Michel Baridon traces the history of the most famous gardens in the world from their inception through the three centuries of eventful history that they have witnessed.

In seventeenth-century France, land took on new importance for the practice of politics and rituals of court life. In her major new book, Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the two seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design. She shows how, at Versailles in particular, the royal park showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality. She challenges the association of state power with social and legal structures alone and demonstrates the importance for Louis XIV and his state of a controlled physical site, a demarcated French territory within the wider European geo-political continent.

The first book to examine how the vast gardens of Versailles were used as a setting for the receptions of ambassadors, heads of state, and other visiting dignitaries who conducted diplomatic and political business with France.

Ovid tells the story of Latona, the mother by Jupiter of Apollo and Diana. In her flight from the jealous Juno, she arrives faint and parched on the coast of Asia Minor. Kneeling to sip from a pond, Latona is met by the local peasants, who not only deny her effort but muddy the water in pure malice. Enraged, Latona calls a curse down upon the stingy peasants, turning them to frogs. In his masterful study, Thomas F. Hedin reveals how and why a fountain of this strange legend was installed in the heart of Versailles in the 1660s, the inaugural decade of Louis XIV’s patronage there. The natural supply of water was scarce and unwieldy, and it took the genius of the king’s hydraulic engineers, working in partnership with the landscape architect André Le Nôtre, to exploit it. If Ovid’s peasants were punished for their stubborn denial of water, so too the obstacles of coarse nature at Versailles were conquered; the aquatic iconography of the fountain was equivalent to the aquatic reality of the gardens. Latona was designed by Charles Le Brun, the most powerful artist at the court of Louis XIV, and carried out by Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy. The 1660s were rich in artistic theory in France, and the artists of the fountain delivered substantial lectures at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on subjects of central concern to their current work. What they professed was what they were visualizing in the gardens. As such, the fountain is an insider’s guide to the leading artistic ideals of the moment. Louis XIV was viewed as the reincarnation of Apollo, the god of creativity, the inspiration of artists and scientists. Hedin’s original argument is that Latona was a double declaration: a glorification of the king and a proud manifesto by artists.

A “lucid and convincingly argued” narrative of how ancient geometric principles continue to shape the contemporary world (Publishers Weekly). On a cloudy day in 1413, a balding young man stood at the entrance to the Cathedral of Florence, facing the ancient Baptistery across the piazza. As puzzled passers-by looked on, he raised a small painting to his face, then held a mirror in front of the painting. Few at the time understood what he was up to; even he barely had an inkling of what was at stake. But on that day, the master craftsman and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi would prove that the world and everything within it was governed by the ancient science of geometry. In Proof!, the award-winning historian Amir Alexander traces the path of the geometrical vision of the world as it coursed its way from the Renaissance to the present, shaping our societies, our politics, and our ideals. Geometry came to stand for a fixed and unchallengeable universal order, and kings, empire-builders, and even republican revolutionaries would rush to cast their rule as the apex of the geometrical universe. For who could doubt the right of a ruler or the legitimacy of a government that drew its power from the immutable principles of Euclidean geometry? From the elegant terraces of Versailles to the broad avenues of Washington, DC, and on to the boulevards of New Delhi and Manila, the geometrical vision was carved into the landscape of modernity. Euclid, Alexander shows, made the world as we know it possible.

When animals and their symbolic representations—in the Royal Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy—helped transform the French state and culture. Peter Sahlins's brilliant new book reveals the remarkable and understudied “animal moment” in and around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and graceful birds. In the unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance, nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an entire worldview in France—what Sahlins calls Renaissance humanimalism toward more modern expressions of classical naturalism and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes's animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of sovereignty after 1668 in which his absolute authority is represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668 explores and reproduces the king's animal collections—in printed text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668 together and to life as he observes them critically in their native habitats—within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden installations of André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings of Sébastien Leclerc, the transfusion experiments of Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the nonhuman and human agents of 1668—panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels and weavers—in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human history.

Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art covers all aspects of Rococo art history through a chronology, an introductory essay, a review of the literature, an extensive bibliography, and over 350 cross-referenced dictionary entries on prominent Rococo painters, sculptors, decorative artists, architects, patrons, theorists, and critics, as well as major centers of artistic production. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Rococo art.

Few buildings carry such a freight of historical symbolism as the Palace of Versailles. First built as a hunting lodge by Louis XIII in the early seventeenth century, then radically repurposed by his absolutist son Louis XIV, Versailles became the focus of that king's centralised power. Drawing on a new wave of research in recent years, particularly on the buildings and material culture of Versailles, Colin Jones, distinguished historian of early modern France, describes the various building campaigns undertaken by Louis XIV and his formal installation of his court at Versailles in 1682; the ritualized rhythms of life at the court of the Sun King; the palace's variegated fortunes under Revolution, First Empire, Restoration and July Monarchy; its return to the political stage in the Franco-Prussian War; its later role as a venue for treaty signings and proclamations; and its continuing legacy as imposing physical embodiment of the ancien régime.

This innovative book poses two, deceptively simple, questions: what is a sculpture garden, and what happens when you give equal weight to the main elements of landscape, planting and artwork? Its wide-ranging frame of reference, including the USA, Europe and Japan, is brought into focus through Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, with which the book begins and ends. Effectively less than 15 years old, and largely the work of one man, Tremenheere affords an opportunity to examine as work-in-progress the creation of a new kind of sculpture garden. Including a historical overview, the book traverses multiple ways of seeing and experiencing sculpture gardens, culminating in an exploration of their relevance as 'cultural ecology' in the context of globalisation, urbanisation and climate change. The thinking here is non-dualist and broadly aligned with New Materialisms and Material Feminisms to explore our place as humans in the non-human world on which we depend. Eminent contributors, including John Dixon Hunt, George Descombes, Bernard Lassus and David Leatherbarrow, approach these issues through practices and theories of landscape architecture; garden and art making; history and writing; and philosophy. Richly illustrated with over 100 images, including a colour plate section, the book will primarily appeal to those engaged in professional or academic research, along with sculpture garden visitors, who will find new and surprising ways of experiencing plants and art in natural and urban settings.

Comprising ten papers which critically examine the field of garden history, presented at the twenty-first Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture. Topics include changes in approaches to garden history and architectural studies over time and new historical investigations and discoveries in Italian and Mughal gardens. Good