LAUSR

Kemalist state wished to project. As this rapid summary indicates, the volume succeeds in exploring its theme from multiple productive angles without losing focus, and the freshness of its content—some of it recent doctoral work—adds to its interest. A number of the essays, however, too readily betray their conference origins, reading as overly brief proceedings that, while rich in informational value, lack the background and contextualization required for less specialized audiences. This means that the broader implications of the individual case studies are not as clear as they might be, despite the admirable attentiveness of each paper to the sources it examines. The more successful contributions—among them the essays by Akyürek, Girardelli, Krecic and Caltana, and Uras—temper the volume’s characteristic granularity with a more conceptually engaged approach that demonstrates the material’s larger significance. A less excusable shortcoming—and one that must be blamed on the publisher—is the rather sloppy manner in which the book has been copyedited and designed. Besides multiple errors and inconsistencies in spelling and typesetting, the illustrations, which are well chosen and plentiful, are sometimes so small as to lose their usefulness. These issues do not, however, take away from the overall importance of the volume, whose far-reaching subject matter and wealth of documentary evidence will make it a noteworthy source for those interested in how the longstanding ties linking the artistic cultures of the Mediterranean endured and developed in the modern period.