Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti, The Horn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0300118933, $45.

A rich and fascinating account of one of music history’s most ancient, varied, and distinctive instruments

From its origins in animal horn instruments in classical antiquity to the emergence of the modern horn in the seventeenth century, the horn appears wherever and whenever humans have made music. Its haunting, timeless presence endures in jazz and film music, as well as orchestral settings, to this day. In this welcome addition to the Yale Musical Instrument Series, Renato Meucci and Gabriele Rocchetti trace the origins of the modern horn in all its variety. From its emergence in Turin and its development of political and diplomatic functions across European courts, to the revolutionary invention of valves, the horn has presented in innumerable guises and forms. Aided by musical examples and newly discovered sources, Meucci and Rocchetti’s book offers a comprehensive account of an instrument whose history is as complex and fascinating as its music.

Renato Meucci directs the Cultural Heritage department of the celebrated Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. Gabriele Rocchetti is horn professor at the Conservatory Luca Marenzio, and a fine natural horn player.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
List of Musical Examples
List of Tables Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Foreword

Part I
1  Preliminary Note on Roman Military Instruments
2  Early Horns and Calls
3  The Coiled Trompe
4  Spiral Instruments
5  Early French Hunting Fanfares
6  Hooped Models
7  Preserved Instruments
8  Von Sporck and the Trompe de Chasse
9  The Natural Hunting Horn (Jadgwaldhorn)
10  Trumpet and Horn Players
11  The Natural Horn at its Zenith (Orchesterwaldhorn)
12  Duets
13  Four Case Studies: Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Telemann
14  Instruments’ Names in the Baroque Era

Part II
15  The Classic Era
16  New Crook Systems
17  The Classical Repertoire
18  The Heyday of the Hand Horn
19  Transitional Systems

Part III
20  Valve Horns
21  Further Valve Systems
22  Reports by Contemporaries
23  Early Music Literature
24  Valve Dissemination: A Regional Overview
25  A Few Leading Composers
26  Double Horn
27  The Horn in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
28  The Repertoire of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
29  The Present-Day Horn

Bibliography
Index

Appendix 1  Notation
Appendix 2  High vs. Low Horn in Haydn’s Symphonies
Appendix 3  Two Letters by Blühmel

From Yale UP:

David Lasocki, Robert Ehrlich, Nikolaj Tarasov, and Michala Petri, The Recorder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300118704, $50.

The fascinating story of a hugely popular instrument, detailing its rich and varied history from the Middle Ages to the present

The recorder is perhaps best known today for its educational role. Although it is frequently regarded as a stepping-stone on the path toward higher musical pursuits, this role is just one recent facet of the recorder’s fascinating history—which spans professional and amateur music-making since the Middle Ages. In this new addition to the Yale Musical Instrument Series, David Lasocki and Robert Ehrlich trace the evolution of the recorder. Emerging from a variety of flutes played by fourteenth-century soldiers, shepherds, and watchmen, the recorder swiftly became an artistic instrument for courtly and city minstrels. Featured in music by the greatest Baroque composers, including Bach and Handel, in the twentieth century it played a vital role in the Early Music Revival and achieved international popularity and notoriety in mass education. Overall, Lasocki and Ehrlich make a case for the recorder being surprisingly present, and significant, throughout Western music history.

David Lasocki, formerly head of music reference services at Indiana University Bloomington, has been a researcher of the recorder for over fifty years. Robert Ehrlich is professor of recorder at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Leipzig.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction — David Lasocki
1  The Era of Medieval Recorders, 1300–1500 — David Lasocki
2  The Era of Renaissance Recorders, 1501–1667 — David Lasocki
3  The Era of the Baroque Recorder, 1668–1800 — David Lasocki
4  Duct Flutes in the Nineteenth Century — Nikolaj Tarasov
5  The Recorder in the Twentieth Century — Robert Ehrlich
Epilogue — Michala Petri

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From IRSA, the Institute for Art Historical Research (founded in Venice in 1979 as the Istituto per le Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte, the institute was relocated to Florence and then to Vienna, before arriving in its current home in Cracow). Orders can be placed via email, irsa@irsa.com.pl.

