Enfilade

Coming in the spring from Lund Humphries:

Livio Pestilli, Canova and His World (London: Lund Humphries, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1848227354, £60.

A new examination of Canova’s life and work in comparison with his contemporaries

This kaleidoscopic study of Antonio Canova (1757–1822), one of the most celebrated sculptors of the Neoclassical era, reconsiders his life, work, and artistic legacy in the wake of the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. Pestilli here examines how critics such as Carl Ludwig Fernow and Quatremère de Quincy critically shaped both Canova’s work and its reception and delves into the striking similarities between Canova and his renowned predecessor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The narrative breathes new life into the sculptor’s art by placing it within the rich cultural context in which he and his contemporaries worked. Drawing from a wealth of sources—including hundreds of letters and original drawings—Pestilli examines a range of previously unexplored themes that will enhance the understanding of specialists and art enthusiasts alike. This study highlights Canova as a sculptor whose work will continue to resonate for years to come.

Livio Pestilli is the former Director of Trinity College, Rome, where he currently teaches seminars on Michelangelo and Bernini. He is the author of Bernini and His World: Sculpture and Sculptors in Early Modern Rome (Lund Humphries, 2022), Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era (Ashgate/Routledge, 2017), and Paolo de Matteis: Neapolitan Painting and Cultural History in Baroque Europe (Ashgate 2013).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
Prologue
1  Zoilus
2  The French Connection
3  ‘A [Neo]classical Bernini’
4  Cantilevering
5  The Artist at the Service of the State
Epilogue

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Petr Macek, Richard Biegel, and Jakub Bachtík, eds., Baroque Architecture in Bohemia, translated by Anna Bryson, Branislava Kuburovic, and Lea Bennis (Prague: Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2026), 767 pages, ISBN: 978-8024655185, $95.

A complete history of Bohemian architecture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forms one of the most important chapters in the cultural history of Bohemia. In this period, art attained a remarkably high level, with Bohemia emerging as a rival to the other cultural centers of Europe. This was especially true in terms of architecture, which not only transformed the appearance of towns and villages in Bohemia but also played a part in the creation of the phenomenon known as the Baroque, which to this day remains an essential part of Czech cultural identity.

The monumental Baroque Architecture in Bohemia brings together multiple generations of art historians from Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences to offer the single most comprehensive examination and exploration of Bohemian architecture during this extraordinary period. The book begins with the Renaissance roots of Baroque Bohemia: it introduces readers to the influence of the cultured and eccentric Rudolf II, who moved the seat of the Holy Roman Empire back to Prague, inviting foreign artists, architects, and alchemists with him; it shows the importance of Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose military success in the Thirty Years’ War heralded a massive building campaign that helped usher in the Baroque age. When the book moves to the period commonly understood as the Baroque, it discusses leading Czech architects, such as Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, but also focuses on lesser-known regional architects and the important Italian architects and artists that left their mark on Bohemia. The architectural and artistic developments are all set among the broader cultural and social context of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book contains extensive pictorial documentation—most impressively Vladimír Uher and Martin Micka’s gorgeous architectural photographs.

c o n t e n t s

Prologue: The Renaissance Roots of the Architecture of the Modern Era in Bohemia
1  The Architecture of the Rudolfine Court
2  Art in the Thirty Years’ War: Lost and Found
3  From Lurago to Mathey: The Crystallization of an Architectural Language in the Later 17th Century
4  The Era of Great Themes and Groundbreaking Innovators
5  Architectural Synthesis in the Work of Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer
6  Between the Baroque and the Neoclassical: The Era of Architectural Plurality
7  Art, Life, Culture: Contexts of Baroque Architecture

From Harvard UP:

Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, translated by Peter Lewis (Cambridge: Balknap Press, 2025), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0674296107, $30.

Immanuel Kant is undoubtedly the most important philosopher of the modern era. His Critique of Pure Reason, “categorical imperative,” and conception of perpetual peace in the global order decisively influenced both intellectual history and twentieth-century politics, shaping everything from the German Constitution to the United Nations Charter.

Renowned philosopher Marcus Willaschek explains why, three centuries after Kant’s birth, his reflections on democracy, beauty, nature, morality, and the limits of human knowledge remain so profoundly relevant. Weaving biographical and historical context together with exposition of key ideas, Willaschek emphasizes three central features of Kant’s theory and method. First, Kant combines seemingly incompatible positions to show how their insights can be reconciled. Second, he demonstrates that it is not only human thinking that must adjust to the realities of the world; the world must also be fitted to the structures of our thinking. Finally, he overcomes the traditional opposition between thought and action by putting theory at the service of practice.

In Kant: A Revolution in Thinking, even readers having no prior acquaintance with Kant’s ideas or with philosophy generally will find an adroit introduction to the Prussian polymath’s oeuvre, beginning with his political arguments, expanding to his moral theory, and finally moving to his more abstract considerations of natural science, epistemology, and metaphysics. Along the way, Kant himself emerges from beneath his famed works, revealing a magnetic personality, a clever ironist, and a man deeply engaged with his contemporary world.

Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University, Frankfurt, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science, where he is responsible for the German standard edition of Kant’s works. The author of four books, he is also coeditor of the three-volume Kant-Lexikon.

From Yale UP:

Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History, 1750–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0300264388, $65. Series: The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History.

In the decades after 1750, an increasing number of former medical students from the University of Edinburgh construed humanity as a subject of both intellectual curiosity and colonial interest. They drew on a shared educational background, blending medicine with natural history and moral philosophy, in a range of encounters with non-European and Indigenous peoples across the globe whom they began to classify as races. Focusing on a surprising number of these understudied students, this book reveals the gradual predominance of race in Scottish Enlightenment thought.

Teaching provided a toolbox of concepts and theories for students who went on to careers as military and naval surgeons, colonial administrators, and natural historians. While some, such as Mungo Park—who traveled in Africa—are well known, many others such as the long-term residents in the Russian Empire, Matthew Guthrie and his wife, Maria Guthrie, or the Caribbean botanist Alexander Anderson are less remembered. Among this group were those such as the Pacific traveler Archibald Menzies and the circumnavigator of Australia, Robert Brown, who are known primarily as botanists rather than as ethnographers. Together they formed a global network of colonial travelers and natural historians sharing a common educational background and a growing interest in race.

Linda Andersson Burnett is a senior lecturer in the Department of History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University, Sweden. Bruce Buchan is a professor in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia.

From Harvard UP:

Miranda Spieler, Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0674986541, $40.

A pioneering biographical study of enslaved people and their struggle for freedom in prerevolutionary Paris, by an award-winning historian of France and the French Empire.

In the decades leading up to the French Revolution, when Paris was celebrated as an oasis of liberty, slaves fled there, hoping to be freed. They pictured Paris as a refuge from France’s notorious slave-trading ports.

The French were late to the slave trade, but they dominated the global market in enslaved people by the late 1780s. This explosive growth transformed Paris, the cultural capital of the Enlightenment, into a dangerous place for people in bondage. Those seeking freedom in Paris faced manhunts, arrest, and deportation. Some put their faith in lawyers, believing the city’s courts would free them. Examining the lives of those whose dashed hopes and creative persistence capture the spirit of the era, Miranda Spieler brings to light a hidden story of slavery and the struggle for freedom.

Fugitive slaves collided with spying networks, nosy neighbors, and overlapping judicial authorities. Their clandestine lives left a paper trail. In a feat of historical detective work, Spieler retraces their steps and brings to light the new racialized legal culture that permeated every aspect of everyday life. She pieces together vivid, granular portraits of men, women, and children who came from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean. We learn of their strategies and hiding places, their family histories and relationships to well-known Enlightenment figures. Slaves in Paris is a history of hunted people. It is also a tribute to their resilience.

Miranda Spieler is the author of Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana. She is Professor of History and Politics at the American University of Paris.

Distributed by Yale UP:

Sam Smiles, Turner and the Slave Trade (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2025), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107512, £30 / $40.

While J. M. W. Turner’s iconic painting The Slave Ship (1840) is celebrated as a powerful denunciation of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, his personal and professional ties to slavery tell a more nuanced story. This book provides the first detailed analysis of Turner’s evolving responses to slavery over his lifetime, from his financial investment in a Jamaican property worked by enslaved labourers to his later denunciation of the trade in his art. Drawing on extensive archival research, Turner and the Slave Trade traces the artist’s interactions with patrons tied to the plantation economy and examines the impact of abolitionist discourse on his work. Key chapters investigate The Slave Ship, its inspiration, and its contested interpretations, while situating Turner within broader debates about art, slavery and shifting public sentiment. Offering a nuanced understanding of how art engages with history’s most urgent issues, this important new study presents Turner as an exceptional yet complex figure, whose legacy is intertwined with the institution of slavery and its eventual abolition.

Sam Smiles is honorary professor at the University of Exeter, and the author of The Late Works of J. M. W. Turner: The Artist and his Critics (2020).

From The University of Chicago Press:

Stephanie O’Rourke, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and Its Colonial Networks, 1780–1850 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0226841557, $45.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European artists confronted the emergence of a new way of thinking about and treating the Earth and its resources. Centered on extraction, this new paradigm was characterized by large-scale efforts to transform and monetize the physical environment across the globe. With this book, Stephanie O’Rourke considers such practices, looking at what was at stake in visual representations of the natural world during the first decades of Europe’s industrial revolutions. O’Rourke argues that key developments in the European landscape painting tradition were profoundly shaped by industries including mining and timber harvesting, as well as by interlinked ideas about race, climate, and waste. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, Germany, and across Europe’s colonial networks, she explores how artworks and technical illustrations portrayed landscapes in ways that promoted—or pushed against—the logic of resource extraction.

Stephanie O’Rourke is a senior lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Art, Science, and the Body in Early Romanticism.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  The French Landscape and the Colonial Forest
2  Mining Romanticism and the Abyss of Time
3  How to Scale a Volcano
4  Human Resources
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index