Enfilade

From Rizzoli:

Alain Baraton, The Gardener of Versailles: My Life in the World’s Grandest Garden, translated by Christopher Brent Murray (New York: Rizzoli, 2014), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-0847842681, $27.

For gardening aficionados and Francophiles, a love letter to the Versailles Palace and grounds, from the man who knows them best. In Alain Baraton’s Versailles, every grove tells a story. As the gardener-in-chief, Baraton lives on its grounds, and since 1982 he has devoted his life to the gardens, orchards, and fields that were loved by France’s kings and queens as much as the palace itself. His memoir captures the essence of the connection between gardeners and the earth they tend, no matter how humble or grand.

With the charm of a natural storyteller, Baraton weaves his own path as a gardener with the life of the Versailles grounds, and his role overseeing its team of eighty gardeners tending to 350,000 trees and thirty miles of walkways on 2,100 acres. He richly evokes this legendary place and the history it has witnessed but also its quieter side that he feels privileged to know. The same gardens that hosted the lavish lawn parties of Louis XIV and the momentous meeting between Marie Antoinette and the Cardinal de Rohan remain enchanted, private places where visitors try to get themselves locked in at night, lovers go looking for secluded hideaways, and elegant grandmothers secretly make cuttings to take back to their own gardens. A tremendous best seller in France, The Gardener of Versailles gives an unprecedentedly intimate view of one of the grandest places on earth.

Alain Baraton is the best-selling author of many books on gardening and the host of weekly gardening programs on French radio and television.

The particular appeal of this book lies in the fact that the gardens included are accessible to the public. From Frances Lincoln:

Jenny Condie, with photographs by Alex Ramsay, The Gardens of Venice and the Veneto (London: Frances Lincoln, 2013), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0711234048, £35 / $60.

The Gardens of Venice and the Veneto draws together an amazing variety of 22 spellbinding garden retreats, from monastery gardens quietly cultivated in the islands of the lagoon to magnificent villas on the Brenta Canal, and baroque masterpieces in the hills beyond. Highlights include an eerie Masonic garden complete with gothic chapel and cavernous grottoes, a pleasure garden made for his workers by a benevolent nineteenth-century industrialist, and a flower-filled delight by the banks of the Grand Canal.

This is a book of ravishing images and intriguing stories. The garden behind Henry James’s Aspern Papers is here, along with the garden which so beguiled Margaret Symonds, the young English author of Days Spent on a Doge’s Farm. With an emphasis on gardens that can be visited, longtime resident Jenny Condie elucidates the dynastic triumphs, the reversals of fortune, and the shifts in taste and influence which have shaped these
extraordinary places.

Jenny Condie was born in Edinburgh and took a degree in Italian and History of Art at UCL. She has translated a number of substantial works in the area of art and literary history and criticism, and she has also written in Italian as a journalist. More recently she has worked with the Fondazione di Venezia to originate and run workshops on English Literature for children in local schools. Jenny Condie has lived in Venice since 2002 with her husband, the novelist Enrico Palandri, and their three children.

Alex Ramsay lives in the Welsh Marches. He is a photographer of international repute whose work has appeared in many books published by Frances Lincoln, including Italian Gardens: A Cultural History (recently reissued in paperback) and Italy’s Private Gardens: An Inside View, both written by his wife, the garden historian Helena Attlee.

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C O N T E N T S

The Gardens of Venice
Island gardens
• The Giudecca
Religious gardens
• San Francesco della Vigna
• Ca’ Morosini del Giardin
Palazzi gardens
• Ca’ Rezzonico
• Ca’ Tron
• Ca’ Zenobio
• Palazzo Cappello Malipiero Barnabò
• Palazzo Contarini Dal Zaffo
• Palazzo Rizzo Patarol
• Palazzo Soranzo Cappello
• Querini Stampaglia

The Gardens of the Brenta Canal
•Villa Brusoni Scalella, Dolo
• Villa Pisani, Stra

The Gardens of Padua
• Orto botanico, Padua
• Ca’ Marcello, Levada di Piombino Dese
• Villa Barbarigo Pizzoni-Ardemani, Valsanzibio
• Villa Ca’ Dolfin, Marchiori, Lendinara s
• Villa Emo, Rivella di Monselice
• Villa Pisani Bolognesi Scalabrin, Vescovana
• Villa Valmarana a Citadella Vigodarzere, Saonara

