The Art Bulletin articles from June 2003

The Art Bulletin archives from June 2003

The baker, his tomb, his wife, and her breadbasket: the monument of Eurysaces in Rome.
June 1, 2003... Since its rediscovery in 1838, the tomb of the baker has sparked the interest of visitors to Rome (Fig. 1). With its rows of dark, hollow circles that repeat on its three extant facades, this curious and unique ruin appears more modern than...

Why Chinese painting is history.
June 1, 2003... In her article "Japanese Art History 2001: The State and Stakes of Research," Professor Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan examined the current state of Japanese art scholarship and noted that "up through the 1990s, many senior scholars were caught in a...

Figures of speech: pictorial history in the Quinatzin Map of about 1542.
June 1, 2003... In a letter dated Mexico City, April 28, 1770, the marques de Moncada, an impoverished Spanish aristocrat then resident in New Spain (colonial Mexico), complained bitterly about his rich colonial father-in-law and the primitive ways of the...

Scrambling for scudi: notes on painters' earnings in early Baroque Rome.
June 1, 2003... Long snubbed by art historians as an ill-matched couple, art and economics have enjoyed a good relationship lately, especially at international conferences where no one thinks that talk about money sullies art. (1) Much of the growing interest...

Piranesi, Juvarra, and the Triumphal Bridge tradition.(Giovanni Piranesi, Filippo Juvarra)
June 1, 2003... One of the most influential images in Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Prima pane di architetture, e prospettive, a collection of engravings published in 1743, was the Ponte magnifico (Fig. 1). It shows a view through the archway on one of the...

A politicized pastoral: Signac and the cultural geography of Mediterranean France.(Paul Signac)(Critical Essay)
June 1, 2003... A cultural geography of Mediterranean France that emphasized the region's naturally harmonious landscape and concomitant traditions of liberty and social accord informed Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac's depictions of the southern shore. Signac...

On writing histories of Roman art.
June 1, 2003... To try to describe the art of a gigantic empire is as daunting a task as one could take on, given the problems that come from covering vast quantities of incommensurable monuments and objects from too many places and times and in too many...

Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... ANTHONY GRAFTON New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. 415 pp.; 1 color ill,, 27 b/w. $35.00 A fascination with Leon Battista Alberti has become a characteristic feature of modern Renaissance scholarship. The very periodization structure on...

Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... MARIO CARPO Trans. Sarah Benson Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. 246 pp.; 27 b/w ills. $34.95 In 1985 Christof Thoenes and Hubertus Gunther published a groundbreaking essay whose answer to its provocative title--"The Architectural...

The Invisible Masterpiece: The Modern Myth of Art.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... HANS BELTING Trans. Helen Atkins Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 480 pp., 181 b/w ills. $45.00 Hans Belting's Invisible Masterpiece is a study of the idea of the masterpiece as it develops in the course of the 19th and...

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West & Picasso: The Communist Years & French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art Before, During and After Vichy.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... SUSAN BUCK-MORSS Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. 432 pp.; 13 color ills., 179 b/w. $55.00; $24.95 paper GERTJE R. UTLEY Picasso: The Communist Years...

Historian of the Immediate Future: Reyner Banham.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... NIGEL WHITELEY Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 494 pp.; 89 b/w ills. $39.95 As anyone who has had anything to say about Reyner Banham will agree, it is impossible not to fall under the spell of the wit and the intelligence of the...

Letter.
June 1, 2003... Caravaggio's "Self-Portrait" by Ribera In his illuminating article "Caravaggio's Deaths" (Art Bulletin 84 [2002]: 449-68), Philip Sohm reproduced an engraving by Henri Simon Thomassin (1687-1741), "avowedly (but improbably) a copy after an...

Books received.(Bibliography)
June 1, 2003... (November 2002-January 2003) ABELL, SAM, AND LEAH BENDAVID-VAL. Sam A Bell: The Photographic Life. New York: Rizzoli International, 2002. 262 pp.; 200 b/w ills. Cloth $60.00 (0847824969). ADORNI, BRUNO, ED. La Chiesa a Pianta...