Enfilade

Coming soon, with distribution by ACC Art Books:

Marieke van Delft, Kay Etheridge, Hans Mulder, Bert van de Roemer, and Florence Pieters, Maria Sibylla Merian: Changing the Nature of Art and Science (Tielt: Lannoo: 2022), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-9401485333, $70.

The revolutionary artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) has come into the spotlight in recent years. The life and work of this German-born woman, who would later settle in the Netherlands, has been studied internationally by entomologists, botanists and historians and are a source of inspiration for contemporary artists and writers. In 2016, Lannoo Publishers, in collaboration with the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, republished her masterpiece Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium as a facsimile. This well-illustrated book assembles the most recent scientific knowledge about this remarkable woman. The authors examine, among other things, Merian’s pioneering work on the reproduction and development of insects, the methods and materials she used for her work, her remarkable journey to Suriname, her network of family, friends and patrons, and her widespread influence on the history of art and science. Her work is compared to that of early modern and contemporary artists and scientists

This book gathers essays by of 23 international experts, most of whom are connected to the international Maria Sibylla Merian Society. The editorial team consists of Marieke van Delft, Kay Etheridge, Hans Mulder, Bert van de Roemer, and Florence Pieters.

From Scala:

Hahn Eura Eunkyung, European Fans: The Untold Story (London: Scala Arts Publishers, 2022), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1785514128, £15 / $21.

Showcasing more than 60 carefully selected fans from a collection of over 1000, this is the first in a series of publications from the Eurus Collection, now available in English for the first time.

Throughout history, fans have had numerous roles: personal items to cool the user, tools for religious and ceremonial events, symbols of royal power and authority or important fashion accessories. As practical, symbolic and decorative objects, they are the meeting point of multiple arts. This book focuses on European fans made in the French Rococo style in the eighteenth century and the Rococo Revival style that emerged in the nineteenth century. Sixty-six superb examples, selected from the Eurus Collection in South Korea, offer a glimpse into the lives of European royalty and aristocracy, including their aesthetic preferences, ideals and views on nature, and demonstrate the intermingling of cultures in the newly emerging painting and craft styles which resulted from trade between Europe and the East. This beautifully illustrated book explores the fans’ thematic and stylistic aspects as well as their assembly and production and invites the reader to discover their untold stories.

The Eurus Collection, under the direction of Hahn Eura Eunkyung, is a sister institution of Hwajeong Museum in Seoul. With more than one thousand fans from all over the world, the Eurus Collection is the second largest of its kind in the world (after The Fan Museum in London) and the largest in Asia.

Hahn Eura EunKyung is the founder and director of Eurus Collection. Most of Eurus Collection’s artefacts were collected by her late father, Dr Hahn Kwang-ho CBE, who was one of the key contributors to the establishment of The Korea Foundation Gallery at the British Museum. Director Hahn’s research interests are in the field of conservation studies and the history of cultural artefacts.

HaYoung Joo is an assistant professor of art theory and criticism at the School of Arts, Chonnam National University, Korea.

The Czech edition appeared in 2017:

Vít Vlnas, Baroque Prague, translated by Derek Paton (Prague: Karolinum Press, Charles University, 2022), 330 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-8024643762, $30.

Baroque Prague is a lavish excursion through Prague’s important baroque period, beginning with the defeat of Czech Protestants at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 and ending with the philosophical era of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. In this book, Vit Vlnas explores both the material and spiritual transformations the city went through during this boisterous period, treating the baroque epoch as a cultural phenomenon vital to the current genius loci of the great Central European capital. Vlnas guides readers through the city from Prague Castle to the Lesser Town, Old Town, and New Town, as well as Vyšehrad, the important historic fortress. In a special section, he takes us to equally important baroque monuments outside of the historical city center. Lushly illustrated with over 200 color plates, including both historical images and contemporary photographs of architectural exteriors, the text is accompanied by helpful maps indicating the location of the monuments, as well as a glossary of prominent figures during the period. Both a highly readable introductory study and a work for experienced scholars of the history of Bohemia, Baroque Prague is an exciting homage to Europe’s great ‘city of a hundred spires’, and shows how a place’s storied past informs its present soul.

Vít Vlnas is head of the Institute of Christian Art History at Charles University and head of the Center for Humanistic Studies at the Moravian Museum.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Geoffrey Tyack, The Historic Heart of Oxford University (Oxford: Bodleian Library Publishing, 2022), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1851245284, $55.

Over eight centuries, the University of Oxford—the third oldest university in Europe—gradually came to occupy a substantial portion of the city, creating in the process a unique townscape containing the Bodleian Library, the Sheldonian Theatre, and the Radcliffe Camera. This book tells the story of the growth of the forum universitatis, as the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor called it, and relates it to the broader history of the University and the city. Based on up-to-date scholarship, The Historic Heart of Oxford University draws upon the author’s research into Oxford’s architectural history and the work of Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, James Gibbs, and Giles Gilbert Scott. Each of the eight chapters focuses on the gestation, creation, and subsequent history of a single building or pair of buildings, relating them to developments in the University’s intellectual and institutional life, and to broader themes in architectural and urban history.

Accessible and well-illustrated with plans, archival prints, and specially commissioned photography, this book will appeal to anyone who wishes to understand and enjoy Oxford’s matchless architectural heritage.

Geoffrey Tyack is an emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford, and President of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society.

C O N T E N T S

1  The University Church and the Congregation House
2  The Divinity School and the Duke Humfrey’s Library
3  The Schools Quadrangle
4  The Sheldonian Theatre
5  The Old Ashmolean Museum
6  The Clarendon Building
7  The Radcliffe Camera and Radcliffe Square
8  The New Bodleian and the Weston Library

Notes
Further Reading
Picture Credits
Index

From Yale UP:

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains, and Menageries (London: Pual Mellon Centre, 2022), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107260, $40.

In his new book, English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens in a way that was often thought to be excessive.

With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including “Lady Broughton’s ‘Miniature Copy of the Swiss Glaciers’,” “Topiary on a Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped ‘Yew-trees’ at Four Ancient London Churchyards,” and “The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House,” English Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focuses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been previously explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography. This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from example and dare to be eccentric.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect with an international practice based in London. He is gardens adviser to Historic Royal Palaces, lecturer at New York University (London), president of the London Gardens Trust, editor of The London Gardener, and author of several books including The London Town Garden (Yale, 2001) and The London Square (Yale, 2012).

From The Getty:

Byron Ellsworth Hamann, The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844 (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2022), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1606067734, $60.

The story of Seville’s Archive of the Indies reveals how current views of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based on radical historical revisionism in Spain in the late 1700s.

The Invention of the Colonial Americas is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. It centers on an archive created in Seville for storing Spain’s pre-1760 documents about the New World. To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa.

In this meticulously researched book, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of eighteenth-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data—assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation.

Byron Ellsworth Hamann is an associate professor of art history at Ohio State University. His research is focused on the art and writing of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, as well as on the connections linking the Americas and Europe in the early modern Mediterratlantic world.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, eds., New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities (London: University of London Press, 2021), 350 pages, ISBN: 978-1908857828, $75.

From the late fifteenth century to the present day, countless explorers, conquerors, and other agents of empire have laid siege to the New World, plundering and pilfering its most precious artifacts and treasures. Today, these natural and cultural products—which are key to conceptualizing a history of Latin America—are scattered in museums around the world. With contributions from a renowned set of scholars, New World Objects of Knowledge delves into the hidden histories of forty of the New World’s most iconic artifacts, from the Inca mummy to Darwin’s hummingbirds. This volume is richly illustrated with photos and sketches from the archives and museums hosting these objects. Each artifact is accompanied by a comprehensive essay covering its dynamic, often global, history and itinerary. This volume will be an indispensable catalog of New World objects and how they have helped shape our modern world.

Mark Thurner is professor of Latin American studies at the University of London. His books include The First Wave of Decolonization and History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography. Juan Pimentel is research professor in the history of science at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC, Madrid. He is the author of many books, including The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel

Part 1: Artificialia

1  Codex Mendoza by Daniela Bleichmar
2  Macuilxochitl by Juan Pimentel
3  Potosi by Kris Lane
4  Piece of Eight by Alejandra Irigoin and Bridget Millmore
5  Pieza de Indias by Pablo Gomez
6  Rubber by Heloisa Maria Bertol Domingues and Emilie Ana Carreón Blaine
7  Silver Basin by Mariana Francozo
8  Feathered Shield by Linda Baez
9  Black by Adrian Masters
10  Cards by Jorge Canizares Esguerra
11  Mary’s Armadillo by Peter Mason
12  Mexican Portrait by Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos
13  Clay Vessel by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra
14  Singing Violin by Jorge Canizares Esguerra
15  Creole Cabinet by Juan Pimentel and Mark Thurner
16  Modern Quipu by Sabine and William Hyland
17  Memory Palaces by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra
18  Inca Mummy by Christopher Heaney
19  Xilonen by Miruna Achim
20  Machu Picchu by Amy Cox-Hall

Part 2: Naturalia

21  Amazon by Roberto Chauca
22  Bird of Paradise by Jose Ramon Marcaida
23  Emeralds by Kris Lane
24  Pearls by Jorge Canizares Esguerra
25  Cochineal by Miruna Achim
26  Opossum by Jose Ramon Marcaida
27  Guinea Pig by Helen Cowie
28  Bezoar by Jose Pardo-Tomas
29  Cacao by Peter Mason
30  Strawberry by Elisa and Ana Sevilla
31  Volcano by Sophie Brockmann
32  Andes by Mark Thurner and Jorge Canizares-Esguerra
33  Anteater by Helen Cowie
34  Megatherium by Juan Pimentel
35  Tapir by Irina Podgorny
36  Cinchona by Matthew Crawford
37  Potato by Rebecca Earle
38  Guano by Gregory Cushman
39  Tortoise by Elizabeth Hennessey
40  Darwin’s Hummingbird by Iris Montero

José Ignacio de Lequanda and Louis Thiébaut, Quadro de Historia Natural, Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú, 1799, 331 × 119 cm (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales). This exceptional work presents 195 scenes and 381 figures describing the physical geography, the history, the ethnography, the fauna, and flora of the Peruvian Viceroyalty, via Google Arts & Culture.