placement of the Jewish figures on the Hereford map relegates them to locations far from England, and indeed, to the distant past, obliterating the existence and potential for a Jewish presence. In chapter two, he argues for a specifically English, rather than a European, context for the Hereford map, connecting its anti-Semitic imagery to the documented evidence of burgeoning anti-Semitism and its concomitant violence in thirteenth-century England.

In the three following chapters, Mittman examines specific motifs and the formal properties of the map, arguing in chapter three that the map could have served as the basis of virtual pilgrimage, and that the ocular journeys of the viewer could follow different routes that can be construed in the context of the map’s surmounting Last Judgment. Although the Christian viewer can travel visually or mentally in an expansive manner across the surface of the map, the Jews on it instead follow a narrowly prescribed itinerary of exile. Their coiling path is a reinforcement of the parallel between the Exodus from Egypt and the expulsion from England, which consigns the Jews to a perpetual and remote position in the distant past from which they can never escape. Building on the narrative of exile, chapter four considers the image of a defecating (but not golden) calf, worshipped by hook-nosed figures labeled “Iudei,” the contemporary word for Jews, rather than the biblical Israelites, again blurring past and present. The idol itself is labeled “Mahū,” perhaps for Muhammad. This image, with its bestial, scatological, satanic distortions of Jewish practices, its conflation of the Jews with other groups, and its spatial and temporal mislocation of Jews on the map, exemplify all of the tactics used by the makers of the Hereford Map to demonize and dehumanize Jews. In chapters five and six, Mittman further develops his scrutiny of these strategies and draws on considerable comparative material, especially from the (now-lost) Ebstorf world map, to show how libels regarding Jewish practices, bodies, and beliefs were figured and disseminated on maps and other visual imagery. These included the blood libel, the baseless allegation that Jews ritually murdered Christians and consumed their blood, as well as the depiction of Jews in monstrous form, with horns or tails. Jews were also associated with the apocalyptic hordes of Gog and Magog in a remote region on the map, another example of conflation and mislocation that dehumanizes and displaces Jews in the image of the world. To complement and support each of his examples, Mittman draws on an ample range of comparanda to demonstrate how thoroughly such beliefs became currency in imagery displayed and consumed in England and elsewhere in Europe.

Many overlapping factors contributed to potency and persuasiveness of the information communicated by the Hereford Map: its grand scale and position in the church, its golden frame adorned with the Last Judgment, the Roman Emperor Augustus depicted in the lower left hand corner, who orders a survey “of the entire world . . . and all its contents” (5) that implicitly undergirds the origins and scope of map itself. Together, these elements buttress the map’s authority and also the force of its anti-Semitic message, and they thereby seem to operate with both historical foundation and divine sanction.

For the purposes of coherence, Mittman’s argument is very tightly framed, but the stories he tells sometimes have bigger resonances than are sounded in his account. Some points that might—in a larger book—have been expanded with more nuance, include how the emergence of national self-consciousness and self-definition (in the absence of Jews or in relation to them) was a broader European phenomenon, how sermons might have contributed to the transmission and teaching of the maps’ imagery, and how the transmission of racial animus as it was diffused in the particular public display context of the Hereford map, compares to map examples that were consulted in more private environments. Given the narrow focus, Mittman musters a remarkable number of visual and textual sources that support his position effectively.

Mittman’s canvass of the Hereford Map and related maps has unfortunate resonance today; he argues that the anti-Semitic hatred that is currently resurgent has roots in these images. Throughout the book, Mittman poignantly weaves together past and present, repeatedly juxtaposing the precarious circumstances of Jewish life in thirteenth century England, and the rise of anti-Semitic violence then, with parallels to be found in racial hatred and the distortion and misuse of the medieval past today. His argument in Cartographies of Exclusion shows how the imagery on a map could be weaponized to justify the dehumanizing treatment, violent abuse, and hasty exile of a population scapegoated in a misguided effort to build national unity and identity. It is a perspective as tragic as it is timely.

Camille Serchuk
Department of Art & Design, Southern Connecticut State University