Jan Ostrowski, Portraiture in Old Poland, translated by Nicholas Hodge and Sabina Potaczek-Jasionowicz (Cracow: IRSA, 2023), 508 pages.

Written by one of Poland’s foremost art historians, this landmark book—the first English-language study to tackle its subject in depth—is an essential text for readers keen to look beyond the Western European art centres that have dominated art history since the discipline’s inception.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—in spite of its flaws—was once the largest state in Europe, and it produced a distinctive culture that was often at odds with those of the absolutist monarchies of the day. The author casts his net wide, considering forms of portraiture that were widespread across the continent as well as indigenous specialities such as coffin portraits and tomb banners. He likewise demonstrates how the 18th-century Partitions of Poland affected portraiture and national identity. This book serves both as an incisive exploration of the subject and as a thought-provoking—and at times witty—resource on how to approach art in general, with the author spotlighting several pitfalls that can mislead the researcher. Finally, he shows how context and rational deduction can help solve iconographic puzzles. The English translation was made possible by a grant from the Lanckoroński Foundation.

Jan K. Ostrowski (b. 1947) grew up surrounded by family portraits at home, which sparked a fascination that stayed with him for life. He studied at Cracow’s Jagiellonian University and the University of Nancy. Later, he was a visiting scholar in Florence, Munich, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He taught the history of art at the Jagiellonian University from 1973 to 2018, becoming a full professor in 1992. In 1989 he was appointed director of Wawel Royal Castle in Cracow and he held this post for three decades. Since 2018, he has been president of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He conceived and directed a programme of inventorying historic sites in the Lviv region (western Ukraine; 23 vols, 1993–2015). He has extensively researched and published on late Baroque sculpture in Lviv (Johann Georg Pinsel), Polish Romantic painting (Piotr Michałowski), and Baroque painting in Flanders and Italy (Anthony van Dyck, Sinibaldo Scorza). He has been decorated both at home and abroad, including with the Order of Polonia Restituta and France’s Legion of Honour.

c o n t e n t s

Preface to the English Edition
Preface to the Polish Edition

1  Introduction
2  Paths to the Early Modern Independent Portrait
3  A Short History of Portraiture in Old Poland
4  The Portrait in Society: Function and Reception
5  Attire, Attributes, and Furnishings in Portraits: What Objects Tell Us about the Sitter and Their Time
Conclusion

Glossary
Abbreviations
Bibliography
Index of Names
List of Figures

From Michael Imhof:

Bernd Pappe and Juliane Schmieglitz-Otten, eds., Portrait Miniatures: Artists, Functions, Techniques, and Collections (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2023), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-3731913399, €40.

The specialist conferences on miniature portraits, organized for the past ten years by the Tansey Miniatures Foundation, have enabled an in-depth examination of this particularly intimate genre of portrait painting. In this third volume of conference proceedings, twenty-one internationally renowned experts from ten countries explore the miniature portrait from different perspectives, highlighting the private use of miniatures and contrasting it with their function in a more public context. Several authors provide new insights into important but hitherto little-known private and museum collections; others introduce specific artists. For the first time, this volume also addresses in significant depth specific technical aspects of creating and preserving portrait miniatures.

The contents can be viewed here»

From Bloomsbury:

Amy Boyington, Hidden Patrons: Women and Architectural Patronage in Georgian Britain (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1350358614 (hardcover), £65 / ISBN: 978-1350358607 (paperback), / £20.

