Enfilade

From Penn State UP:

Emily Neumeier, Architectural Revolution on the Ottoman Frontier: Greece and Albania in the Age of Ali Pasha (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2025), 232 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0271097749, $115.

In the early nineteenth century, the most consequential developments in Ottoman architecture were taking place not in Istanbul but in the farthest reaches of imperial territory. Emily Neumeier investigates this wider phenomenon through a consideration of the architecture of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, one of the most prolific patrons in the history of the Ottoman Empire, who undertook a building program so ambitious that it ultimately got him killed.

Ali Pasha is still a household name in present-day Greece and Albania, where he served as Ottoman governor from 1788 to 1822. To consolidate his rule over an incredibly diverse population, the governor set out on a sweeping building program that included mosques, palaces, military fortifications, dervish lodges, and even Orthodox Christian monasteries. Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources, Neumeier reveals how Ali Pasha’s buildings shifted the sociopolitical order by testing the standards of patronage established by the imperial court and relocating administrative authority from center to province. To reconstruct the world that Ali Pasha built, Neumeier draws from both extensive fieldwork and abundant archival material, whose far-flung nature—from Istanbul to London—reflects the impressively wide scope of Ali Pasha’s influence.

Rigorously researched and packed with fascinating stories, this book presents an innovative spatial history of the Ottoman frontier during the age of revolutions, a pivotal period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when there was no obvious blueprint for power. It will be of interest to specialists in art and architectural history, the Ottoman Empire, and Mediterranean, Islamic, and Modern Greek studies.

Emily Neumeier is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Temple University.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations and Transliterations

Introduction
1  ‘Amidst No Common Pomp’: Redefining the Governor’s Palace
2  Revising the Rules of Engagement: Fortifications on a Liquid Frontier
3  Building Local Support: Patronage for Multiconfessional Communities
4  Poetic Justice: Experiments in Architectural Epigraphy
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Distributed by Simon & Schuster:

Genevieve Wheeler Brown, Beyond Blue and White: The Hidden History of Delftware and the Women Behind the Iconic Ceramic (New York: Pegasus Books, 2025), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1639368914, $35.

An absorbing work of cultural history that reveals the stories behind one of the world’s most coveted and beloved ceramic.

When over seventy-five pieces of rare and intriguing 17th- and 18th-century Delftware are rediscovered in an historic Manhattan townhouse, decorative art advisor and writer Genevieve Wheeler Brown quickly recognizes that, together, these pieces tell an amazing story. What begins as a curatorial exercise quickly evolves not only into an exploration of this colorful, expressive, and sometimes even humorous decorative art, coveted for hundreds of years, but also an unexpected uncovering of forceful female lives yet untold.

Connecting the accounts of women across centuries, Beyond Blue and White allows us to craft a more complete picture of female experience through the lens of material culture. We meet female Delftware makers, including Barbara Rotteveel founder of “The Three Bells” Delftware factory in 1671. We are introduced to female Delftware patrons such as Queen Mary II, who found her means of expression while creating a vogue in the 17th century for Delft blue and white across royal courts. And then there are the female collectors beginning in the 19th century who saw the artistry and craft in these ceramics others had overlooked. Foremost among them was Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II who came together with fellow New York women and laid the groundwork for women in the museum world while preserving decorative arts with an educational mission.

With illustrations of period objects, documents, maps, paintings, prints and drawings, Beyond Blue and White is a colorful celebration of an iconic decorative art and dynamic women living in extraordinary times. Wheeler Brown’s rich narrative encourages us to see beyond the dazzling cobalt glaze of Delftware to consider that these vessels are also our connection to a history with a fascinating group of women at its center.

As a decorative art advisor and writer with over thirty years in the art world, including a decade with Christie’s in New York and London, Genevieve Wheeler Brown has been actively involved in the community of Delftware. She has also participated on the Antiques Roadshow as an appraiser with an eye out for overlooked ‘treasure’. In her role, she has held innumerable objects, from fake Stradivari violins to gold-mounted Faberge eggs, considering their value but also the stories they can tell.

From The London Topographical Society:

Sheila O’Connell and Laurence Worms, eds., with an introduction by John Montague, a checklist of Rocque’s London maps by Ashley Baynton-Williams, and an index by Roger Cline, The A–Z of Georgian London and Its Environs: John Rocque’s Maps, 1746–1747 (London: The London Topographical Society, 2026), 207 pages, £23.

This publication reproduces at about fifty per cent actual size John Rocque’s two great maps of London in the 1740s: the 24-sheet Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster and Borough of Southwark and the 16-sheet Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark with the Country near ten Miles round.

John Montague’s introduction tells the complex story of the development of the maps, incorporating new information on Rocque’s early life courtesy of Sandra Robinson. Roger Cline has produced an index of 6000 place names, over 250 places of worship, and sixty-four estates outside the urban centre.

Many of you will already know about the New Books Network, but if not, this conversation between Meredith Gamer and Kelsey Brosnan is a fine introduction! As described by the Wikipedia entry for the network:

The New Books Network (NBN) is a podcast network featuring interviews with scholars, researchers, and writers about their new books. Most of the books the NBN covers are non-fiction and published by university or independent scholarly presses. The mission of the NBN is public education. The NBN is the largest book-focused podcast enterprise in the world. It features over 130 ‘organic’ author-interview podcasts (“New Books in…”) produced in-house and over 100 ‘hosted’ podcasts produced by university presses, academic institutes, and scholars. The NBN publishes 70 episodes per week and has published over 30,000 episodes to date, all of which are permanently accessible for free on the NBN website. The NBN reaches 200,000 listeners monthly; those listeners download approximately one million episodes each month. . . .

