Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci’s latest publication, A Mediterranean History of Modern Art: Tension Between History and Metahistory (Volume 1), builds upon the author’s critical scholarship on modern art by focusing on the 19th- and 20th-century artistic developments of the Mediterranean region.

His is the first study on Mediterranean modern art which analyses the region as a whole and that considers the multiple contradictions and complexities of the geographical space in question. Schembri Bonaci’s theoretical approach to the study of the arts is here further developed to analyse themes that are inextricable from the history of the Mediterranean, namely the tension between the cosmopolitan and the periphery and the coloniser and the colonised, and how these defined the artistic character of the region. In A Mediterranean History of Modern Art, the author advocates for a horizontal approach to the study of Mediterranean art by dialectically juxtaposing and challenging hegemonic vertical models that have sustained a hierarchy of artistic positions.