The Gardens of Treviso
• Villa Barbaro di Maser

The Gardens of Verona
• Giardino Giusti, Verona
• Giardino di Pojega, Villa Rizzardi, Negrar
• Villa Allegri Arvedi, Cuzzano s
• Villa della Torre, Fumane
• Villa Trissino Marzotto, Trissino

The Gardens of Vicenza
• Villa Fracanzan Piovene, Orgiana
• Villa Godi Malinverni and Villa Piovene Porto-Godi, Lonedo di Lugo Vicentino
• Villa da Schio , Costozza
• Villa Valmarana ai Nani

Visiting the gardens
Books to read

The Leiden-based, medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel posted notice of this 1692 manuscript at his blog, which was then picked up by Colossal and Gizmodo. From Colossal (5 May 2014): 

A. Boogert, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque municipale/Bibliothèque Méjanes, MS 1389 (1228). The entire book can be viewed here, in hi-resolution, zoomable images.

In 1692 an artist known only as “A. Boogert” sat down to write a book in Dutch about mixing watercolors. Not only would he begin the book with a bit about the use of color in painting, but would go on to explain how to create certain hues and change the tone by adding one, two, or three parts of water. The premise sounds simple enough, but the final product is almost unfathomable in its detail and scope.

Spanning nearly 800 completely handwritten (and painted) pages, Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau, was probably the most comprehensive guide to paint and color of its time. According to Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel who translated part of the introduction, the color book was intended as an educational guide. The irony being there was only a single copy that was probably seen by very few eyes. . .

The full posting is available here»

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Kwakkel followed up with this note:

Full disclosure (6 May, 2014): While this colourful book is first presented to a larger audience in this post and there are no Dutch publications devoted to it, I have since posting discovered that it is known by at least one other Dutch scholar. It is currently being studied and will be included in a PhD study to be completed in 2015 at the University of Amsterdam. While it is great that blogs such as The Colossal (here) and Gizmodo (here) have picked it up, it is important to know that I was not the one “discovering” the manuscript. I merely put it on the bigger podium it deserves, via this blog.

From Ashgate:

Nebahat Avcioglu and Emma Jones, eds., Architecture, Art, and Identity in Venice and its Territories, 1450–1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 326 pages, ISBN: 978-1472410825, £70.

Cities are shaped as much by a repertoire of buildings, works and objects, as by cultural institutions, ideas and interactions between forms and practices entangled in identity formations. This is particularly true when seen through a city as forceful and splendid as Venice. The essays in this volume investigate these connections between art and identity, through discussions of patronage, space and the dissemination of architectural models and knowledge in Venice, its territories and beyond. They celebrate Professor Deborah Howard’s leading role in fostering a historically grounded and interdisciplinary approach to the art and architecture of Venice.

Based on an examination and re-interpretation of a wide range of archival material and primary sources, the contributing authors approach the notion of identity in its many guises: as self-representation, as strong sub-currents of spatial strategies, as visual and semantic discourses, and as political and imperial aspirations. Employing interdisciplinary modes of interpretation, these studies offer ground-breaking analyses of canonical sites and works of art, diverse groups of patrons, as well as the life and oeuvre of leading architects such as Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. In so doing, they link together citizens and nobles, past and present, the real and the symbolic, space and sound, religion and power, the city and its parts, Venice and the Stato da Mar, the Serenissima and the Sublime Port.

Nebahat Avcioglu is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College, CUNY. Emma Jones is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction, Nebahat Avcioglu and Emma Jones

Section 1: Identity, Space and the City

1. ‘Soli deo honor et gloria’? Cittadino lay procurator patronage and the art of identity formation in Renaissance Venice, Allison Sherman

2. The Sisters Sagredo: Passion and patronage in eighteenth-century Venice, Esther Gabel

Section 2: Drawing, Mapping and Translating Venice

3. The early history of Jacopo Sansovino’s scheme for Piazza San Marco: A proposal, Paul Davies

4. Venice 1557: Sabbadino’s city plan, Elena Svalduz

5. Translatio Longhena Salute: Drawings and patrons in pilgrimage between Venice, Rome, and Gostyn, Andrew Hopkins

Section 3: Palladio’s Creations and Creating Palladio

6. The twin sacristy arrangement of Palladio’s Venice: origins and adaptations, Lydia Hamlett

7. Palladio’s patrons and music: Connections between cultural interests and architecture: The Villa Pisani at Bagnolo, Laura Moretti

