• Reviewed by Ivan Gaskell

    In her spectacular exhibition, Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), has chosen to show Sargent’s work by juxtaposing selected portraits with clothing similar to, and in some cases actually depicted in, those paintings.

Notes from the Field

  • 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.

  • Book Review
    The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archives of the Indies, 1781–1844.
    Reviewed by Miruna Achim

    When did colonial America begin? This is the polemical question Byron Ellsworth Hamann sets out to answer in his immensely erudite and lavishly illustrated The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archives of the Indies, 1781–1844.

  • Book Review
    Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
    Reviewed by Dario Gamboni

    Stone, and especially marble—in the broad, ancient, and traditional sense of a veined stone lending itself to be carved and polished—is a topical subject in the history of art and architecture.


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