Enfilade

From Penn State UP; and save 30% with code NR23 (see below for details).

Allison Stagg, Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023), 266 pages, ISBN: 978-0271093321, $80.

Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists to share news and opinions with their audiences in shockingly radical ways. Complementing studies on British and European printmaking, this book is a survey and catalogue of all known American political caricatures created in the country’s transformative early years, as the nation sought to define itself in relation to European models of governance and artistry. Allison Stagg examines printed caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians in the United States’ fledgling government, reactions captured in the personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them. Stagg’s work fills a large gap in early American scholarship, one that has escaped thorough art-historical attention because of the rarity of extant images and the lack of understanding of how these images fit into their political context. Featuring 125 images, many published here for the first time since their original appearance, and a comprehensive appendix that includes a checklist of caricature prints with dates, titles, artists, references, and other essential information, Prints of a New Kind will be welcomed by scholars and students of early American history and art history as well as visual, material, and print culture.

Allison M. Stagg is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Architecture and Art History at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Orders must be placed at psupress.org to receive the discount; normal shipping charges apply. European customers may order through NBNi, using the code NR23 for a 30% discount.

From Penguin Random House:

David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder (New York: Doubleday, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0385534260, $30.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans,” it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then … six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes—they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann’s recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O’Brian, his portrayal of the castaways’ desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann’s work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

David Grann is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award. He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Grann’s investigative reporting has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

From Yale UP:

Roger White, Georgian Arcadia: Architecture for the Park and Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0300249958, $65.

An exploration of the origins and evolution of Georgian landscape architecture, a period of innovative and diverse garden structures in which some of the era’s greatest architects experimented with form, style, and technology

The invention and evolution of the Georgian landscape garden liberated garden buildings from the corset of formality, allowing them to structure much more extensive areas of garden and park. One of the leading authorities on Georgian landscape architecture, Roger White explores a genre in which some of the era’s greatest architects experimented with different forms, styles, and new technology. Covering not just the obvious adornments of parks and gardens such as temples, summerhouses, grottoes, towers, and ‘follies’, the book also explores structures with predominantly practical functions, including mausolea, boathouses, dovecotes, stables, kennels, deer pens, barns, and cowsheds, all of which could be dressed up to make an architectural impact. White examines these structures not only architecturally but from a functional and cultural viewpoint, considering questions of stylistic origins and development. Focussing on the contributions of Britain’s leading eighteenth-century architects—Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Gibbs, Kent, Adam, Chambers, Wyatt, and Soane—Georgian Arcadia provides a richly illustrated account of a period of innovative and diverse garden building.

Roger White is an architectural historian specialising in the Georgian period. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and has been Secretary of both the Georgian Group and the Garden History Society.

From Rizzoli:

Bernd H. Dams and Andrew Zega, Visions of Arcadia: Pavilions and Follies of the Ancien Régime (New York: Rizzoli, 2023), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8478-9916-6, $85.

Astonishing buildings created for casual amusements, the splendid pavilions and garden follies of prerevolutionary France are the glorious productions of an age now past—but they continue to speak to us through the dazzling artistry of Dams and Zega.

Spanning 150 years and the reigns of four kings, the pleasure pavilions, garden follies, and châteaux of Ancien Régime France are fascinating for the stories that surround their creation as well as a visual feast and a delight. Typically the realm of scholars, the subject is given extraordinary life at the hands of the authors, through whose historically accurate, meticulously rendered watercolors the reader comes to see the sometimes grand, sometimes playful, always beautiful buildings, sculpture, and ornament as they were meant to be seen. Dams and Zega have devoted much of a lifetime to rediscovering and illuminating these great treasures of world heritage, and this volume is the fruit of more than thirty years of passionate investigation. Intensive original research and devoted exploration informs the work, capturing the genius of these buildings through the medium of watercolor, which the author-artists harness to render building materials and surfaces with sensitivity and great range. From the mannerist and early baroque guard pavilions at Blérancourt to the Château de Rosay, a fantasy realized in the form of an Anglo-Chinese folly park, this volume is a revelation, sure to captivate architects, historians, landscape designers, and garden lovers.

Bernd H. Dams is an architect and architectural historian. Andrew Zega is an architectural illustrator, designer, and writer. Together, they have authored and illustrated a number of successful books, including Palaces of the Sun King, Chinoiseries, and Central Park NYC for Rizzoli.

Francesco Ignazio Lazzari’s Discrizione della Villa Pliniana is the 2023 winner of the Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, from the Society of Architectural Historians. Members of the award committee—Kathleen John-Adler, Sonja Dümpelmann, and Tracy Ehrlich—note in their citation: “given that Lazzari lived until the year 1717, we are reminded that his dedication to the Plinian tradition was not simply an outgrowth of a narrow Renaissance antiquarianism, it reflected a broader pan-European concern for the classical language of architecture that flourished in the eighteenth century.”

Distributed by Harvard UP:

Anatole Tchikine, Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, and Taylor Ellis Johnson, Francesco Ignazio Lazzari’s ‘Discrizione della Villa Pliniana’: Visions of Antiquity in the Landscape of Umbria (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2021), 241 pages, ISBN: 978-0884024873, £35 / €37 / $40.

A cultivated patrician, a prolific playwright, and a passionate student of local antiquity, Francesco Ignazio Lazzari (1634–1717) was a mainstay of the artistic and intellectual life of Città di Castello, an Umbrian city that maintained a remarkable degree of cultural autonomy during the early modern period. He was also the first author to identify the correct location of the lost villa ‘in Tuscis’ owned by the Roman writer and statesman Pliny the Younger and known through his celebrated description. Lazzari’s reconstruction of this ancient estate, in the form of a large-scale drawing and a textual commentary, adds a unique document to the history of Italian gardens while offering a fascinating perspective on the role of landscape in shaping his native region’s identity. Published with an English translation for the first time since its creation, this manuscript is framed by the scholarly contributions of Anatole Tchikine and Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey. At the core of their discussion is the interplay of two distinct ideas of antiquity—one embedded in the regional landscape and garden culture of Umbria and the other conveyed by the international tradition of Plinian architectural reconstructions-that provide the essential context for understanding Lazzari’s work.

Series | Ex Horto: Dumbarton Oaks Texts in Garden and Landscape Studies

Anatole Tchikine is Curator of Rare Books at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey is Professor in the Department of Art at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword
Acknowledgments

Prologue: Fitting Together the Pieces of the Lazzari Puzzle — Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey

1  Repatriating Pliny: Lazzari and His Reconstruction — Anatole Tchikine
2  ‘So That the Memory of This Villa…’: Lazzari’s Two Antiquities — Anatole Tchikine
3  ‘Tuscos Meos’: Visions of Pliny’s Villas by Lazzari, His Predecessors, and His Contemporaries — Pierre de la Ruffiniere du Prey
Epilogue: Local Memory and National Myth — Anatole Tchikine

Description of Pliny’s Villa — Francesco Ignazio Lazzari, translated with notes from Italian and Latin by Anatole Tchikine and Taylor Ellis Johnson
Discrizione della Villa Pliniana — Francesco Ignazio Lazzari, transcription by Anatole Tchikine and Taylor Ellis Johnson

Appendices
1  Pliny the Younger, Letter to Apollinaris — translated from Latin by Taylor Ellis Johnson
2  Nine Latin Inscriptions Found in the Area of Città di Castello (Appendix to the Città di Castello Manuscript) — transcription by Anatole Tchikine
3  Legend to Lazzari’s Drawing — transcription by Anatole Tchikine
4  Chronology of Lazzari’s Writings — Anatole Tchikine

Contributors
Index