CAA News Today

Antonella Fenech Kroke reviews Maniera: Pontormo, Bronzino and Medici Florence, an exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt. “The most substantial exhibition on Mannerism staged in Germany,” the show, with “intellectual exuberance,” “provided a unique opportunity to see the disquieting emergence and flourishing of multiples creative perspectives that the term Mannerism has attempted to unify.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Sally Hickson reads In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents by Giancarla Periti. This volume “about aristocratic nuns and convent patronage offers an interesting characterization of a resulting corpus of ‘seductive images,’” providing “a touchstone for investigations into patrician nuns, their motivations, their artists, and the visual and perhaps didactic functions of such imagery.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

Maria Fabricius Hansen discusses Malcolm Bull’s Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth: Vico and Neapolitan Painting. With the aim of seeing Giambattista Vico “through the painting of his time in order to present and discuss a series of major themes within art history,” this “accomplished, concise, and intelligently focused” book is “a strong proponent for the relevance of rhetoric as a kind of art theory of its present moment.” Read the full review at caa.reviews.

David Riep examines Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art by Delinda Collier. Centered on a “discussion of the varied intricacies of analog and digital media by tracking Chokwe mural and sand (sona) arts and symbolism,” the text “successfully engages broad theoretical concepts linking art, cybernetics, and media theory, while maintaining its focus on the shifting iterations of Chokwe iconography. Read the full review at caa.reviews.