Enfilade

Constructed between 1848 and 1884—precisely when Mount Vernon was being preserved as a crucial part of America’s history—the obelisk at 555 feet high remains the tallest stone structure in the world. From Bloomsbury:

John Steele Gordon, Washington’s Monument and the Fascinating History of the Obelisk (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 224 pages, ISBN: 978  1620  406502, $27.

Conceived soon after the American Revolution ended, the great monument to George Washington was not finally completed until almost a century later; the great obelisk was finished in 1884, and remains the tallest stone structure in the world at 555 feet. The story behind its construction is a largely untold and intriguing piece of American history, which acclaimed historian John Steele Gordon relates with verve, connecting it to the colorful saga of the ancient obelisks of Egypt.

Nobody knows how many obelisks were crafted in ancient Egypt, or even exactly how they were created and erected since they are made out of hard granite and few known tools of the time were strong enough to work granite. Generally placed in pairs at the entrances to temples, they have in modern times been ingeniously transported around the world to Istanbul, Paris, London, New York, and many other locations. Their stories illuminate that of the Washington Monument, once again open to the public following earthquake damage, and offer a new appreciation for perhaps the most iconic memorial in the country.

John Steele Gordon is one of America’s leading historians, especially in the realm of business and financial history. He is the author of The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, Hamilton’s Blessing, A Thread Across the Ocean, An Empire of Wealth, and The Great Game. He has written for Forbes, Worth, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and his columns appear regularly in The Wall Street Journal. He lives in North Salem, New York.

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From Princeton UP:

Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 320 pages, ISBN: 978  0691  171937, $60 / £50.

What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition.

Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people. In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting. Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years.

Craig Clunas is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford. His books include Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China; Empire of Great Brightness: Visual and Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China; and Art in China.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Beginning and Ending
2  The Gentleman
3  The Emperor
4  The Merchant
5  The Nation
6  The People
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photography and Copyright Credits

From Princeton UP:

Michel Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 216 pages, ISBN: 978  06911  72774, $40 / £33.

The color red has represented many things, from the life force and the divine to love, lust, and anger. Up through the Middle Ages, red held a place of privilege in the Western world. For many cultures, red was not just one color of many but rather the only color worthy enough to be used for social purposes. In some languages, the word for red was the same as the word for color. The first color developed for painting and dying, red became associated in antiquity with war, wealth, and power. In the medieval period, red held both religious significance, as the color of the blood of Christ and the fires of Hell, and secular meaning, as a symbol of love, glory, and beauty. Yet during the Protestant Reformation, red began to decline in status. Viewed as indecent and immoral and linked to luxury and the excesses of the Catholic Church, red fell out of favor. After the French Revolution, red gained new respect as the color of progressive movements and radical left-wing politics.

In this beautifully illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau, the acclaimed author of Blue, Black, and Green, now masterfully navigates centuries of symbolism and complex meanings to present the fascinating and sometimes controversial history of the color red. Pastoureau illuminates red’s evolution through a diverse selection of captivating images, including the cave paintings of Lascaux, the works of Renaissance masters, and the modern paintings and stained glass of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers.

Michel Pastoureau is a historian and director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études de la Sorbonne in Paris. A specialist in the history of colors, symbols, and heraldry, he is the author of many books, including Green, Black, and Blue (all Princeton) and The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

From Princeton UP:

Michael Lewis, City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 256 pages, ISBN: 978  0691  171814, $45 / £38.

The vision of Utopia obsessed the nineteenth-century mind, shaping art, literature, and especially town planning. In City of Refuge, Michael Lewis takes readers across centuries and continents to show how Utopian town planning produced a distinctive type of settlement characterized by its square plan, collective ownership of properties, and communal dormitories. Some of these settlements were sanctuaries from religious persecution, like those of the German Rappites, French Huguenots, and American Shakers, while others were sanctuaries from the Industrial Revolution, like those imagined by Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and other Utopian visionaries.

Because of their differences in ideology and theology, these settlements have traditionally been viewed separately, but Lewis shows how they are part of a continuous intellectual tradition that stretches from the early Protestant Reformation into modern times. Through close readings of architectural plans and archival documents, many previously unpublished, he shows the network of connections between these seemingly disparate Utopian settlements—including even such well-known town plans as those of New Haven and Philadelphia.

The most remarkable aspect of the city of refuge is the inventive way it fused its eclectic sources, ranging from the encampments of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible to the detailed social program of Thomas More’s Utopia to modern thought about education, science, and technology. Delving into the historical evolution and antecedents of Utopian towns and cities, City of Refuge alters notions of what a Utopian community can and should be.

