Enfilade

From De Luca Editori d’Arte:

Clare Hornsby and Caroline Barron, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Etchings from the Research Collections of the British School at Rome (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-8865576403, €60.

This book presents some of the most significant objects in the Research Collections of the British School at Rome (BSR), gathered by the School’s first student and third Director, the archaeologist Thomas Ashby (1874–1931). Ashby bought a large number of early books and prints that now make up the basis of the Special Collections, including a substantial number—around 150—loose etched prints and several complete printed books made by the multi-talented artist, architect, and printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Venice 1720–Rome 1778).

The etchings come from all stages of Piranesi’s career and reflect many aspects of his vast output. They have been the subject of exhibitions organised by the British School, in Rome and elsewhere, and they feature in online catalogues, but this book is the first produced by BSR to offer an analysis of a selection of the loose prints, 104 in total. The focus of the catalogue is the archaeological and topographical subject matter of the prints, as well as an examination of the text that accompanies them in the form of detailed labels and captions. Piranesi’s print output has become widely known in the last century or so and his name has come to be associated with drama, exaggeration, fantasy and even mystery. This book takes a close look at the prints and reveals a partial corrective to that view: Piranesi the antiquarian and archaeologist emerges as protagonist here, highlighting just one of the rich variety of responses to the ancient past that formed the cultural environment of Grand Tour Rome.

Clare Hornsby is an art and architectural historian and a Research Fellow at BSR. She has published on the Grand Tour, the antiquities market between Rome and London, and on eighteenth-century architecture. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a member of the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma, and of the Scientific Committee of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi.

Caroline Barron is an ancient historian who works on the cultural and historical significance of Latin epigraphy, from antiquity to the present day. A monograph on the collecting of Latin inscriptions in the eighteenth-century is forthcoming, and her current research project is on the history of epigraphic forgery. She is Assistant Professor in Classics (Roman History) in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Research Fellow at BSR.

This brief publication (in Italian) is available as a free PDF from De Luca Editori d’Arte; the English abstract is included below:

Sabina d’Inzillo Carranza de Cavi, Glama Ströberle tra Roma e Lisbona: Vieira, Benefial, Masucci e la pietra rossa (Rome: De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2025), 31 pages, ISBN: 978-8865576502 (PDF file), free.

This essay, which thoroughly analyzes three notebooks now in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, focuses on the graphic style of João Glama Ströberle, a Portuguese painter of German descent, a pupil of Vieira Lusitano, and a master of Vieira Portuense. His training in Rome from 1734 to 1741 with talented artists such as the non-conformist Marco Benefial and the Marattesque Agostino Masucci made him an important trait d’union between Italy and Portugal, where he contributed to the transfer of the principles of life drawing and academic draughtsmanship. The essay discusses the graphic techniques learned in Rome, paying particular attention to the use of red chalk in the 18th century, between Rome and Lisbon.

From The Getty:

Yvonne Markowitz and Susanne Gänsicke, with contributions by Emily Stoehrer, Beyond Adornment: Jewelry and Identity in Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2025), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-1606069622, $40.

Why do people wear jewelry? What meaning does it hold for the wearer? And what does the wearer hope it will convey to those they encounter—or to someone viewing their image decades, even centuries, later?

Artistic renderings of the human figure—in portraiture, sculpture, and other media—in a range of allegorical, historical, and religious images often showcase jewelry. The ornaments depicted in such designs offer an abundance of information that not only heightens our understanding of the subject but also provides insights into the imagination of the artist. Jewelry enhances our enjoyment of works of art because it is visually compelling, sensuous, and laden with an array of associations and symbolic meanings. Bringing together spectacular and significant art objects depicting figures wearing sumptuous personal adornments that define who they are within the specific milieus in which they lived, this richly illustrated and accessible volume represents a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the ways in which jewelry can be studied and understood.

Susanne Gänsicke is senior conservator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Yvonne J. Markowitz is the Rita J. Kaplan and Susan B. Kaplan Curator Emerita of Jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

c o n t e n t s

Timothy Potts — Foreword
Introduction — Yvonne Markowitz and Susanne Gänsicke
1  Susanne Gänsicke — Projecting a Powerful Presence
2  Susanne Gänsicke — In Search of the Spiritual
3  Yvonne Markowitz — For Those We Love and Mourn
4  Susanne Gänsicke — An Illustrious Past Serving the Present
5  Yvonne Markowitz — Fantasizing the Present
Emily Stoehrer — The Theater of Everyday Life: Dressing the Part

About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index

From Harvard UP:

Robert Darnton, The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0674299887, $27.

