Enfilade

From Brill:

Louise Hardiman, ed., Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture, and British-Russian Relations (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-3506793768, $155. From Brill’s Russian History and Culture series, volume 24.

Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy explores the history of British-Russian state relations from the perspective of art and material culture. This richly illustrated book presents manifold practices of courtly gift-giving and vivid case studies of British-Russian artistic diplomacy over the centuries. It traces a visual and material history of cross-cultural dialogue that starts with an early English map of Russia made in the 16th century and ends with gifts of Fabergé art objects and domestic photographs exchanged between the British royal family and the family of Tsar Nicholas II in late Imperial Russia. Twelve expert authors from academia, the arts, and the museum sectors in Britain, Russia, and the United States present new narratives and critical interpretations based on material from previously unexplored archives. Their diverse approaches reveal the importance of artistic diplomacy and the agency of gifts of art and material culture in courtly and state relations.

Louise Hardiman is an independent academic and lecturer specialising in Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet art and the history of British-Russian cultural relations. Her publications and ongoing research focus mainly on the art and design history of late imperial Russia and the involvement of women in cross-cultural artistic exchange. She has also published two illustrated books of Russian folk tales by the nineteenth-century artist Elena Polenova.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Conventions

1  Introduction: Visual Culture and the History of British-Russian Relations — Louise Hardiman

Part I: Art and Diplomacy
2  Art and Acculturation: Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Portraits of Petr Potemkin (1682) and Peter the Great (1698) — Louise Hardiman
3  Catherine II, the Cathcarts, and Russian Anglophilia — Anthony Cross
4  Prince Grigorii Potemkin, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Anglo-Russian Artistic Diplomacy in the Age of Catherine the Great — Elizaveta Renne

Part II: The Agency of Gifts
5  ‘Give with One Hand and Take with the Other’: British Diplomatic Gifts to Russia, 1795–97 — Ekaterina Heath
6  Courtly Splendour and Cultural Identity: Nineteenth-Century Russian Imperial Gifts for the British Royal Family — Caroline de Guitaut
7  Alfred, Lord Tennyson and an Imperial Russian Gift — Olga Sobolev
8  Fabergé Hardstone in Imperial Gifting from Russia to England — Cynthia Coleman Sparke

Part III: Travels and Dialogues
9  Gavriil Skorodumov and James Walker: Printmaking and British-Russian Relations in the Late Eighteenth Century — Zalina Tetermazova
10  ‘Smart Travels’: The Encounters of Grand Duke Nicholas with British Art and Artists, 1816–17 — Irina Marisina
11  Tsar Alexander I, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and George Dawe: Masculinity and the Development of the St Petersburg Military Gallery — Allison Leigh

Part IV: Dynasties and Domesticities
12  The Wedding of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Maria Alexandrovna of Russia in 1874 and its Visual Commemoration — Stephen Patterson
13  Images of Nicholas II: (Mis-)interpreting the Last Tsar — Wendy Slater

Index

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

David Hugus, Chinese Rank Badges: Symbols of Power, Wealth, and Intellect in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Hong Kong University Press, 2022), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-9627956457, $65.

Both utilitarian objects and examples of textile design of wondrous beauty, Chinese rank badges were developed in the Ming and Qing dynasties to indicate the bearer’s station in the civil or military bureaucracies. David Hugus centers his study on their chronology and iconography, accompanying his work with beautiful color illustrations. Beginning with the earliest dynastic period to the end of the imperial period, and beyond to the present day, Hugus’s analyses of the style and iconography of Chinese rank badges provide the reader with the tools to recognize the circumstances of individual badge design and to develop a basis for connoisseurship.

David Hugus is a longtime collector of Chinese rank badges. He is the co-author of Ladder to the Clouds.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Wu Hung, The Full-Length Mirror: A Global Visual History (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1789146103, $35.

Beautifully illustrated, a stirring and wide-ranging reflection on art, technology, culture—and the full-length mirror.

