Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Joanna Stalnaker, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0300181340, $35. The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.

A moving, intimate portrait of the Enlightenment philosophers as they faced the end of their lives and their historical moment.

Shortlisted for the Kenshur Prize, sponsored by The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University.

What would the Enlightenment look like if we viewed it through the eyes of the philosophers as they were facing death? Joanna Stalnaker turns our usual perspective on the Enlightenment on its head, bringing to light a set of works written at the end of the Old Regime and at the end of their authors’ lives. These works, all written before the French Revolution, cast a retrospective glance over the intellectual movement their authors participated in, and over the authors’ own lives and works. Stalnaker shows that the beauty of these works stems from their authors’ efforts to give literary form to the materiality and fragility of their dying bodies. As they reflected on writing as a means of reaching posterity, Enlightenment philosophers embraced the possibility that neither their names nor their writings would survive long beyond the decomposition of their bodies. They inscribed the silence and nothingness of death into their last works.

Stalnaker’s book unsettles reigning interpretations of the Enlightenment as a precursor to our modernity and shows its protagonists at their moments of fragility and doubt, capturing their sense of an ending rather than the confidence in a glowing future so often attributed to them.

Joanna Stalnaker is professor of French at Columbia University. She is the author of a prizewinning first book, The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia. She lives in New York City.

Distributed by Liverpool University Press:

Brent Elliott and Roger Bowdler, The British Cemetery: Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture (London: Historic England, 2026), 544 pages, ISBN: 978-1836245964, £50 / $85.

Covering 1700–2020, this book is the first major study of the British cemetery, tracing the rise of these new landscapes of remembrance from early modern times to the present. Victorian cemeteries drew on the Georgian churchyard tradition and a long-established interest in the burial customs of antiquity. New commercial opportunities were seized as church controls ended, with fast-growing urban populations demanding space for their dead. The results were magnificent: new combinations of layout, planting and myriad memorials arose, reflecting the eclectic taste and religious mood of the times. Virgin land on the edge of towns was adapted to receive mass burials, and the mason’s trade expanded rapidly to supply the growing market for family memorials. Chapters based on new research look at the evolution of buildings, planting, and tombs. Contemporary comments are extensively cited, and a picture emerges of these complex places, seething with family loss and communal memory. From grand mausoleum to humble burial plot, this survey casts light on all varieties of grave, and brings the story up to the present day.

Brent Elliott, formerly Librarian at the Royal Horticultural Society, member of the Victorian Society’s Buildings Committee, has been a committee member or trustee for Kensal Green, West Norwood, and Highgate Cemeteries.
Roger Bowdler worked at English Heritage/Historic England from 1989 to 2018 as a historian and Director of Listing. A specialist in commemorative art, he has written on church monuments, churchyards, mausolea, and war memorials.

From Yale UP:

Andrew Moisey, The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0300285208, $65.

A dynamic prehistory of photography tracing the medium through more than four centuries of Western art.

The prehistory of photography is often told as a story of science, of a magic arising from the camera obscura and advances in chemistry, but not as a history of art. In this exhilarating and erudite book, Andrew Moisey uses a practicing photographer’s perspective to show how a sense of ‘being there’—the immediacy, takenness, and embodiment inherent in a photograph—originates in the Western art of everyday life before photography. Moisey argues that photography’s spirit appears in art before its invention—and that its invention sets the standard of first-person subjectivity on which Impressionism and Modernism were raised.

Spanning over four centuries from the Renaissance to today, the book shows how pictorial models of the present shift from ‘world pictures’ to embodied, situated encounters before photography’s invention, giving paintings and prints a crucial role in photography’s ancestry for the first time. Moisey then reverses the book’s perspective to reveal how photographic artists in the twentieth century used graphic abstraction to resurrect the early modern ‘world picture’ of life. Drawing on his experiences as both a scholar and a photographer, Moisey grounds his book in art history and his own first-hand experience.

Andrew Moisey is assistant professor in the Department of History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell University.

Soon to be available in the UK with January distribution by Yale UP:

Adriano Aymonino, Paper Marbles: Design, Antiquarianism and Geology in Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726) (London: Burlington Press, 2027), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1916237872, £45 / $60.

Newly published by The Burlington Press in a hand-numbered edition of just 500 copies, Paper Marbles presents the first complete facsimile reproduction of Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726), an extraordinary manuscript documenting the coloured marbles of ancient Rome through meticulously painted watercolours.

Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755), was a polymathic artist, intellectual, draughtsman, antiquarian, and musician. For historians, his name is today largely associated with his witty caricatures of prominent figures in Roman society, as well as of French and British Grand Tourists. But at the same time he was also a stone carver and a skilled antiquarian—interests that resulted in the production of many drawings after antique sculptures, cameos, coins, and vases, of which the Studio di Molte Pietre represents just one, albeit exemplary, example.

Ghezzi, a skilled fresco painter, used the Studio di Molte Pietre whenever he needed to replicate ancient coloured marbles in paintings on the walls of palaces and villas in and around Rome. The volume, therefore, also constitutes a unique survival among similar repertoires that were used by Baroque and late-Baroque artist in their daily practice. Alongside remarkable images that have never before been reproduced in their entirety, this publication includes transcriptions and translations of Ghezzi’s annotations, as well as introductory, contextual and interpretative essays. These watercolours have never been reproduced in their entirety. A limited print run of 500 available, each hand numbered.

Adriano Aymonino is the Director of the MA in the Art Market and the History of Collecting at the University of Buckingham. His publications include Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2015); Enlightened Eclecticism (PMC for Yale University Press, 2021 — winner of the 2022 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History), and a revised and updated edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique (Brepols, 3 vols, 2024). He is currently working on a critical edition of Robert Adam’s Grand Tour correspondence, which will be hosted on the Sir John Soane’s Museum website (2025). He is also an associate editor for the Journal of the History of Collections.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
Technical Note
1  Pier Leone Ghezzi: Drawings, Gems, Studi, and Stones
2  The Stones of Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour
3  Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726)
4  Paper Marbles in Ghezzi’s Circle: Gaetano Piccini, ‘Draughtsman of Antiquities’, and the Elusive Giuseppe Lucchesi
5  Coloured Marble and Sectilia in the mid-1720s: the Tradition of Antiquarian Drawings and the Domus Transitoria
6  Publication, Visual Conventions and Reliability
7  Taxonomy and Geology; Nature and Art
Conclusion
Facsimile

Appendix
Bibliography
Index