Enfilade

From Yale UP and Thames & Hudson:

Kelly Grovier, The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0300267785, £30 / $38.

As featured on BBC Worldwide, a captivating new history of art told through the storied biographies of colors and pigments

In this refreshing approach to the history of color, Kelly Grovier takes readers on an exciting search for the intriguing and unusual. In Grovier’s telling, a color’s connotations are never fixed but are endlessly evolving. Knowledge of a pigment and its history can unlock meaning in the works that feature it. Grovier employs the term ‘artymology’ to suggest that color is a linguistic device, where pigments stand in for syllables in art’s language. Color is the site of invigorating conflict—a battleground where past and present, influence and originality, and superstition and science merge into meanings that complicate and intensify our appreciation of a given work. How might it change our understanding of a well-known masterpiece like Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night to know that the intense yellow moon in that painting was sculpted from clumps of dehydrated urine from cows that were fed nothing but mango leaves? Or that the cobalt blue pigment in Van Gogh’s sky shares a material bloodline with the glaze of Ming Dynasty porcelain? Consisting of ten chapters, each presenting a biography of a family of colors, this volume mines a rich vein of pigmentation from prehistoric cave painting to art of the present day. The book also includes beautifully designed features exploring important milestones in the history of color theory from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century.

Kelly Grovier is an acclaimed poet, columnist, and feature writer for BBC Culture. He is the author of several books, including A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Artymology

1  Red
Red Ochre • Carmine • Rose Madder • Vermillion • Red Lead
Colourful Minds: Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1704)

2  Orange
Orpiment • Saffron • Chrome Orange • Cadmium Orange
Colourful Minds: Tobias Mayer’s The Affinity of Colour Commentary (1775)

3  Yellow
Yellow Ochre • Lead-tin Yellow • Naples Yellow • Indian Yellow • Chrome Yellow • Cadmium Yellow • Arylide Yellow
Colourful Minds: Mary Gartside’s Essay on a New Theory of Colour (1808)

4  Green
Verdigris • Malachite • Emerald Green • Veridian
Colourful Minds: Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810)

5  Blue
Azurite • Ultramarine • Cobalt Blue • Prussian Blue • Artificial Ultramarines
Colourful Minds: Philipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere (1810)

6  Purple
Tyrian Purple • Cobalt Violet
Colourful Minds: Michel Eugène Chevreul’s The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (1839)

7  Black
Charcoal • Bone Black
Colourful Minds: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems (1902)

8  White
Lead White • Calcite • Kaolin
Colourful Minds: Albert Henry Munsell’s Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915)

9  Brown
Umber • Van Dyke Brown • Mummia • Excrement
Colourful Minds: Johannes Itten’s Utopia 1921

10  Precious Metals
Gold • Silver

From Lund Humphries:

Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c.1500–1800: Poetry and Ecology (London: Lund Humphries, 2022), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1848224940, £45 / $80.

Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Dürer’s intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other Northern European artists who captured ‘the truth of vegetation’ in their work. These incidents of remarkable scenery in the visual arts have received little attention in the history of art, until now. Prosperetti brings together a set of essays which are devoted to the poetics of the woodlands in the work of the great masters, including Claude Lorrain, Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, amongst others. Through an examination of aesthetics and eco-poetics, this book draws attention to the idea of lyrical naturalism as a conceptual bridge that unites the power of poetry with the allurement of the natural world. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated throughout, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art strives to stimulate the return of the woodlands to the places where they belong—in people’s minds and close to home.

Leopoldine Prosperetti is a writer and academic. She is Instructional Professor in the School of Art at the University of Houston, and has written and edited a number of books including Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) and Landscape and Philosophy in the Art of Jan Brueghel (Ashgate, 2009).

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Introduction
Kindle’s Promise
Dürer’s Linden
Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb
The Poet’s Catalogue
The Copse
Survivor Sole
Sights of Tivoli
Love in a Ducal Forest
In the Heart of the Forest
Down by the Riverside
Epilogue

Bibliography
Illustrations

From Silvana Editoriale:

Irene Graziani, with contributions by Francesca Maria Conti, Igino Conti, and Ilaria Negretti, Jacopo Alessandro Calvi, detto Il Sordino (1740–1815): Accademico e Pittore (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2022), 512 pages, ISBN: 978-8836652884, €40.

Nella Bologna della seconda metà del Settecento Jacopo Alessandro Calvi (Bologna, 1740-1815) diviene il principale competitore dei fratelli Ubaldo e Gaetano Gandolfi. Formatosi sotto l’ala di Giampietro Zanotti, segretario dell’Accademia Clementina, fin dagli anni giovanili si sperimenta nelle «dive arti sorelle» della pittura e della poesia, privilegiando un criterio elettivo nel processo di imitazione della natura. Testimoniano il suo successo l’annessione all’Accademia Clementina (1770) e il gran numero di commissioni, soprattutto pale di destinazione ecclesiastica.

