Egyptian Art: Selected Writings of Bernard V. Bothmer‪.‬

Egyptian Art: Selected Writings of Bernard V. Bothmer. By Bernard V. Bothmer, edited by Madeleine E. Cody. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xxii + 517, illus. In the editorial preface to this homage to the contributions by Bernard V. Bothmer to the study of Egyptian art, James Romano states that the intent of its publication was "to emphasize his [Bothmer's] object-based methodology in contrast to current approaches that stress theoretical methodology over connoisseurship." In truth, Bothmer's primary contributions to the discipline were: 1) the establishment of demanding standards for the accurate description of works of Egyptian art and the coinage of a precise terminology to achieve it, and 2) the codification of rules developed by Hans Wolfgang Mueller for the photographic recording of such works of art. The refinement of these mechanisms was an achievement that earned for Bothmer a unique position as a pioneer in the history of Egyptology for his efforts to catalog, to bring order to, and to maintain control over a vast corpus of material produced over several millennia during the history of a culture dedicated to the production of sculpture, relief, and painting on a scale from minute to monumental. Nevertheless, one must acknowledge that the field of Egyptian art history lags woefully behind any other area of the study of art from a theoretical perspective and that, although historically significant, Bothmer's work is, as a product of its time, dated in terms of the interests of many current scholars.