This book tells two stories about the full-length mirror. One story, through time and space, crisscrosses the globe to introduce a broad range of historical actors: kings and slaves, artists and writers, merchants and craftsmen, courtesans, and commoners. The other story explores the connections among objects, painting, and photography, the full-length mirror providing a new perspective on historical artifacts and their images in art and visual culture. The Full-Length Mirror represents a new kind of global art history in which ‘global’ is understood in terms of both geography and visual medium, a history encompassing Europe, Asia, and North America, and spanning over two millennia from the fourth century BCE to the early twentieth century.

Wu Hung is the Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor, director for the Center for the Art of East Asia, and consulting curator at the Smart Museum of Art, all at the University of Chicago.

C O N T E N T S

Prelude A Prehistory of the Full-Length Mirror

Part One: Object and Reflection
1  From Versailles to the Forbidden City: The Global Invention of the Full-Length Mirror
2  From the House of Green Delights to the Hall of Mental Cultivation: Mirror-Screens in the Literary and Visual Imagination

Part Two: Medium and Subjectivity
3  From Europe to the World: The Global Circulation of Full-Length Mirror Photography
4  From Iconography to Subjectivity: Discovering the Self in the Full-Length Mirror

Coda: Disenchantment of the Full-Length Mirror

References
Select Bibliography
Photo Acknowledgments
Index

From Princeton UP:

Eric Tagliacozzo, In Asian Waters: Oceanic Worlds from Yemen to Yokohama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 512 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0691146829, £30 / $35.

A sweeping account of how the sea routes of Asia have transformed a vast expanse of the globe over the past five hundred years, powerfully shaping the modern world.

In the centuries leading up to our own, the volume of traffic across Asian sea routes—an area stretching from East Africa and the Middle East to Japan—grew dramatically, eventually making them the busiest in the world. The result was a massive circulation of people, commodities, religion, culture, technology, and ideas. In this book, Eric Tagliacozzo chronicles how the seas and oceans of Asia have shaped the history of the largest continent for the past half millennium, leaving an indelible mark on the modern world in the process. Paying special attention to migration, trade, the environment, and cities, In Asian Waters examines the long history of contact between China and East Africa, the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism across the Bay of Bengal, and the intertwined histories of Islam and Christianity in the Philippines. The book illustrates how India became central to the spice trade, how the Indian Ocean became a ‘British lake’ between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and how lighthouses and sea mapping played important roles in imperialism. The volume ends by asking what may happen if China comes to rule the waves of Asia, as Britain once did. A novel account showing how Asian history can be seen as a whole when seen from the water, In Asian Waters presents a voyage into a past that is still alive in the present.

Eric Tagliacozzo is the John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University. His books include Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca.

The table of contents is available here»

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Fiona Lindsay Shen, Pearl: Nature’s Perfect Gem (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1789146219, $35.

From their creation in the maw of mollusks to lustrous objects of infatuation and conflict, a revealing look at pearls’ dark history.

This book is a beautifully illustrated account of pearls through millennia, from fossils to contemporary jewelry. Pearls are the most human of gems, both miraculous and familiar. Uniquely organic in origin, they are as intimate as our bodies, created through the same process as we grow bones and teeth. They have long been described as an animal’s sacrifice, but until recently their retrieval often entailed the sacrifices of enslaved and indentured divers and laborers. While the shimmer of the pearl has enticed Roman noblewomen, Mughal princes, Hollywood royalty, mavericks, and renegades, encoded in its surface is a history of human endeavor, abuse, and aspiration—pain locked in the layers of a gleaming gem.

Fiona Lindsay Shen is an art historian and director of the Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University in California.

