The Poet and the King, described by the New York Review of Books as the finest and most perceptive of all the innumerable accounts of La Fontaine, is being offered for the first time in an English translation. La Fontaine, whose works are still memorized by French schoolchildren, is regarded by Fumaroli, and countless others, as the greatest French lyric poet of the seventeenth century. La Fontaine is best known, however, for his fables and Contes. Marc Fumaroli's grand study is almost as much about Louis XIV as it is about La Fontaine. He provides a detailed analysis of the absolutist...

Taking its cue from Horace s saying As is painting, so is poetry ( Ut pictura poesis ), Marc Fumaroli s treatise "What Language to Say the Arts?" revisits the genesis of the conceptual turn in art. Fumaroli argues that the roots of this transition run deeper than the twentieth-century conceptualism of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Rather, the origins of conceptual art can be found in the emergence of aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophy in eighteenth-century Germany, a time when writers, such as Lessing, Baumgarten, Winckelmann, and Kant, tried to analyze art from a purely...