A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state kept them under constant surveillance. A few became celebrities, but most were hacks, and none could survive without patrons or second jobs.

The Writer’s Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography to take the measure of ‘literary France’ as a whole. Historian Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they fit into the social order—or didn’t. Reassessing long-standing narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. And while literary France contributed to the downfall of the ancien régime, it did so through its example more than its ideals: the contradiction inherent in the Republic of Letters—in theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected clique—dramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system.

Darnton brings his trademark rigor and investigative eye to the character of literary France, from the culture war that pitted the ‘decadent’ Voltaire against the ‘radical’ Rousseau to struggling scribblers, booksellers, censors, printers, and royal spies. Their lives, little understood until now, afford rare insight into the ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.

Robert Darnton is the author of numerous award-winning books on French cultural history, including The Revolutionary Temper. A MacArthur Fellow, chevalier in the Légion d’honneur, and winner of the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, Emeritus, at Harvard University.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Paths to Grub Street
1  Careers: The Ancien Régime
2  The Facts of Literary Life
3  Contemporary Views
4  Careers: Revolutionary Denouements
Conclusion

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

From the National Trust:

Rachel Conroy, with an introduction by Sandi Toksvig, Women Artists & Designers at the National Trust (National Trust, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0707804699, £15.

From the magnificent gardens created by Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst to a striking self-portrait by Angelica Kauffman, the elegant, mass-produced ceramics of Susie Cooper and a model of a Palmyran temple by lady’s maid Elizabeth Ratcliffe, this beautifully illustrated book explores the lives and work of women whose creativity has shaped the National Trust’s collections and, often, the experience of visitors to its places. Spanning six centuries, this book takes a closer look at some of the many women artists and designers whose lives are connected to National Trust places or whose work is represented in its vast collections. The selection features both talented amateur artists and professionals who have shaped the art-historical canon—such as Eileen Agar, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, Rosalba Carriera, and Barbara Hepworth—focusing on their unique contributions and achievements across a range of disciplines, including garden and interior design, photography, illustration, enamelling, fine art, studio pottery, and textiles.

Rachel Conroy is a Senior National Curator at the National Trust and loves telling stories through objects. She has worked as a curator specialising in British decorative arts since 2004, curating many exhibitions and displays. Having contributed articles to numerous specialist journals, Rachel recently co-authored a book on historic Welsh ceramics.
Sandi Toksvig OBE is a comedian, broadcaster, campaigner, and author. Her broadcasting career has included QI, The Great British Bake Off, The News Quiz, and Call My Bluff. An activist for gender equality, Sandi co-founded the Women’s Equality Party in 2015. She is a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where she has delivered lectures on women in art.

Published by Pallas Athene and distributed by Simon & Schuster:

Louis-Sébastian Mercier, Neighbours and Rivals: An Eighteenth-Century Journey between Paris and London, translated by Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin (London: Pallas Athene, 2025), 284 pages, ISBN: 978-1843682707, £25 / $33.

The great French journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s descriptions of an optimistic, utopian 18th-century London, translated by Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) first traveled to London and began recording his impressions in 1780. An exemplar of a new form of journalistic, reflective literature, his account presents emotive representations of the city as collections of experiences, habits, and personalities. And differently from Dickens’s London or Baudelaire’s Paris, with their contrasts of opulence and misery, Mercier describes a less familiar urban environment—more optimistic, perhaps even utopian. His version of London is, in fact, a projection of his philosophical imagination—not simply a rounded portrait but also a reflection of what he hoped Paris could become. For this first publication in English, Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin’s translation preserves the life and humor of Mercier’s text. It is illustrated with contemporary images, with an emphasis on Thomas Rowlandson and Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, the first Parisian flâneur-artist.

Jonathan Conlin, a senior lecturer at the University of Southampton, specializes in modern British cultural history from the 18th century to the present, with a focus on urban history. His previous books include The Nation’s Mantelpiece, Evolution and the Victorians, and Civilisation. Laurent Turcot is a professor of history at l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, specializing in the 16th to the 19th century, particularly urban culture and leisure.