Enfilade

From Frances Lincoln:

Tim Richardson, with photographs by Clive Boursnell, The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia (London: Frances Lincoln, 2024), 320 pages, ISBN: ‎978-0711290921, £40 / $60.

Smooth lawns, glassy pools, cool garden temples, mysterious woodland glades, evocative statuary … the 18th-century English landscape garden offers a transcendent vision of Arcadia, a world of rich escapism peopled by gods and goddesses, young lovers and dairymaids, poets and philosophers.

This sumptuous, beautifully photographed volume celebrates this quintessentially British creation, arguably its greatest artform, taking you on a tour of 20 of the finest surviving gardens, including:
• Studley Royal (Yorkshire), a dreamy valley garden which culminates with a view down and across the ruins of a Cistercian abbey
• Stowe (Buckinghamshire), the great politically motivated garden of its day, boasting the ensemble masterpiece that is William Kent’s Elysian Fields
• Chiswick House (London), Lord Burlington’s experiment in neoclassical architecture
• Petworth (Sussex) of ‘Capability’ Brown, who eschewed the symbolism of earlier generations but created instead his own powerful vision of pastoral Arcadia
• Hawkstone Park (Shropshire), designed to elicit a thrill of fear in visitors as they traverse rocky precipices and encounter live hermits

Tim Richardson is a writer who specializes in garden and landscape design and history. He has been gardens editor at Country Life and landscape editor at Wallpaper* magazine, and was founding editor of both the award-winning gardens magazine New Eden and Country Life Gardens. He contributes to The Daily Telegraph, House and Garden, Gardens Illustrated, and Country Life. He is the author of Phaidon’s The Garden Book, Vanguard Landscapes Gardens of Martha Schwartz, English Gardens of the 20th Century, and Arcadian Friends: The Makers of the English Landscape Garden. He is also the author of The New English Garden (Frances Lincoln).

First published in 2010, The English Garden has been reissued by Haus Publishing, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Hans von Trotha, The English Garden, translated by John Brownjohn (London: Haus Publishing, 2024), 104 pages, ISBN: 978-1914982095, £10 / $17.

Garden design in England was entirely reinvented during the eighteenth century. The strictly symmetrical gardens of the French Baroque were replaced by artificial landscapes almost indistinguishable from natural scenery. What continues to govern our notions of a beautiful landscape, even today, is the ideal image of nature conceived by eighteenth-century English landscape gardeners. Hans von Trotha’s journey through the history of the English garden introduces us to twelve of the most important, original, and beautiful parks in Britain, all of which can be visited today. On the way, we learn how the new landscape garden was born of the spirit of political opposition. We also learn the significance of imitation Greek temples and Gothic ruins. The foreword presents a historical outline of the origins of the English garden.

Hans von Trotha studied literature in Heidelberg and Berlin, completing his PhD in eighteenth-century gardens. He became a radio journalist and later a university lecturer. He spent ten years as the editorial director at Nicolai Verlag in Berlin and is the author of a novel, Pollak’s Arm (2019).

John Brownjohn is an experienced and versatile literary translator with almost 200 books to his credit. His work has won him critical acclaim and numerous awards on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (three times), the US PEN, and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize for Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes and Thomas Brussig’s Heroes Like Us.

From Brepols:

Adriano Aymonino, Eloisa Dodero, Nicholas Penny, and Francis Haskell, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900, revised and amplified edition (Turnhout: Harvey Miller / Brepols, 2024), 3 volumes, approximately 1684 pages, ISBN: 978-1909400252, €395.

Indispensable for historians of taste and for art historians concerned with the debt owed by artists from the Renaissance onwards to the art of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as for students and collectors of the many surviving copies of the sculptures discussed.

For several hundred years, until about 1900, a limited number of antique sculptures were as much admired as are the Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or Michelangelo’s David today. They were reproduced in marble, bronze, and lead, as plaster casts in academies and art schools, as porcelain figurines for chimneypieces and as cameos for bracelets and snuffboxes. They were celebrated by poets from Du Bellay and Marino to Byron and D’Annunzio, and memorably evoked by novelists as diverse as Marcel Proust and Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. Copies of some of these statues can be seen at Pavlosk and Madrid, at Stourhead, Charlottenburg, Malibu and Versailles, and in countless gardens, houses, and museums throughout the world.