C O N T E N T S

Preface: Sarah Siddons’s Necklace
1  The Oyster’s Autobiography
2  Harvest
3  Culturing Pearls, Capturing Markets, Cultivating Brands
4  The Seven Pearly Sins
5  And the Seven Virtues
6  Embodied

References
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Photo Acknowledgments
Index

From The University of Chicago Press:

Rebecca Whiteley, Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-0226823126, $49.

The first full study of ‘birth figures’ and their place in early modern knowledge-making.

Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images’ creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe. Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.

Rebecca Whiteley is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
A Note on Terminology

Introduction: Picture Pregnancy

Part I: Early Printed Birth Figures, 1540–1672
1  Using Images in Midwifery Practice
2  Pluralistic Images and the Early Modern Body

Part II: Birth Figures as Agents of Change, 1672–1751
3  Visual Experiments
4  Visualizing Touch and Defining a Professional Persona

Part III: The Birth Figure Persists, 1751–1774
5  Challenging the Hunterian Hegemony

Conclusion

Color Plates
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From The University of Chicago Press:

Giles Sparrow, with a foreword by Martin Rees, Phenomena: Doppelmayr’s Celestial Atlas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0226824116, $65.

Lavishly illustrated volume revealing the intricacies of a 1742 map of the cosmos.

The expansive and intricate Atlas Coelestis, created by Johann Doppelmayr in 1742, set out to record everything known about astronomy at the time, covering constellations, planets, moons, comets, and more, all rendered in exquisite detail. Through stunning illustrations, historical notes, and scientific explanations, Phenomena contextualizes Doppelmayr’s atlas and creates a spectacular handbook to the heavens.

Phenomena begins by introducing Doppelmayr’s life and work, placing his extraordinary cosmic atlas in the context of discoveries made in the Renaissance and Enlightenment and highlighting the significance of its publication. This oversized book presents thirty beautifully illustrated and richly annotated plates, covering all the fundamentals of astronomy—from the dimensions of the solar system to the phases of the moon and the courses of comets. Each plate is accompanied by expert analysis from astronomer Giles Sparrow, who deftly presents Doppelmayr’s references and cosmological work to a modern audience. Each plate is carefully deconstructed, isolating key stars, planets, orbits, and moons for in-depth exploration. A conclusion reflects on the development of astronomy since the publication of the Atlas and traces the course of the science up to the present day. Following the conclusion is a timeline of key discoveries from ancient times onward along with short biographies of the key players in this history.

Giles Sparrow is an author, editor, and consultant specializing in popular science, astronomy, and space technology. His books include The Stargazer’s Handbook, Physics in Minutes: 200 Key Concepts Explained in an Instant and The Cosmic Gallery: The Most Beautiful Images of the Universe.

From Oxbow Books:

Stephen Wass, Seventeenth-Century Water Gardens and the Birth of Modern Scientific Thought in Oxford: The Case of Hanwell Castle (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2022), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1914427169, £40.

Based on a decade of archaeological investigation and historical research, this book tells the story of the Copes of Hanwell Castle in north Oxfordshire and the creation of a garden with links to the development of scientific thinking in Oxford in the late seventeenth century. New research using Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire as a starting point has uncovered details of a remarkable family and their rise and tragic downfall, their social circle, that included some great names in the development of early scientific thinking, and their garden that in effect became a place dedicated to the wonders of technology. The complex tale weaves together the activities of a royalist agent, Richard Allestree, a prodigious musician, Thomas Baltzar, John Claridge, a Hanwell Shepherd with a penchant for weather forecasting, and Sir Anthony Cope who in an atmosphere of secrecy and distrust began to gather together a community that eventually was named by Plot as The New Atlantis, a reference to a book published earlier in the century by Sir Francis Bacon in which he suggests a model for a Utopian science-focused society.

The book also chronicles the programme of archaeological excavation that has uncovered several unusual garden features and, most significantly of all, describes in detail the unique collection of seventeenth-century terracotta garden urns, an assemblage that is unparalleled in post-medieval archaeology. This collection was destroyed in a single episode of vandalism around 1675 and has been preserved in deeply buried deposits of mud and silt. Their analysis and reconstruction is opening new insights into the decorative schemes of seventeenth-century gardens. There is coverage of other gardens of the period and their surviving features as well as an examination of early science and how gardens impacted on its development in many ways.

