Angela Oberer, The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera. The Queen of Pastel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). 326 pages. ISBN: 9789462988996 Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) is a celebrated name in the eighteenth-century art world, with a well-established place in Grand Tour mythology for attracting clients to sit for their portraits…
On the 26th of January 2021, as a pandemic-wracked India held muted celebrations of the anniversary of its constitutional founding, a group of farmers protesting recently introduced farm laws veered from their permitted routes towards the Red Fort in the heart of the Old City of Delhi. Staid images from…
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), ISBN: 978-0-2264-8520-1 Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design offers a new account of German modernism told through the history of its preoccupation with bodily experience from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth…
Christiane Gruber Mosque and grove, ancient wall and garden, palace and courtyard, are full of song, of the cheerful sound of twittering and chirping; everywhere there is the rush of wings, everywhere the busy, active little lives go on.[1]—Edmondo de Amicis (1878) In Istanbul and further afield, a number of…
Zirwat Chowdhury Contemporaries of the architect George Dance the Younger had little doubt that his new façade (built 1788-1790) for the City of London’s Guildhall (Fig. 1) made some form of reference to the artist Williams Hodges’s recently published views of Indian architecture (Fig. 2). As the City’s Clerk of…
Carolyn Yerkes A revolutionary referent opens the second architectural book published in the American colonies, a new edition of Abraham Swan’s A Collection of Designs in Architecture, Containing New Plans and Elevations of Houses, for General Use, published in Philadelphia in 1775 (Fig. 1). A central column or pillar, gripped…
Heeryoon Shin Overlooking the sacred Ganges River, the Amethi Temple blends seamlessly into the riverfront vista of Banaras, the celebrated north Indian Hindu pilgrimage city (Fig. 1). Its curvilinear towers mark the building as a Hindu temple following a longstanding architectural tradition, a choice befitting the temple’s location in a…
Susanna Caviglia, History, Painting, and the Seriousness of pleasure in the age of Louis XV (Oxford: Liverpool University Press on behalf of Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2020). 330 pages, 87 illustrations (63 black and white, 24 colorplates) In this fascinating and important book, Susanna Caviglia invites us to reconsider new contexts and…
The Palace of Versailles remains a subject of interest and fascination for scholars and curators alike. Recent exhibitions and publications reveal that there are still new angles to explore of this already much-studied seat and symbol of power. The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domaine (New York:…
In a 1994 interview with Jerome Brooks for The Paris Review, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe reflected on his impetus to write: There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until…