THTRE D'AMOUR: The Garden of Love and Its Delights: Rediscovery of a Lost Book from the Age of the Baroque

It's probably French, and it's beautiful. This set of 143 love-related, hand-colored engravings from the 17th century—many with verse commentary (in French and Latin) ranging from bawdily hilarious to truly heartbreaking—was compiled as a book around 1620, and is lovingly printed in facsimile, with German scholar Warncke's transcriptions, translations and commentary en face . While not creating a narrative, the engravings together form a dialogue on love, with lovers acting out scenes of torment, torpor and everything in between. Though the pages aren't glossy, the colors are vivid, and turning this nicely scaled book's pages feels intimate. Warncke includes an essay on the Emblemata amatoria (as the book is called in Latin) that decodes its emblems, identifies some of its artists, explains its significance as a book and offers interpretations of its subject. The book as a whole, like its subject, is inexhaustible. (Feb.)