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VISIONS OF ARCADIA

Pavilions and Follies of the Ancien Régime

Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams love and know better than anyone the history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and especially the history of France in these times when its arts shone across the world. This is how they can make the stones and gardens speak, and all those who knew them, so well that one might think they are our contemporaries.

They allow us to see and love, like them, what they see and what they love, because they have a rare and precious privilege—that of style, their own, that their work imposes on everything and everyone.

—Olivier de Rohan Chabot, President of Sauvegarde de l’Art Français, from his introduction

Visions of Arcadia was published by Rizzoli in April of 2023. Years in preparation, it is a large-format hardcover, 280 pages with end notes, richly illustrated with nearly 70 original watercolors, as well as contemporary photography and numerous period artworks. The text is expansive and wide-ranging, surveying the society of Ancien Régime France through the lens of these supposedly useless structures with clarity, insight and wry wit.