Writings on Architecture

Hugh Pagan, 01 July 2001 - [ E-mail a Friend ]

JOHN BURY and PAUL BREMAN Writings on Architecture Civil and Military c.1460 to 1640. A checklist of printed editions. Hes & de Graaf Publishers BV, 2000. 122pp. Publisher's printed wrappers. Price: DFL 106

In any bibliographical area one of the chief problems that confronts the serious enquirer, whether scholar, librarian, bookseller or collector, is to discover what older printed literature actually exists. In the field of architecture, neglected by biographical scholarship until well into the second half of the twentieth century, this has been a real difficulty, and it has become more and more apparent that the reference works of the past offer only very imperfect guidance. To take one obvious example, The Berlin Catalogue seems at first sight to list an endless selection of architectural titles of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the reality is that the core of the library which it catalogues had been acquired by the Berlin authorities in one single transaction, by which they obtained (somewhat by sleight of hand) the collection formed over thirty years up to 1879 by the French architect Hippolyte Destailleur, and the Staatliche Preussisches Kunstbibliothek therefore lacked some significant older titles or editions which had never come Destailleur's way.

In 1981 John Bury sought to remedy the absence of any acceptable list of older architectural literature by submitting as his contribution to a conference on early architectural treatises held in Tours, France, a paper which in its subsequent published version, issued in 1988, offered a check list of printed and manuscript writings on architecture by 168 authors of the Renaissance period. He and Paul Breman have now built on this, and provide the reader with some 280 author entries, providing details of some 1800 editions, old and new, of 365 titles. It remains a check list only, so users will have to go elsewhere for collations and other bibliographical information, but the inclusion by the authors of modern facsimile reprints, modern critical editions and some relation monographs, makes it of real assistance not merely to rare book librarians and to antiquarian booksellers but to anyone seriously interested in the history of architecture.

For the specialist, the pages devoted to the various editions of the various separately published treatises by Serlio will be an especial boon, for Bury and Breman set out with great clarity what editions in which language exist, and indeed with such clarity that one may well wonder why past accounts of Serlio's writings have been muddled or imperfect or both. Almost equally commendable is their eight-page listing of all the significant published editions of Vitruvius, for to get such a quantity of information so clearly into so few pages is truly a triumph.

What is also very much to the authors' credit is that although they have sought to be comprehensive in their listing, they have at the same time imported a new precision into the task of defining what is and what is not an architectural book. This has served both to widen and to limit the accepted canon of architectural writings. A decision to include books on fortification, on which Breman is himself a very considerable authority, is reflected in the volume's chosen title, Writings on Architecture Civil and Military, and is readily defensible by the fact that for the writers of most sixteenth century architectural treatises the literature of fortification was just a branch of literature on architecture. Similarly, a decision to list contemporary guide books and other publications where they provide architecturally relevant text or illustrations of architecturally significant buildings, draws the readers attention to books of which he or she might well be unaware, some of them of considerable merit.

By contrast, the authors have been consistently tough on other peripheral writings, firmly excluding books on carpentry, ornament and perspective, even when such books are by one of their chosen authors (Dürer is represented by his writings on fortification, but for Bury and Breman his other writings might as well not exist). Whether they have been right to be as firm as they have is debatable, but it does seem right to omit books on carpentry, and much of the literature on ornament and perspective is not particularly germane to architecture as such. It is however, perhaps a pity that the authors have omitted Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's posthumously published treatise on perspective (several editions), and one wonders if the French architect Jacques Androuet du Cerceau drew any clear distinction in his own mind between those of his engraved publications that offered designs for buildings and those that offered design for decorative ornament.