8. How Palladio became famous: Paolo Gualdo and the Republic of Letters, Tracy E. Cooper

Section 4: The Production of Sacred Space

9. The seventeenth-century project for the church of San Nicolò del Lido in Venice: Liturgical problems and new architectural models in the counter-Reformation, Massimo Bisson

10. Innovation or afterthought? Dating the San Giobbe retrochoir, Joanne Allen

11. Venice’s cathedral of San Pietro di Castello, 1451–1630, Gianmario Guidarelli

Section 5: Time and Place in the Stato da Mar

12. The topography of antiquity in descriptions of Venetian Crete, Johanna D. Heinrichs

13. Jacopo Foscarini, Francesco Barozzi and the oracles of Leo the Wise, Blake de Maria

14. Becoming a man of empire: The construction of patrician identity in a republic of equals, Patricia Fortini Brown

This critical catalogue of Princeton’s Spanish drawings was reviewed by Zahira Véliz Bomford for The Burlington Magazine 156 (April 2014): 244–45. From Yale UP:

Lisa A. Banner with contributions by Jonathan Brown, Robert S. Lubar, and Pierre Rosenberg, Spanish Drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-0300149319, $40.

The Princeton University Art Museum’s collection of Spanish drawings includes masterworks by artists such as Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). Although many of the drawings in the collection relate to celebrated paintings, commissions, and other works by these artists, they remain largely unknown. Most have not been published previously and many are attributed here for the first time.

In Spanish Drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum, preeminent scholars enrich the growing corpus of work on Spanish drawings with original research. Each of the 95 drawings is reproduced in color, often accompanied by comparative illustrations. Watermarks have been documented with beta radiography and are included in an appendix. Provenances and
artist biographies round out this detailed record of one of the
most important collections of its kind.

Lisa A. Banner has written extensively on Spanish baroque art and has contributed to exhibition catalogues, symposia, and conferences throughout the world, most recently co-curating The Spanish Manner at The Frick Collection (2010–11).

From The Old School Press:

John Sutcliffe, The Colours of Rome: An Examination of the Use of Colour on the Façades of Today’s Rome, with Historical and Other Notes, and a Selection of Colours Copied on Site (Bath: The Old School Press, 2013), 32 pages, ISBN: 978-1899933334 (standard edition), £185 / $350.

John’s vision for this book was a survey of the city’s colourscape, a palette of colours so different from that of, say, Venice, Tuscany, or Palermo, and a palette that is today in a period of great change. His new essay traces the history of that palette and the influences that have led it to its state today.

To illustrate the essay John made several trips to Rome, returning finally with twenty sheets of colours copied directly from the buildings themselves. His carefully chosen selection is designed to demonstrate the diversity of the palette and also to draw together two very different strands of tradition that have created the appearance of the streets of Rome today. Each of the twenty colours is illustrated with a large painted patch applied directly onto its own sheet of Magnani wove using water-based paints. These sheets are loose in a wallet within the cased sleeve that holds the book, thus making it possible for the reader to explore the colours in different combinations just as they appear in Rome. A swatch card of chips of the twenty colours is also included in the wallet.

The wallet in the sleeve contains the paint-outs for the twenty colours that John Sutcliffe has chosen as representative of the colours of Rome. They are accompanied by a swatch card summarising the full set.

The text is printed in 14pt Dante on a large page of Magnani hand-made laid paper, with headings printed from wood-letter. The book is bound in full cloth and is protected by the sleeve inside which the wallet of paint patches is attached. In addition to the standard edition of ninety-nine copies there were twenty-five de luxe copies (ALL SOLD) that take the form of a solander box containing, as well as the standard edition book, bottled samples of nine of the most important pigments, mostly earths, in powdered form. The book is 323mm by 235mm (about 12.75 inches by 9.25 inches); the solander box is slightly larger and 92mm deep (3.75 inches). The price is £185 (euro235, US$350) for a standard copy (and was £350 (euro435, US$580) for a de luxe copy). Trade discount is one quarter. Postage and packing are charged as usual at cost.

If you know our books you will know we love colour, so this was a project that appealed from the outset. If Rome, architecture, and the way our cities change interest you, this book will appeal, and we hope that the production qualities will enhance your enjoyment. Uniquely, it is the only record of the most characteristic colours to be seen in Rome today, perhaps the only such survey of any city.