Anche nel tempo della «fatal rivoluzione», che comporta una drastica riduzione delle opportunità di lavoro per tutti gli artisti, Calvi regge il colpo, superando le difficoltà del momento, sia attraverso l’intensificarsi dell’attività letteraria — gli si devono fra l’altro la prima monografia critica di Guercino, edita nel 1808, e uno studio su Francesco Francia, pubblicato nel 1812 — sia attraverso lo svolgimento di un ruolo di perito presso l’Accademia Clementina, impegnata nell’ingrato compito di governare il rischio di dispersione dei beni d’arte durante le spoliazioni napoleoniche.

Pur estraneo ai valori giacobini, viene convocato come commissario nel Concorso per la ‘Riconoscenza Nazionale’ (1802), indetto a Milano allo scopo di celebrare il ritorno di Napoleone dopo la parentesi austriaca; e nel 1804 sarà annoverato fra i professori della nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna. Con il nuovo secolo la sua carriera riesce a trovare ragioni di soddisfazione anche sul fronte della produzione artistica: attraverso un’intelligente lettura critica della maniera del tardo Guercino e del dolce e devoto Francesco Francia, la sua pittura saprà farsi anticipatrice di istanze poi affermatesi nella Bologna tornata papale, appena prima della morte di Calvi, avvenuta a un mese dalla Battaglia di Waterloo.

C O N T E N T S

Catalogo delle opere
Dipinti e bozzetti
Disegni
Stampe su disegno o da dipinti di Jacopo Alessandro Calvi
Opere espunte
Opere segnalate dalle fonti, ma non reperite, non identificate o non ancora rintracciate — Irene Graziani
Disegni di animali di Jacopo Alessandro Calvi: inediti — Francesca Maria Conti

Tavole
Jacopo Alessandro Calvi collezionista: dipinti, disegni e altre opere presenti nello ‘Studio del Sordino’ — Igino Conti
Ferdinando Belvisi, Elogio storico di Jacopo Alessandro Calvi — a cura di Ilaria Negretti
Apparati — a cura di Irene Graziani

Regesto
Appendice documentaria
Indice topografico delle opere
Indice dei nomi
Bibliografia

From Yale UP:

Maura Flannery, In the Herbarium: The Hidden World of Collecting and Preserving Plants (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 336 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0300247916, $35.

Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time—including changes related to climate.

Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization of these precious specimens today. She charts the growth of herbaria during the Age of Exploration, the development of classification systems to organize the collections, and herbaria’s indispensable role in the tracking of climate change and molecular evolution. Herbaria also have historical, aesthetic, cultural, and ethnobotanical value—these preserved plants can be linked to the Indigenous peoples who used them, the collectors who sought them out, and the scientists who studied them.

This book testifies to the central role of herbaria in the history of plant study and to their continued value, not only to biologists but to entirely new users as well: gardeners, artists, students, and citizen-scientists.

Maura C. Flannery is professor emerita of biology at St. John’s University, New York, and research affiliate in the A. C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of two previous books and a blog, herbariumworld.wordpress.com. She lives in Aiken, SC.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Opening Hidden Gardens
1  Rooted in an Herbarium
2  Early Botany
3  The Technology and Art of Herbaria
4  Early Exploration
5  The Value of Collecting
6  Linnaeus and Classification
7  Botanical Exploration
8  Gardens
9  Managing Exploration and Collecting
10  Natural History and Botany
11  Evolution and Botany
12  Changing Botany
13  Useful Plants and Ethnobotany
14  Understanding and Conserving Biodiversity
15  Online Herbaria
16  A Broader Vision: Herbaria and Culture
Epilogue: Herbaria Blooming

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From The University of Chicago Press:

Kermit Roosevelt, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0226817613, $25.

Our idea of the Founders’ America and its values is not true. We are not the heirs of the Founders, but we can be the heirs of Reconstruction and its vision for equality.

There’s a common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order. This alternate understanding of American identity opens the door to a new understanding of ourselves and our story, and ultimately to a better America.

America today is not the Founders’ America, but it can be Lincoln’s America. Roosevelt offers a powerful and inspirational rethinking of our country’s history and uncovers a shared past that we can be proud to claim and use as a foundation to work toward a country that fully embodies equality for all.

Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, he is the author of The Myth of Judicial Activism, as well as two novels, Allegiance and In the Shadow of the Law.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1  Stories of America
2  Questioning the Standard Story: Dissenters
3  The Exclusive Declaration
4  The Ambiguous Revolution
5  The Geostrategic Constitution
6  The Story of Continuity
7  The March of the Declaration
8  Why We Tell the Standard Story
9  Why We Shouldn’t Tell the Standard Story
10  Magic Tricks and Revolutions
11  Why, How, and Who We Are
12  Redemption Songs: Inclusive Equality and Exclusive Individualism in Modern America
13  The Better Story

Bibliographical Essay
Acknowledgments
Notes