Enfilade

Saltzman’s wide range of sources include Rousseau and Goya. From The University of Chicago Press:

Benjamin Saltzman, Turning Away: The Poetics of an Ancient Gesture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2026), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0226847214 (cloth), $115 / ISBN: 978-0226847221 (paper), $30.

A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world.

Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others. Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.

Benjamin A. Saltzman is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he coedits the journal Modern Philology. Saltzman is the author of Bonds of Secrecy: Law, Spirituality, and the Literature of Concealment in Early Medieval England and the coeditor of Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages.

c o n t e n t s

Prologue
1  Parodos
2  Ambivalence
3  Sensation
4  Darkness
5  Retroversion
Exodos

Gratitude
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

From Lund Humphries and The Getty:

Kelsey Brosnan, Anne Vallayer-Coster (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 2026), 152 pages, ISBN: 978-1848226852, £35 / $45.

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of just four female academicians admitted to the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the late 18th century. She made her debut at the Paris Salon only a year after joining the academy with her outstanding still-lifes. Later, she secured Queen Marie Antoinette as a patron. This book, the first English-language publication in over 20 years dedicated to this artist, provides a fresh, feminist re-evaluation of her biography and artistic context. Exploring the wide range of objects, materials and textures which the artist depicted—from food and flowers to guns and game—this study offers a new, synaesthetic framework for experiencing the visceral qualities of Vallayer-Coster’s still-life paintings as they were understood in her own time.

Kelsey Brosnan is a writer and art historian specialising in 18th- and 19th-century French paintings, works on paper, and decorative arts. She is Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Design Department at Pratt Institute, New York and also works as a writer and cataloguer for Christie’s, New York.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  Vallayer-Coster, Académicienne / Citoyenne
2  Allegories
3  Food
4  The Hunt
5  Shells
6  Flowers
Conclusion

Appendix: Vallayer-Coster at the Salon, 1771–1817
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From: Rizzoli:

Virginia Hart, ed., Views of America: The Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the U.S. Department of State (New York: Rizzoli Electa, 2026), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0847876532, $65. With contributions by Bri Brophy, Laaren Brown, and Mark Alan Hewitt. Principal photography by Durston Saylor and Bruce White.

A book to honor the 250th anniversary of America, uncovering the history of the United States through works of art dating from America’s revolutionary period, from the collection of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the US Department of State.

Published as a follow-up to Rizzoli’s America’s Collection, with a new array of objects and original scholarship, this book celebrates the unparalleled collection of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, one of America’s most astonishing yet little-known treasures, located in the US Department of State’s Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, DC, now in a more accessible price and format. The collection is home to more than 5,000 fine and decorative art objects, mostly from 1740 to 1840, which tell stories from the nation’s founding era and formative decades.

This survey of 100 key works brims with historical provenances: porcelain from the personal collection of George Washington, silverwork by Paul Revere, side chairs that descended through the family of Francis Scott Key, and the tambour writing table upon which the Treaty of Paris was signed and is still used for signing of diplomatic papers today. The book showcases the important paintings by John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Moran, Childe Hassam, and others, as well as examples of fine furniture and porcelain. The collection reflects the craftsmanship and spirit of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America and forms a vital link between the past and today’s endeavors to represent the American character through the art of diplomacy.

Virginia B. Hart is director and curator of the Diplomatic Reception Rooms, and Bri Brophy is deputy chief curator. Laaren Brown is a writer and editor for art and natural history topics. Mark Alan Hewitt is an architect and architectural historian.

From Bloomsbury:

Thom Richardson and Paula Turner, eds., with photographs by Cassandra Parsons, The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Arms and Armour from Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman World (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2026), 560 pages, ISBN: 978-1781301203, $195.

Brimming with bejewelled and enamelled dagger hilts, swords, and scabbards, and with delicately gilded spears, helmets, shields, and breastplates, the Wallace Collection is home to one of the finest assemblages of arms and armour in the world. The pieces within the collection provide an expansive view of three key areas—Asia, Africa, and the Ottoman world—and span the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, with star objects dating from as early as the 15th century. Being both functional weapons and prestigious luxury items, objects in this area of the collection are fascinating and awe-inspiring both for their technical achievements and artistic virtuosity.

This richly illustrated catalogue, compiled by leading specialists in the field, is a landmark achievement and shines a light on a previously overlooked part of the Wallace Collection. It provides detailed photographs of almost every object, each accompanied by a description of its provenance, materials, inscriptions, and construction. Also included is an introduction to the subject and a history of the collecting of non-European arms and armour by the 4th Marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace.