Enfilade

From Penguin Random House:

Sofi Thanhauser, Worn: A People’s History of Clothing (New York: Pantheon, 2022), 400 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1524748395, $30.

In this panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories—Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool—about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways. She takes us from the opulent court of Louis XIV to the labor camps in modern-day Chinese-occupied Xinjiang. We see how textiles were once dyed with lichen, shells, bark, saffron, and beetles, displaying distinctive regional weaves and knits, and how the modern Western garment industry has refashioned our attire into the homogenous and disposable uniforms popularized by fast-fashion brands.

Thanhauser makes clear how the clothing industry has become one of the planet’s worst polluters and how it relies on chronically underpaid and exploited laborers. But she also shows us how micro-communities, textile companies, and clothing makers in every corner of the world are rediscovering ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear. Drawn from years of intensive research and reporting from around the world, and brimming with fascinating stories, Worn reveals to us that our clothing comes not just from the countries listed on the tags or ready-made from our factories. It comes, as well, from deep in our histories.

Sofi Thanhauser teaches in the writing department at Pratt Institute. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, MacDowell, and Ucross Foundation. Her writing has appeared in Vox, Essay Daily, and The Establishment, among other publications.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction

Linen
1  The Last Linen Shirt in New Hampshire
2  Underthings

Cotton
3  Texas Fields
4  The Fabric Revolution
5  Drought

Silk
6  Yangtze Silk
7  Costume Drama
8  The Rise of Mass Fashion

Synthetics
9  Rayon
10  Nylons
11  Export Processing Zones

Wool
12  Army of the Small
13  Woolfest
14  Weavers

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Liverpool UP:

David Jacques, Chiswick House Gardens: 300 Years of Creation and Re-creation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1800856219, £40.

The grounds at Chiswick House are amongst the most iconic of all the historic gardens of Europe. In the 1720s they reflected Lord Burlington’s innovative ideas on Palladianism and antique gardens, whilst the area transformed by William Kent to give a rustic appearance in the early 1730s has been recognised as one of, or perhaps the, birthplace of the landscape garden. The grounds were periodically brought to the forefront of taste, reaching another high point as the venue for spectacular garden parties under the 6th Duke of Devonshire. As a garden of many periods it has given rise to passionate national debates since World War II on the principles of restoration, and as a public park it has been an important project assisted by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Its renewed high state of keeping and its tranquil beauty belies its ‘deep’ history of intellectual debate, social tensions and practical difficulties.

The book concentrates on the four main periods when Chiswick gardens were in the national spotlight, two when being in the forefront of taste and two concerning the restorations, the first being in the 1950s when the whole question of garden restoration was entirely new. The second restoration, on and off since 1988 intersects with the development of a philosophical stance and national policy on the restoration of parks and gardens. There is much of interest for art and architectural historians, garden historians, social historians and those local and international visitors who enjoy the finest public park in West London.

David Jacques is an independent scholar and part-time lecturer at the Institute for Historical Research.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword
Acknowledgements
Image Credits
About the Book
Abbreviations

1  ‘His Lordship’s Fine Genius’
2  ‘A Picture of Watteau’
3  English Palladianism
4  The Public Park Initiative

Appendix A: The Owners of Chiswick House Gardens
Appendix B: The Head Gardeners at Chiswick House
Appendix C: Chronology

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Penn State UP:

Sarah Betzer, Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0271088839, $125.

Framed by tensions between figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations, Animating the Antique explores enthralling episodes in a history of artistic and aesthetic encounters. Moving across varied locations—among them Rome, Florence, Naples, London, Dresden, and Paris—Sarah Betzer explores a history that has yet to be written: that of the Janus-faced nature of interactions with the antique by which sculptures and beholders alike were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification.

Examining the traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, the book takes off from the decades marked by the archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments of the mid-eighteenth century and culminates in fin de siècle anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks. It turns on two fundamental and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the nineteenth century, and that by attending to the enduring power of this model, we can newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture’s allure. As Betzer shows, these eighteenth-century developments had far-reaching ramifications for the making and beholding of modern art, the articulations of art theory, the writing of art history, and a significantly queer Nachleben of the antique.

Bold and wide-ranging, Animating the Antique sheds light upon the work of myriad artists, in addition to that of writers ranging from Goethe and Winckelmann to Hegel, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. It will be especially welcomed by scholars and students working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history, art writing, and art historiography.

Sarah Betzer is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia and the author of Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History, also published by Penn State University Press.

From Routledge:

Kristoffer Neville and Lisa Skogh, eds., Queen Hedwig Eleonora and the Arts: Court Culture in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe (New York: Routlege, 2021), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1472489609 (hardback), $160 / ISBN: 978-1032097244 (paperback), $49.

As queen consort and dowager, Hedwig Eleonora (1636–1715) held a unique position in Sweden for more than half a century. As the dominant collector and patron of art and architecture in the realm, she left a strong mark on Swedish court culture. Her dynastic network among the Northern European courts was extensive, and this helped to make Sweden a major cultural center in Northern Europe in the later seventeenth century. This book represents the first major scholarly publication on the full range of Hedwig Eleonora’s endeavours, from the financing of her court to her place within a larger princely network, to her engagements with various cultural pursuits, to her public image. As the contributors show, despite her high profile, political position, and conspicuous patronage, Hedwig Eleonora experienced little of the animosity directed at many other foreign queens and regents, such as the Medici in France and Henrietta Maria in England. In this way, she provides a model for a different and more successful way of negotiating the difficulties of joining a foreign court; the analysis of her circumstances thus adds a substantial dimension to the study of early modern queenship. Presenting much new scholarship, this volume highlights one extremely significant early modern woman and her imprint on Northern European history, and fosters international awareness of the importance of early modern Scandinavia for European cultural history.

Kristoffer Neville is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Lisa Skogh is Project Co-Investigator in the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

C O N T E N T S

1  Kristoffer Neville (University of California, Riverside) and Lisa Skogh (Victoria and Albert Museum), Introduction: Queen Hedwig Eleonora and the Arts
2  Jill Bepler (Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel), ‘The Queen of the North’: Hedwig Eleonora and Her German Family in Paint and Print
3  Gabriele Ball (Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel), Queen Hedwig Eleonora’s Societal Network within the Tugendliche and the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft
4  Björn Asker (National Archives, Stockholm), Hedwig Eleonora as Dowager Queen and Administrator
5  Lisa Skogh (V&A Museum), The Pretiosa Cabinet at Ulriksdal Palace
6  Kjell Wangensteen (Princeton University), Hedwig Eleonora as Patron of David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl
7  Mikael Ahlund (Uppsala University Art Museums), The Wilderness inside Drottningholm: David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl and the Northern Nature at the Court of Hedwig Eleonora
8  Lars-Olof Larsson (Christian-Albrecht-University, Kiel), David Klöcker Ehrenstrahlʼs Portraits of Hedwig Eleonoraʼs Siblings: Invention and the Presentation of the Family
9  Lars Ljungström (Royal Collections, Stockholm), Hedwig Eleonora and Building as a Princely Pursuit
10  Kristoffer Neville (University of California, Riverside), Hedwig Eleonora and the Practice of Architecture
11  Anders Jarlert (Lund University), Hedwig Eleonora, Lund University, and the Learned
12  Mara Wade (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Ballet, Kunstkammer, and the Education of Princess Hedwig Eleonora at the Gottorf Court
13  Maria Schildt (Uppsala University), Hedwig Eleonora and Music at the Swedish Court, 1654–1726
14  Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Oxford University), Hedwig Eleonora in Print: From ‘Citronat’ to ‘Wundermutter’

A book that I should have noted several years ago; the ebook appeared in 2021. –CH. From Penn State UP:

Kristoffer Neville, The Art and Culture of Scandinavian Central Europe, 1550–1720 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0271082257, $90.

Politically and militarily powerful, early modern Scandinavia played an essential role in the development of Central European culture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this volume, Kristoffer Neville shows how the cultural ambitions of Denmark and Sweden were inextricably bound to those of other Central European kingdoms. Tracing the visual culture of the Danish and Swedish courts from the Reformation to their eventual decline in the eighteenth century, Neville explains how and why they developed into important artistic centers. He examines major projects by figures largely unknown outside of Northern Europe alongside other, more canonical artists—including Cornelis Floris, Adriaen de Vries, and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach—to propose a more coherent view of this part of Europe, one that rightly includes Scandinavia as a vital component. The seventeenth century has long seemed a bleak moment in Central European culture. Neville’s authoritative and unprecedented study does much to change this perception, showing that the arts did not die in the Reformation and Thirty Years’ War but rather flourished in the Baltic region.

Kristoffer Neville is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Nicodemus Tessin the Elder: Architecture in Sweden in the Age of Greatness and coeditor of Queen Hedwig Eleonora and the Arts: Court Culture in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Gothicism in Germania
2  Reform and Reformation
3  Frederik II and the Arts in Denmark in the Later Sixteenth Century
4  Christian IV
5  Minerva’s World
6  Two Queens
7  Absolutism
Epilogue: The Romantic North

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From The Getty:

Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss, The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN 978-1606067307, $60.

This richly illustrated volume, the first devoted to maritime art and galley slavery in early modern France, shows how royal propagandists used the image and labor of enslaved Muslims to glorify Louis XIV.

Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom’s coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions—ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints—Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France.

With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasizes the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)—rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands—in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV’s reign.

Meredith Martin is associate professor at New York University. She is an art historian specializing in French art, architecture, empire, and intercultural exchange from the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Gillian Weiss is professor at Case Western Reserve University. She is a historian specializing in early modern France, its relations with the Islamic world, and Mediterranean slavery.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Abbreviations

Introduction
1  Turks at Work: Building the Marseille Arsenal
2  Port to Palace: Mediterranean Dominance at Paris and Versailles
3  Civility and Barbarism: Enslaved Turks in Maritime Ceremonies and Manuals
4  Spectacles of Suffering: Galley Slaves and Plague
Epilogue

Illustration Credits
About the Authors
Index