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From the NBN website:

Podcast | Meredith Gamer, City of the Gallows, hosted by Kelsey Brosnan on the art channel of the New Books Network (27 July 2026), 62 minutes.

Meredith Gamer, City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts—from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang—it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day.

Kelsey Brosnan is an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. Her book on the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster was published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in 2026.

From Yale UP:

Andrei Pesic, The Enlightenment in Concert: Music, Markets, and Secularization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2026), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300251579, $65.

A new interpretation of the Age of Enlightenment through the lens of music, institutions, and markets

The birth of public concerts changed Europe’s cultural landscape by introducing sacred music to secular spaces. The Concert spirituel in Paris is a landmark in this Enlightenment transition: the first long-lasting concert series, it began in 1725 with performances that mostly featured sacred music composed for the royal chapel in Versailles. By the time the Concert ended, in 1790, it was presenting a variety of musical genres, and its sacred repertoire had declined precipitously. The Concert had evolved from an institution dependent on the church calendar and the court into a business in a competitive market. Andrei Pesic explores the dynamics of secularization during the Enlightenment, including the unintended consequences of linking music to commerce, social hierarchy, and religious practices. He reveals the role of public concerts in a burgeoning marketplace for entertainment—and the expansion of secular customs and diminishment of religious constraints—in places as varied as Paris, Berlin, and Haiti.

Andrei Pesic is assistant professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. His research has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

From The Walpole Society:

The 2026 Berger Prize longlist was announced on 8 July at the Warburg Institute, by Dr Jonny Yarker, Chair of the Berger Prize judging panel. In addition, Laura Freeman, Chief Art Critic at The Times, and shortlisted author for the 2024 Berger Prize for her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, delivered a talk, “Doorstepping: House Museums and Shaking Hands with the Past.”

Here are the fifteen titles, with the winning title scheduled to be announced on December 3.

• Kate Anderson, Catriona Murray, Jemma Field, Anna Groundwater, Karen Hearn, and Liz Louis, Art & Court of James VI & I (National Galleries Scotland).

• Christine Casey, Architecture and Artifice: The Crafted Surface in Eighteenth-Century Building Practice (Paul Mellon Centre).

• Apurba Chatterjee, An Empire of Images: Visual Culture and the British in India (Cambridge University Press).

• Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi, Irascible: The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso (Yale University Press).

• Amy Concannon, Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals (Tate Publishing).

• Alexis Goodin et al, A Room of Her Own: Women Artist Activists in Britain, 1875–1945 (Clark Art Institute).

• John Hilary, Magnates and Masterpieces: The German-Jewish Collectors of Edwardian Britain (Yale University Press).

• Peter Humfrey, Regency Collectors: Buying and Displaying Old Masters in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Paul Holberton Publishing).

• James King, ‘Our Little Gang’: The Lives of the Vorticists (Reaktion Books).

• Catherine Lampert and Toby Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings (Modern Art Press).

• Jonathan Marsden, European Sculpture in the Collection of His Majesty the King (Modern Art Press).

• Stephanie O’Rourke, Picturing Landscape in an Age of Extraction: Europe and Its Colonial Networks, 1780–1850 (University of Chicago Press).

• Sam Smiles, Turner and the Slave Trade (Paul Mellon Centre).

• Anne Stutchbury, Tessa Wild, Stephen Ponder, and Alice Strickland, Standen: Philip Webb, Morris & Co., and the Creation of an Arts and Crafts Home (Yale University Press).

• Ian Warrell, with a contribution by Gillian Forrester, Turner (Yale Center for British Art).

From Penguin Random House:

Thomas Laqueur, The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History (New York: Penguin Press, 2026), 400 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0593652794, $45.

From award-winning cultural historian Thomas Laqueur, an enlightening and unique meditation on the presence of dogs in art, from the Paleolithic era to the present, and what our intertwined human-canine relationship reveals about human nature

Long before the phrase man’s best friend became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In The Dog’s Gaze, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories.

Dogs have been ubiquitous in the worldmaking of visual artists as far back as the Paleolithic age. Looking across the Western tradition, from Giotto to Goya and Rubens to Rego, Laqueur shows what their presence—as hunting partners, beloved friends, and even conduits to the afterlife—reveals about our own ways of seeing and how we want to be remembered. Far from being mere motifs, dogs are an integral and intentional element of the images in which they appear: They provide narrative coherence; they look out and bear witness, often on the artist’s behalf; they illuminate our understanding of morality and melancholy and some, like us, become celebrities. Indeed, as Laqueur reveals, dogs in art are our social doppelgängers, our companions in looking and being.

Richly illustrated and lovingly written, The Dog’s Gaze is a unique visual history that examines the remarkable social bond between two species, shedding new light on the human condition through the eyes of our canine companions.

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. An internationally renowned cultural historian, he has published books on topics ranging from working class religion and education to the history of sexuality and the body. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and recipient of the 2007 Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award and the 2016 Cundill History Prize. His work has been translated into twenty languages.