John Sutcliffe knows about colour. A former regional curator at the National Trust and now active as a decorative painter, his expertise in the topic, in particular in an architectural setting, was extensively used by Farrow & Ball, a company that will surely be known to many, at the time when they were first building up their reputation for traditional paints and hand-produced wallpapers. For many years John’s interest in colour has taken him to the Mediterranean, to Italy, and in particular to Rome. The buildings of Rome’s centro storico carry on their walls many layers of coloured limewash and distemper, layers that have both accumulated and decayed over time, thereby capturing the changing fashions in colour.

More information is available here»

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As described by Martin Gayford for The World of Interiors (May 2014), p. 50:

[The book] is a work of decorative art in itself, elegantly printed and bound by a private press in a limited edition. . . . In the course of his investigations, Sutcliffe made a discovery. His initial assumption was that the shades he saw had been used since the days of ancient Rome. This turned out to be completely wrong. . . . Tastes in colour in the age of Michelangelo, Bernini, and the Grand Tour were all different, both from each other and from what can be seen today. In earlier centuries, Rome would have looked lighter and bluer. . . . The dramatically dark walls Sutcliffe loves date back only to the late 19th century and the Mussolini regime. In recent decades, these have begun to be replaced by a new fashion for ‘old colours’—that is, 17th- and 18th-century hues rediscovered by careful scraping of old paintwork. The colours of cities seem, like most things, to fluctuate through time.

David Watkin likewise praises the “beautifully produced book,” in his review for TLS, “Raw and Burnt,” (7 March 2014): 22.

From Thames & Hudson:

Diana Scarisbrick and Benjamin Zucker, Elihu Yale: Merchant, Collector & Patron (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 288 pages, ISBN 978-0500517260, £25.

There can be few educational institutions named after a man with the force of character, powers of leadership, business acumen, and variety of intellectual and spiritual interests of Elihu Yale. His career, which spans Puritan New England, Mughal India, and the London of the English Enlightenment, throws light on the religious, political, social, commercial, scientific, and cultural circumstances of the world of the later Stuarts and early Hanoverians.

Elihu Yale (1649–1721) is famous for the name of Yale University, of which he was an early benefactor. He made his fortune in India, trading in diamonds. Arriving there in 1672, he rose through the East India Company from clerk to governor. When he returned to London in 1699 he brought with him gems, furniture and textiles. In the milieu of portrait painter Sir Godfrey Kneller and physician Sir Hans Sloane he established a fashionable household where he had assembled some ten thousand items.

Yale’s collection was dispersed after his death and the catalogues of the sales survive, providing information about the 18th-century London art market. The Yale sales prove to be a landmark in the history both of collecting and of auctioneering. Analyses of the categories throw light on Yale’s personality and interests: he is revealed as a Fellow of the Royal Society, churchman and a philanthropist, totally in tune with the English Enlightenment.

The authors explore Yale’s life in Madras and London and his interests, including musical and scientific instruments and books, and then turn to Yale as a dealer and a collector of diamonds and jewelry and works of art. The story is one with many appeals: the East India Company and early 18th-century London; furniture, both Indian and English; the fashion for things Oriental in the West; gemstones and jewelry; and collecting works of art.

Diana Scarisbrick is a historian specializing in jewelry and engraved gems. She has curated exhibitions in the UK and abroad and has written many books, including Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty and Portrait Jewels: Opulence and Intimacy from the Medici to the Romanovs. She is a Research Associate at the Beazley Archive, Oxford, and recently collaborated with Professor Sir John Boardman on The Marlborough Gems.
Benjamin Zucker, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is one of the world’s leading gem dealers, based in New York. He has written extensively on gemstones, coloured stones and the history of ring collecting

From the University of Texas Press:

James M. Córdova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0292753150, $55.

In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or ‘crowned nuns’, that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain.

To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Córdova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown’s project to modify and modernize colonial society—a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns’ religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits’ rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the ‘crowned nun’ with a discussion of the nuns’ actual roles in society, Córdova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable.

James M. Córdova is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he teaches pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American art.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1. Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain
2. New Spanish Portraiture and Portraits of Nuns
3. Euro-Christian Precedents in the Crowned-Nun Image
4. Indigenous Contributions to Convent Arts and Culture
5. The Profession Portrait in a Time of Crisis
6. Colonial Identity Rhetorics
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography