ars libri ltd.
rare and scholarly books
on the fine arts
ars libri ltd.
rare and scholarly books
on the fine arts
Early Art Literature Exhibited at the International Fine Art Fair
11
CHIZZOLA, LUIGI.
Le pitture e sculture di Brescia che sono esposte al pubblico. Con un’ appendice di alcune private gallerie. xxiv, 196, pp. Very fine unsigned etched decorations throughout, including allegorical frontispiece, title-page, 4 culs-de-lampe and 2 lettrines, all by the same artist; 1 additional cul-de-lampe by a different hand. Sm. 4to. Contemporary heavy drab paper wraps. Though the work was published by Luigi Chizzola, who also contributed the preface, it is based on the researches of the Brescian sculptor G.B. Carboni (d. 1783), who is often named as its author. The etchings are quite artistic, the culs-de-lampe being rococo compositions reminiscent of Piranesi, incorporating monuments of the city. This copy has occasional intelligent annotations in two contemporary hands. A fine copy, uncut and as issued. .
Brescia (Dalle Stampe di Giambatista Bossini), 1760. $1,250.00
Schlosser p. 569; Cicognara 4185; Fossati Bellani 2101; Lichtenthal p. 5
12
(CONTI SALE) PARIS. PALAIS DU TEMPLES
Catalogue d’une riche collection de tableaux des maîtres les plus célèbres des trois écoles; aussi des plus grands maîtres, sous verre & en feuilles, bronzes, marbres, terre cuite du Quesnoi, de Bouchardon, &c., pierres gravées antiques, pendules, montres, & bijoux, & autres objets curieux, qui composent le cabinet de feu Son Altesse Sérenissime Monseigneur le Prince de Conti, prince du sang, & grand prieur de France. Sale, 8 April - 6 June 1777. (2), ii, viii, 417, (3)pp. Fine engraved allegorical half-title by Martini after Moreau. Contemporary boards, 3/4 calf (very finely rebacked and recornered). This copy priced in pen throughout. A little light wear internally; a handsome copy. A highly important sale, "une des ventes les plus importantes du XVIIIe siècle" (Duplessis).
Paris (Muzier père/ Pierre Remy), 1777 . $1,250.00
Lugt 2671; Duplessis 971; Cicognara 4468
13
DIETTERLIN, WENDEL.
Architectura von Ausstheilung, Symmetria und Proportion der Fünff Seulen. Und aller darauss volgender Kunst Arbeit, von Fenstern, Caminen, Thürgerichten, Portalen, Bronnen, und Epitaphien. Wie diselben auss allerley Art der Fünff Seullen gr 5 parts in 1. 209ff. Etched portrait, 5 etched titles, and 195 etched plates in text; 1 copperplate-engraved half-page diagram. Sm. folio. Early full leather (renewed at spine and hinges, preserving nearly all of the original backstrip). First published in parts in 1593-1594, and as a collected edition (in several issues, in Latin, German and French) in Nürnberg, 1598. We quote at length from Harry Francis Mallgrave’s remarks about the book in his essay in the Millard catalogue. “One of the most interesting and important architectural works of sixteenth-century northern Europe is the ‘Architectura von Ausstheilung, Symmetria und Proportia der fünff Seulen’ of Dietterlin... [Dietterlin’s] artistic fame and influence was unparalleled in Germany in the first two decades of the seventeenth-century, and in this respect and others, his significance, especially in his dissemination of Renaissance decorative forms in Germany, parallels and even transcends that of Vredeman in the Netherlands.... What makes Dietterlin’s decorative style so unique and important for architecture is twofold: first, the very high artistic quality of the 203 engraved plates; and second, the way in which the painter (as he identifies himself on the title-page) attempts to interpret the Vitruvian and Serlian tradition of classical architecture in a private, lively, and imaginative style that was, as one of his earlier biographers phrased it, ‘almost impressionistic,’ if not a forerunner to the German baroque. Dietterlin, in effect, mediates or filters the tradition of Vitruvius or Serlio through such column books as that of Blum, but even here important distinctions or departures are already in evidence.... Each of the five books is devoted to one order and iconographic theme based on the Vitruvian explana tion of its origin. Each book begins with plates relating the order’s basic geometry or proportions, before passing to its decorative appurtenances with a lively if not sometimes nightmarish sensitivity. Terror and dementia are sometimes the impressions evoked by these images, as Dietterlin combines architectonic, human and animal forms with a pre-Piranesian sense of fantasy and humor that is unparalleled within the architectural literature of this time. There is scarcely a distinction in his forms between what is organic or inorganic, as walls, portals and windows breathe with empathetic life. Humanist architecture for Dietterlin is entirely corporeal, moving, and animate.... The technical or artistic execution of the plates also elevates the book above any other northern treatise of the sixteenth century, but this achievement is so self-evident to the reader that it is scarcely worth noting.” Consistently foxed in the margins, generally outside the image; one plate with early extension at outer margin, an d with a small hole within the etching. This copy with strong impressions of the plates, and complete with the portrait, which is often missing.
Nürnberg (Paulus Fürst), 1655 $7,500.00
Cf. (citing various editions and issues): The Millard J. Millard Architectural Collection, III: Northern European Books (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1998) p. 25ff., nos. 28-29; Berlin 1942; Cicognara 49; Schlosser p. 421; Guilmard p. 378; Fairfax Murray Early German 134; Besterman p. 29; Brunet II.706; Graesse II.391; Ornament und Entwurf 50; Kunstbibliothek Berlin: Architektur in Darstellung und Theorie 100; Brown University: Ornament and Architecture 40; Dumbarton Oaks: Fons Sapientiae 11
14
DU CERCEAU, JACQUES ANDROUET.
[Praecipua aliquot romanae antiquitatis ruinarum monimenta vivis prospectibus ad veri imitationem affabre designata.] 24 engraved plates, trimmed but nearly all preserving ruled borders (a few plates trimmed fractionally within the border). Average dimensions (slightly irregular): 150 x 185 mm. (5 7/8 x 7 1/8 inches). Mounted in a modern album, on leaves of Dutch handmade paper, the suite is accompanied by a leaf of old laid paper, probably the front flyleaf or inner front cover of an early binding, on which are carefully inscribed five contemporary English signatures (four of these seemingly written by the same hand). Each plate is titled within the image, in various locations at the top. Oblong 4to. Modern full vellum over boards, fillets ruled in blind. This suite of views of Roman antiquities, complete except for the title-page, is a reduced re-engraving by Du Cerceau of a series by the Flemish printmaker Hieronymus Cock, published in Antwerp in 1551 under the same title. Cock’s suite, larger in format (ca. 230 x 325 mm.), was also re-engraved in reverse by Battista Pittoni in Venice in 1561, serving as a model for Veronese in his frescoes at the Villa Maser. The Pittoni series was republished in Venice in 1582 as illustrations in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s “Discorsi sopra l’antichità di Roma.” The subjects of the prints (not including the title) are as follows: Tempio della Pace (2), Colosseum (9), Palace of Septimius Severus, Capitol, Ponte dei Quattro Capi, Palace of the Emperors (4), Baths of Caracalla (2), Baths of Diocletian, and ‘uncertain’ ruins (3). Fine impressions; occasional soiling and rubbing, a few printer’s creases, but in general a very fine set.
[Orléans or Paris, post 1551]. $6,000.00
Geymüller p. 299f.,; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen: In de Vier Winden: De prentuitgeverij van Hieronymus Cock 1507/10-1570 te Antwerpen (Rotterdam, 1988), no. 15ff.; Berlin 1836
15
FALDA, GIOVANNI BATTISTA.
Li giardini di Roma con le loro piante alzate e vedute in prospettiva. 21 etched and engraved plates, including engraved title and magnificent allegorical dedication leaf, by Gio. Battista Manelli after Arnold van Westerhout, of the garden of the “Roman Hesperides.” Oblong folio. Nineteenth-century marbled boards, 3/4 calf (rubbed). Both artistically and historically, a very important publication on nine of the most celebrated gardens of Rome--at the Vatican and Quirinal palaces, and the villas Borghese, Medici, Pamphili, Mattei, Farnese, Ludovisi and Savelli-Peretti--of which only three survive in anything resembling their original state. The extremely accurate and exquisite plates, which alternately present bird’s-eye views and prospects, are by both Falda and Simone Felice. This copy is a rare early issue, with plates before numbers (though the title-page is undated, unlike the first issue, where it is dated 1683). A few marginal stains, a little light foxing; a fine copy, with splendid impressions.
Roma (Gio. Giacomo de’ Rossi), [after 1683]. $7,500.00
Berlin 3492; Olschki 16895; Brunet II.1172; Graesse II.549
16
FERRERIO, PIETRO & FALDA, GIOVANNI-BATTISTA.
Palazzi di Roma de più celebri architetti. Disegnati da Pietro Ferrerio pittore et architetto. Libro Primo. [Falda, Giovanni-Battista. Nuovi disegni dell’architetture, e piante de’ Palazzi di Roma de’ più celebri architetti disegnati et intagliati da Gio. Battista Falda.... Libro secondo.] I: 42 etched and engraved plates (including title); II: 61 etched and engraved plates (including title). Oblong folio. Eighteenth-century marbled boards, 1/4 leather (with early rebacking). This set is a rare early issue, with plates before numbers (though after the addition of the mention of “Libro primo” and “Libro secondo” on the title pages, which had not appeared in the first issue). It also contains the correct complement of 103 plates which characterizes the first issue (42 and 61 respectively, in the two parts, including titles); in contrast, later issues contain a total of 105, including two plates added by Domenico de’ Rossi to the second book after 1691. “This is the first publication to provide systematic, measured and uniformly scaled illustrations of Roman palaces built in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By focusing exclusively on the palace, this book becomes a compendium of exempla, not only illustrating the houses of a very special city, but also establishing the typology of the residential palace.... Ferrerio’s collection of palace façades and plans provided an important model for what became a distinct type of publication.... This trendsetting book on Roman palaces is divided into two parts. Ferrerio was the author of most of the illustrations in the first part, except for one sheet engraved by Giovanni Battista Falda, who was also responsible for forty of the sixty sheets of the second part. While Falda’s work and successful career as an engraver associated with the Roman published Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi have been amply documented, much less is known about Ferrerio, who seems to have practiced as an architect and engraver, a nd whose principal claim to recognition is this album of palace illustrations” (Millard). One plate from the first book is bound out of sequence, in the second. Intermittent light soiling and a little foxing; a fine copy.
Roma (Gio. Jacomo Rossi/ Gio. Giacomo de’ Rossi), [before 1691]. $8,500.00
Millard IV.37; Cicognara 3719; Fowler 120; Berlin 2665; Besterman: Old Art Books 40; Brunet II.1235; Graesse II.573
17
FOSSATI, GASPARD.
Aya Sofia Constantinople as Recently Restored by Order of H.M. The Sultan Abdul Medjid. 3ff. letterpress description of the plates. Lithographic title page and 25 tinted lithographic plates (in two tints) by Louis Haghe after Fossati, mounted on guards. Printed titles in Turkish pasted beneath imprint. 2º (542 x 390 mm.). Contemporary quarter morocco (rubbed, front hinge split, somewhat chipped at head and foot of spine). Occasional light dampstaining (plate 10 somewhat more affected) with partial loss of Turkish inscription below the print; a few plates a bit frayed or creased in the blank margin, where loosening from the hinges. First edition of the first modern account of Hagia Sophia. The short text in the book (in French, notwithstanding the English title) was written from Fossati’s notes by the Vicomte Adalbert de Beaumont, and the design of the title-page is attributed to Owen Jones. Fossati, an Italian/Swiss architect who worked in Russia before travelling to Constantinople in 1837, entered the ser vice of the Porte in 1845, and in 1847 was charged with the restoration of the Hagia Sophia. Although the separate work he intended to publish on the mosaics never appeared, and they were again covered up once the restoration work had been done, this is the first modern record of both the exterior and the interior of the building. As Abbey notes, the lithographs represent the last work undertaken by Louis Haghe (1806-1885) before he broke off his connection with William Day to concentrate on watercolor painting, and the subject was an appropriate one for a lithographer who had spent nine years of work on Roberts’ “Holy Land.” A full-scale monograph on Fossati’s work at Hagia Sophia has been published by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection: Teteriatnikov, Natalia B.: Mosaics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul: The Fossati Restoration and the Work of the Byzantine Institute (Washington, D.C., 1998).
London (P & D Colnaghi), 1852. $16,000.00
Blackmer 619; Abbey Travel 396; cf. Mango, C.: Materials for the Study of the Mosaics of St. Sophia (1962) for more detailed information on Fossati
18
I paesi del Cavalier Gianfrancesco Barbieri, detto GUERCINO da Cento.
Da esso inventati ed espressi in XIV. vedute, ed intagliati in Rame da Giovanni Penna in Parigi. Letterpress title, printed in red and black, with elaborate vignette (Piazzetta?), engraved dedication after Cesare Gennari, and 14 engraved plates by Penna after Guercino. Oblong folio. Modern boards, 3/4 leather, the front cover mounted with an early nineteenth-century red morocco label. The work was printed at the instigation of Benedetto and Cesare Gennari, and dedicated to Francesco II, Duke of Modena. The very fine engravings after Guercino landscape drawings are by Jean Pesne (Rouen 1623 - Paris 1700). Title-page cut down and mounted; central fold in dedication, with unobtrusive mend at foot.
Venezia (Giambattista Albrizzi ), 1754. $4,500.00
19
HOLLAR, WENCESLAUS
Ornatus muliebris Anglicanus, or The Severall Habits of English Women, from the Nobilitie to the contry woman, as they are in these times, 1640. 27 etched plates by Wenceslaus Hollar (including a duplicate of plate 25), each bordered by hand in red with a frame of double lines. Three plates (the title, the duplicate no. 25, and no. 26) are trimmed to the plate line, and skillfully laid down on the mounts, conforming to the format of the rest of the suite. 4to. Early nineteenth-century mottled boards, 3/4 leather gilt (rubbed at spine and extremities). A.e.g. Originally published circa 1640, Hollar’s famous series of fashion plates of English gentlewomen (actually twenty-five ladies and one kitchenmaid) was frequently reissued, even into the early nineteenth century. In his catalogue raisonné, Pennington enumerates as many as nine issues of the suite on the basis of publishers’ information.. This copy corresponds to Pennington’s state V, dated between circa 1710 and 1717. As he points out, copies are often composed of mixed states of the prints. Here, the trimmed duplicate of plate 25 is actually the first state of the print, whereas the integral example of it is in the second state, as are most others in this issue, which is printed on fine early eighteenth-century laid paper. Occasional very light foxing and wear. A fine copy, with armorial ex-libris and shelf ticket of Lambton Castle.
(Sold by H. Overton at the White Horse without Newgate), 1640. $4,500.00
Pennington, Richard: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607-1677 (Cambridge/New York, 1982), nos. 1778-1801; Lipperheide Gca 3; Colas 1464
20
LA FONTAINE [JEAN DE].
Fables choisies, mise en vers. 4 vols. I: (2), xxx, xviii, 124pp. II: (2), ii, 135, (1)pp. III: (2), iv, 146pp. IV: (2), ii, 188pp. Frontispiece and 275 full-page plates hors texte, after Jean-Baptiste Oudry by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, engraved by Cochin himself, Aliamet, Aubert, Aveline, Baquoy, Beauvarlet, Cars, Choffard, Dupuis, Flipart, Galimard, Le Mire, Moitte, Radigues, Surugue, Tardieu, Teucher, and numerous others. Inserted in the first volume, the portrait of Oudry by Tardieu after Largillière ("found in some copies but not integral" per Gordon N. Ray). Folio. Contemporary full mottled calf, the spines gilt in 8 compartments. A large-paper copy, of which only 100 examples were printed. We quote from David Becker’s remarks in Regency to Empire on the history of the work: "Oudry began a series of drawings to illustrate the fables of La Fontaine around 1729, more than twenty-five years before their publication in this lavish four-volume set. They were executed during the artist’s leisure hours away from his duties as painter for the royal tapestry works at Beauvais. He made a total of 275 designs for the fables, all of which were engraved for the book. The original drawings are often signed and dated, ranging as late as 1734, with a frontispiece added in 1752.... It was not until 1751 when the complete set of drawings for the project was acquired by the financier Montenault that their publication was undertaken. While securing a team of no fewer than forty-two engravers, Montenault also commissioned Charles-Nicolas Cochin fils to redraw Oudry’s designs, because their technique was deemed too free and loose for the engravers to follow. Cochin drew his more precise designs in the same format a s Oudry’s, and the subsequent engravings were also executed in the same size. Several of the finished engravings were exhibited in the 1753 Salon, and the first three volumes of the book were published in 1755 and 1756. A royal grant enabled the final volume to appear in 1759 after the publishers encountered financial difficulties.... The volumes were printed in a very grand format, among the largest of any illustrated book of the time save for certain royal festival books. Three different sizes and types of paper were used for the text and the plates, with two grander formats issued in one hundred copies each. Oudry’s full-page plates were embellished with borders and titles, and the flower painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier (1724-1806) was commissioned to design decorative tailpieces to fill in the spaces at the end of each fable. His ornamental, rustic designs were engraved on wood by Jean-Michel Papillon (1698-1776) and Nicolas Le Sueur (1691-1764). These decorations often serve to counterbalance the comple xity of the engraved plates opposite and are sometimes allegorical in nature. In fact, P.P. Choffard issued a suite of metal-engraved copies of these tailpieces soon after their initial publication (ca. 1760)." Exceptionally tall, this copy measures 479 x 330 mm. (18 7/8 x 13 inches), substantially larger than those at the Pierpont Morgan Library, Harvard and the National Gallery. The plate for fable CLXXII, "Le singe et le léopard" is in the second state, as is normal in the large-paper edition. Some rubbing and chipping at the extremities and hinges of the bindings, with small losses at head and feet of backstrips; intermittent unobtrusive dustiness and pale foxing; withal an excellent copy, bearing the engraved ex-libris of the Bibliothèque de Champy fils aîné in each volume.
Paris (Desaint & Saillant/ Durand), 1755-1759. $18,000.00
Ray 5; Cohen-de Ricci 548-550, supplement 280; Portalis 483-489; Girardin (1913); Rochambeau 86; Tchemerzine VI.390f.; Brunet III.753; Graesse IV.73; Guilmard p. 150; Cicognara 1125; Bland (1958) p. 209f.; Blumenthal, Joseph: Art of the Printed Book 1455-1955 (New York, 1973), p. 29; Regency to Empire 41; Opperman, Hal: J.B. Oudry (Fort Worth, 1983), p. 146f.
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