Stephen Wass completed his MA in historical archaeology at the University of Leicester and then established himself as a freelance consultant specialising in historic gardens. Much of his work has been for the National Trust including major sites such as Chastleton House, Packwood House, Croft Castle, and Stowe Landscape Gardens. The current volume arises from a programme of doctoral research at the University of Oxford.

C O N T E N T S

Preface: Robert Plot and Sir Anthony Cope

1  Introduction
• The Study of Gardens in Theory and Practice
• Hanwell: Geology, Geography, Archaeology, and History

2  The Sixteenth Century
• William Cope and the Building of Hanwell House
• The Origins of Early Modern Water Gardens
• Water Gardens in the Sixteenth Century

3  The Seventeenth Century
• Continental Engineers and Their Influence
• The Copes in Ascendancy
• Walter Cope’s Water Maze
• Francis Bacon, Gardening, and The New Atlantis
• Thomas Bushell and the Enstone Marvels
• Other Early Seventeenth-Century Water Gardens

4  At Hanwell House
• The Archaeology of the Gardens, 1600–1660
• Sir Anthony Cope, the Fourth Baronet
• Sir Anthony Cope in His Social Setting
• Hanwell, Cope, and Plot
• Sir Anthony’s Companions
• The Archaeology of the Gardens, 1660–1675
• Reconstructing the House of Diversion
• The Hanwell Pots and Other Finds

5  The End of it All
• The Aftermath, the Family and Estate after 1675
• The Archaeology of the Gardens from 1675 to the Present Day

6  Oxford, Science, and Gardening
• Oxford, Hanwell, and Early Scientific Thinking
• Gardens and Science
• The Tangley Mystery and Hanwell as the New Atlantis

Conclusions

From Oxbow Books:

Deborah Turnbull and Louise Wickham, Thomas White (c. 1736–1811): Redesigning the Northern British Landscape (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2021), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1914427008, £40 / $55.

This volume aims to restore the reputation of Thomas White, who in his time was as well respected as his fellow landscape designers Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton. By the end of his career, White had produced designs for at least 32 sites across northern England and over 60 in Scotland. These include nationally important designed landscapes in Yorkshire such as Harewood House, Sledmere Hall, Burton Constable Hall, Newby Hall, and Mulgrave Castle, as well as Raby Castle in Durham, Belle Isle in Cumbria, and Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire. He had a vital role in the story of how northern English designed landscapes evolved in the 18th century. The book focuses on White’s known commissions in England and sheds further light on the work of other designers such as Brown and Repton, who worked on many of the same sites. White set up as an independent designer in 1765, having worked for Brown from 1759, and his style developed over the next thirty years. Never merely a ‘follower of Brown’, as he is often erroneously described, White was admired for his designs, which influenced the later, more informal styles of the picturesque movement. The improvement plans he produced for his clients demonstrate his surveying and artistic skills. These plans were working documents but at the same time works of art in their own right. Over 60 of his beautifully-executed coloured plans survive as a testament to the value his clients placed on them. This book makes available for the first time over 90% of the known plans and surveys by White for England. Also included are plans by White’s contemporaries, together with later maps, estate surveys, and contemporary illustrations to understand which parts of improvement plans were implemented.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Abbreviations

1  Thomas White in Context
2  Early Career and Working with Brown
3  First Commissions, 1765–68
4  Established Landscape Designer, 1769–80
5  Later Career, 1781–1803
6  Getting the Commission
7  His Landscape Designs
8  Working Methods
9  Arboricultural Activities
10  Thomas White in Scotland by Christopher Dingwall
11  White’s Sites in England

Bibliography
Index