Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. Some light fading on cover. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Although these two sets of views are exceptional in France and Italy they cannot be singled out from the burgeoning fashion for topographical and architectural record polarised by Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentia the hundred or so engravings of the monuments of Rome appearing from 1573. But architectural view painting did not establish itself in Italy as a dominant and identifiable national style at least not until it blossomed in the Venetian Republic in the eighteenth-century and then it was urban rather than country topography that took prece- dent. In France Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder produced two compilations of bird’s eye views of royal and private estates published in 1576 and 1579 as Le Premier Volume des plus excellents Bastiments de France. The initiative is not entirely clear even now. Unlike Leonard Knyff more than a century later the engravings were not commis- sioned or dedicated pieces. They are linear con- veying no sense of place or landscape. Whatever may have been Du Cerceau’s motivation he pro- duced a book of views proclaiming the splendours of French ch?teaux many then built to his designs. Although the Bastiments de France set an important precedent in France the publication was isolated and did not create a fashion for painting houses and gardens. Indeed it is surpris- ing how few oil painted estate views there are in France in the period 1580 to 1640. (LL)