An enduring myth of Georgian architecture is that it was purely the pursuit of male architects and their wealthy male patrons. History states that it was men who owned grand estates and houses, who commissioned famous architects, and who embarked upon elaborate architectural schemes. Hidden Patrons dismantles this myth—revealing instead that women were at the heart of the architectural patronage of the day, exerting far more influence and agency than has previously been recognised. Architectural drawing and design, discourse, and patronage were interests shared by many women in the eighteenth century. Far from being the preserve of elite men, architecture was a passion shared by both sexes, intellectually and practically, as long as they possessed sufficient wealth and autonomy. In an accessible, readable account, Hidden Patrons uncovers the role of women as important patrons and designers of architecture and interiors in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland. Exploring country houses, Georgian townhouses, villas, estates, and gardens, it analyses female patronage from across the architectural spectrum and examines the work of a range of pioneering women from grand duchesses to businesswomen to lowly courtesans. Re-examining well-known Georgian masterpieces alongside lesser-known architectural gems, Hidden Patrons unearths unseen archival material to provide a fascinating new view of the role of women in the architecture of the Georgian era.

Amy Boyington is a social and architectural historian, with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She serves as a trustee of the Georgian Group and is a popular Instagram and TikTok historian.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Text
List of Abbreviations

Introduction
1  The Country House
2  The Town House
3  The Villa
4  The Wider Estate, Garden Design, and Ornamental Buildings
Conclusions

Bibliography
Index

From IRSA, the Institute for Art Historical Research (founded in Venice in 1979 as the Istituto per le Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte, the institute was relocated to Florence and then to Vienna, before arriving in its current home in Cracow). Orders can be placed via email, irsa@irsa.com.pl.

Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, Symbols and Forms in Jewish Art, translated by Renata Stein (Cracow: IRSA, 2022), 212 pages, ISBN: 978-8389831354. With an essay on Wischnitzer’s life and work by Shalom Sabar.

This is an English translation of a classic study on the iconography of Jewish art by Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein (1885–1989), originally published in Berlin in 1935 as Symbole und Gestalten der jüdischen Kunst. The outbreak of the Second World War prevented the book from spreading, and its uncirculated print-run was almost entirely destroyed by the Nazis. The few surviving copies of the book that circulated among specialists, gained this highly innovative work on Jewish iconography a position of a classic study. The present English edition makes the legendary book by Rachel Wischnitzer-Bernstein available to wider audiences of international readers for the first time.

“Against all odds, two years after the Nazi party and Hitler rose to power, Symbole und Gestalten der jüdischen Kunst appeared in Berlin in the mid-1930s. Presenting the visual art of the Jewish people as a sophisticated humanistic achievement, this handsome, beautifully produced volume illustrates the deep meanings and the powerful symbols of the Jewish people over the ages. Moreover, the book’s thesis and the materials gathered in it are underlined by an implied aspiration: to strengthen Jewish identity and make the Jews of the time conscious and proud of their rich heritage. The author of this courageous book…, Rachel Wischnitzer (1885–1989), a modest woman, small in size, …contributed more than any other scholar of the first half of the twentieth century to the establishment and development of a new field of academic study—the history of Jewish art.” —From Shalom Sabar’s biographical essay

Rachel Wischnitzer (1885–1989) during her long life produced 344 publications, including books, scholarly articles, reviews of books, and exhibitions, as well as encyclopedia items. Together with her husband Mark, she edited the literary and artistic periodicals Rimon and Milgroim. The doyenne of historians of Jewish art, she was a pioneer in the field when she published in 1913 her first article on the ancient synagogue in Lutsk. Her wide interests drove her to study and publish about Hebrew illuminated manuscripts, synagogue architecture, Jewish and general iconography. Her major contribution to Jewish iconography was a courageous attempt to find a single theme to which all the paintings in the third century Synagogue at Dura Europos would adhere.

c o n t e n t s

Foreword by Józef Grabski

Introduction
1  Divine Revelation
2  Kingdom
3  Doctrine
4  Priesthood
5  Judaism
6  Festivals and Customs
7  Messianic Hope
8  Time and the Universe
Shalom Sabar — Rachel Wischnitzer: Life and Work