How and when did these particular sculptures achieve such a special status? Who were the collectors, restorers, dealers, artists, dilettanti, scholars and archaeologists who created their reputations? Under what names (often wildly fanciful) did they first become famous? How were they interpreted, and how and when and why did their glamour begin to wane? These are some of the problems that are confronted in Taste and the Antique.

Taste and the Antique has become a classic of art history since its original publication in 1981. Now expanded into three volumes, this revised and amplified edition significantly updates the information based on new research undertaken in the last several decades, as well as expanding examples of the reception and influence of these works by artists and collectors from the Renaissance through to contemporary art.

When Taste and the Antique was published in 1981, Francis Haskell (1928–2000) was established as one of the most influential historians of art, not only in the English-speaking world but throughout Europe, chiefly on account of his first book, Patrons and Painters (1963), a highly original account of Baroque art in Italy. Since his appointment as professor of art history in Oxford in 1967, he had turned his attention from Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to France in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and had begun his investigations of collecting, historiography, and the role of the museum and of the art critic, eventually published as Rediscoveries in Art (1976) and Past and Present in Art and Taste (1987). Taste and the Antique identified the models for art education and criticism during the four centuries with which Haskell was chiefly preoccupied, providing a series of individual case studies for the works upon which orthodox taste was founded. The book had a central place in his oeuvre, prompting preoccupations which persist in the last book that he published in his lifetime, History and Its Images (1993), as well as in The Emphemeral Museum, published posthumously in 2000.

When he began to work with Francis Haskell on Taste and the Antique, Nicholas Penny was teaching art history at the University of Manchester. His first book, Church Monuments in Romantic England (1977), had attracted Haskell’s attention and subsequently they discovered and developed many mutual interests. Penny went on to occupy curational positions in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the National Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. From 2008 to 2015 he was director of the National Gallery. He is now a visiting professor at the National Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. Among his other books are Raphael (1983), written with the late Roger Jones, and The Materials of Sculpture (1993), as well as catalogues of the sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum (3 volumes, 1992) and of the sixteenth-century Italian paintings in the National Gallery (2004, 2008, 2016). He is currently cataloguing the Italian paintings in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, of which one volume was published in 2021 and the other, written with Imogen Tedbury, is approaching completion.

Adriano Aymonino is the director of the MA in Art Market, Provenance and History of Collecting at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of Paper Palaces (2013); Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal (with Anne Varick Lauder, 2015); and, most recently, Enlightened Eclecticism. The Grand Design of the 1st Duke and Duchess of Northumberland (2021), winner of the 2022 William MB Berger Prize.

Eloisa Dodero is archaeological curator at the Capitoline Museums in Rome. She is the author of Il Tesoro di Antichità. Winckelmann e il Museo Capitolino nella Roma del Settecento (with Claudio Parisi Presicce, 2017); Ancient Marbles in Naples in the Eighteenth Century (2019); and co-author, with Amanda Claridge, of The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Sarcophagi and other Reliefs (four volumes, 2022) and, within the same series, of Statues and Busts (2023).

c o n t e n t s

Volume I | Text

A revised and amplified version of the 1981 edition. Fifteen chapters trace in narrative form, with the support of a wide variety of plates, the rise and decline of this highly important episode in the history of taste. These chapters are followed by catalogue entries for 95 of the most celebrated sculptures, all of them illustrated, which provide information on when and where they were discovered, changes of ownership and nomenclature, as well as a record of varying critical fortunes designed to complement the more general discussion in the earlier chapters.

Preface to the Revised and Amplified Edition
An Updated Note on the Presentation of the Essay and Catalogue
Introduction

1  ‘A New Rome’
2  The Public and Private Collections of Rome
3  Plaster Casts and Prints
4  Control and Codification
5  Casts and Copies in Seventeenth-Century Courts
6  ‘Tout ce qu’il y a de beau en Italie’
7  Erudite Interests
8  Florence: The Impact of the Tribuna
9  Museums in Eighteenth-Century Rome
10  The New Importance of Naples
11 The Proliferation of Casts and Copies
12  New Fashions in the Copying of Antiquities
13  Reinterpretations of Antiquity
14  The Last Dispersals
15  Epilogue

Notes to the Text
Updated Bibliography
Catalogue
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Volume II | Originals

Contains especially commissioned new photography of over 90 statues catalogued in Volume I.

Volume III |Replicas and Adaptations

Devoted to a visual survey of the full range of replicas and adaptations of the works catalogued and illustrated in the previous volumes.