CAA News Today

The December 2011 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, features essays on the portraiture of nuns in colonial Mexico, the sociological context of Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and Federico Zuccari’s painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary.

The December issue publishes four essays on diverse topics. For “Inventing the Exegetical Stained-Glass Window,” Conrad Rudolph studies the reintroduction of allegory in an art program established by Abbot Suger in the twelfth century for St-Denis in France, finding that it culminated in the construction of a new elite art for the literate layperson. In “Ancient Prototypes Reinstated,” Livia Stoenescu demonstrates the self-conscious medievialism in Zuccari’s painting The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary (1594) and the artist’s intention of inscribing its narrative within a Christocentric image. In “Clad in Flowers: Indigenous Arts and Knowledge in Colonial Mexican Convents,” James M. Córdova examines the flowery trappings depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits of nuns in New Spain. For her essay, Christine M. E. Guth explores the sociocultural context of Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (ca. 1830–33) to reveal it as a site for Japan’s shifting geopolitical circumstances between the 1790s and the 1860s.

In the Reviews section, two writers consider three books on the history of Asian art. Douglas Osto explores Buddhist visual culture through Andy Rotman’s Thus Have I Seen: Visualizing Faith in Early Indian Buddhism and Cynthea J. Bogel’s With a Single Glance: Buddhist Icon and Early Mikkyō Vison, and Melanie Trede evaluates Alicia Volk’s In Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugorō and Japanese Modern Art. Bissera V. Pentcheva considers acoustics and architecture in Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti’s Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics, while Étienne P. H. Jollet reviews Frank Fehrenbach’s study of Roman Baroque fountains, Compendia Mundi: Gianlorenzo Berninis “Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi” (1648–51) und Nicola Salvis “Fontana di Trevi” (1732–62). Gregory Batchen offers a take on national histories of photography through two recent books: Maria Golia’s Photography and Egypt and Karen Strassler’s Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java.

Please see the full table of contents for December to learn more. CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership.

The next issue of The Art Bulletin, to be published in March 2012, will include essays on the Zen monk painter Sesshū Tōyō, the art of Henri Fuseli, the “biography” of a statute sculpted in or near the Lagoon region of Ivory Coast. The issue also inaugurates a new feature, “Regarding Art and Art History,” comprising field notes on the topic of anthropomorphism by various authors and a critical essay on the interview format, followed by a conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philip Ursprung.