• Reviewed by Tim Barringer

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s hymn to the courtly arts, The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, culminates with a triumphant corpus of portraits of Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603).

Notes from the Field

  • Book Review
    Tales Things Tell: Material Histories of Early Globalisms
    Finbarr Barry Flood and Beate Fricke

    Through six extensive case studies, this fascinating book unpacks and eruditely fleshes out early globalisms in material and object-oriented terms, demonstrating how such an emphasis and the perspective of art history can enhance the currently expanding field of global history.

  • Translated Text
    How To Make a New Spain: The Material Worlds of Colonial Mexico City
    Reviewed by Barbara E. Mundy

    Readers of Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría’s earlier The Archaeology and History of Colonial Central Mexico (Cambridge, 2016) will reencounter familiar themes in this recent book.

  • Book Review
    Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology
    Reviewed by Astrid Van Oyen

    Time has long been a central concern of both archaeology and philosophy. For Plato, time was an absolute external reality. Aristotle, instead, emphasized the relative temporal relations between events.

  • Book Review
    The Art of Cloth in Mughal India
    Reviewed by Sugata Ray

    The Art of Cloth in Mughal India begins with an intriguing seventeenth-century hand-painted, mordant, and resist-dyed cotton wall hanging depicting traders, hunters, aristocrats, and monarchs from diverse parts of an early modern world intimately linked by Indian Ocean trade.

  • Book Review
    Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, & Architecture in Medieval Islam
    Reviewed by Scott Redford

    This book can be described as an extended essay on perception and mentality in the medieval Islamic world in relationship to objects.


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West 86th is a publication of the Bard Graduate Center and the University of Chicago Press