Michael J. Lewis is the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History at Williams College. His books include Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind, The Gothic Revival, and American Art and Architecture. His essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

C O N T E N T S

1  The Idea of the City of Refuge
2  The Sacred Squareness of Cities
3  The Protestant Tempering of Utopia
4  Christianopolis
5  The Lord’s Grove
6  Harmony
7  Economy
8  Conclusion

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments

From Princeton UP:

Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 352 pages, ISBN: 978  06911  72279, $65 / £55.

Delving into the intersections between artistic images and philosophical knowledge in Europe from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, The Art of Philosophy shows that the making and study of visual art functioned as important methods of philosophical thinking and instruction. From frontispieces of books to monumental prints created by philosophers in collaboration with renowned artists, Susanna Berger examines visual representations of philosophy and overturns prevailing assumptions about the limited function of the visual in European intellectual history.

Rather than merely illustrating already existing philosophical concepts, visual images generated new knowledge for both Aristotelian thinkers and anti-Aristotelians, such as Descartes and Hobbes. Printmaking and drawing played a decisive role in discoveries that led to a move away from the authority of Aristotle in the seventeenth century. Berger interprets visual art from printed books, student lecture notebooks, alba amicorum (friendship albums), broadsides, and paintings, and examines the work of such artists as Pietro Testa, Léonard Gaultier, Abraham Bosse, Dürer, and Rembrandt. In particular, she focuses on the rise and decline of the ‘plural image’, a genre that was popular among early modern philosophers. Plural images brought multiple images together on the same page, often in order to visualize systems of logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, or moral philosophy. Featuring previously unpublished prints and drawings from the early modern period and lavish gatefolds, The Art of Philosophy reveals the essential connections between visual commentary and philosophical thought.

Susanna Berger is assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction
1  Apin’s Cabinet of Printed Curiosities
2  Thinking through Plural Images of Logic
3  The Visible Order of Student Lecture Notebooks
4  Visual Thinking in Logic Notebooks and Alba amicorum
5  The Generation of Art as the Generation of Philosophy

Appendix 1 Catalogue of Surviving Impressions of Philosophical Plural Images
Appendix 2 Transcriptions of the Texts Inscribed onto Philosophical Plural Images
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits

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From the newsletter of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Salon 379 (7 February 2017) . . .

Richard Goddard, ‘Drawing on Copper’: The Basire Family of Copper-Plate Engravers and their Works (Maastricht, 2017), 332 pages, ISBN: 978  946159  5911.

Julian Pooley FSA writes with news of a book about copper-plate engraving. Four generations of the Basire family of skilled printmakers, draughtsmen, and engravers, spanning 1730–1883, were celebrated for their skill in drawing, on copper and stone, accurate representations of monuments and antiquities. Their pictures can be found throughout Archaeologia, Vetusta Monumenta, and many of the most celebrated works of 18th- and 19th-century topography and antiquarianism (James Basire, 1730–1802, was engraver to the Society of Antiquaries for 20 years). Richard Goddard, a descendent of the Basire family, has published a meticulously researched and beautifully written study of their careers, interests and influence called ‘Drawing on Copper’: The Basire Family of Copper-Plate Engravers and their Works. It is beautifully illustrated by over 70 plates, says Pooley, and has six chapters assessing the medium of engraving and careers of successive members of the Basire family. Details can be found on the author’s website, where a PDF of the book can be downloaded.

From Penn State University Press:

Heather McPherson, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 272 pages, ISBN: 978  0271  074078, $90.

In this volume, Heather McPherson examines the connections among portraiture, theater, the visual arts, and fame to shed light on the emergence of modern celebrity culture in eighteenth-century England. Popular actors in Georgian London, such as David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, and John Philip Kemble, gave larger-than-life performances at Drury Lane and Covent Garden; their offstage personalities garnered as much attention through portraits painted by leading artists, sensational stories in the press, and often-vicious caricatures. Likewise, artists such as Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence figured prominently outside their studios—in polite society and the emerging public sphere. McPherson considers this increasing interest in theatrical and artistic celebrities and explores the ways in which aesthetics, cultural politics, and consumption combined during this period to form a media-driven celebrity culture that is surprisingly similar to celebrity obsessions in the world today.

This richly researched study draws on a wide variety of period sources, from newspaper reviews and satirical pamphlets to caricatures and paintings by Reynolds and Lawrence as well as Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, and Angelica Kauffman. These transport the reader to eighteenth-century London and the dynamic venues where art and celebrity converged with culture and commerce. Interweaving art history, history of performance, and cultural studies, Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons offers important insights into the intersecting worlds of artist and actor, studio and stage, high art and popular visual culture.

Heather McPherson is Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Studio and Stage in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons
1  Garrick, Reynolds, and the Apotheosis of Performance
2  Portraiture, Public Display, and the Politics of Representation
3  Staging Celebrity: Siddons and Tragic Pallor
4  Targeting Celebrity: Caricature and Cultural Politics
5  Artistic Afterlives and the Historiography of Fame

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

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