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Summary
Author: Blasset, N. ; Cottart, P.
Title: Les epitaphes inventés par N. Blasset d'Amiens ; Receuil des plus beaux portails de plusieures églises de Paris.
Publication: (Paris), Jean L'Enfant nd (late 1650s?) ; Anvers, Van Merle 1660.
Price: £1,850
Reference: 05441
Full Description
Small folio. (7) unnumbered engraved plates including decorative title leaf ; 12 engraved plates including decorative title leaf. The volume also includes the following two suites of engravings by Jean Le Pautre : (1) Plusieurs deseings d'autelz à la Romaine nouvellement inventez, Paris, Jollain, 1665, 6 engraved plates (2) Portails d'eglise à Italienne nouvellement inventé, (Paris, no imprint or date but 1660s?), 6 engraved plates. Contemporary full vellum, rather worn and abraded. A contemporary ink ownership inscription at the foot of the first plate in the first Le Pautre suite (bound first in the volume) records that "Desen Boeck hoort toe aen Myn Heer Johannes Baptista van den Kerckhoven Konst Schilder". The first Le Pautre suite has an old light stain at its bottom right hand blank corner, and both Le Pautre suites are soiled or browned at their outer margins, but the plates of the Blasset and Cottart items are in generally good condition, with only very minor browning at their outer margins and a few reddish marks on one of the Blasset plates.
Although this composite volume includes two suites of engravings by Le Pautre (see the detailed description below), its importance lies in the fact that it contains the suites by Blasset and Cottart under whose names we catalogue it here. The Blasset suite comprises a decorative title leaf and six elegant designs for funeral monuments, engraved by Jean L'Enfant from drawings by Nicolas Blasset the younger (1600-1659), an architect and sculptor from Amiens who attained the position of "sculpteur ordinaire du Roy". Although Blasset's are scarce outside older public collections today, their influence on contemporaries was by no means negligible, and they were even reproduced in reverse in England in Robert Pricke's The Ornaments of Architecture, 1674. It is interesting to note that although the plates are unnumbered they are bound in the same order in our copy as they are in the British Architectural Library copy (BAL Cat 290). No set of these plates was reported to NUC.The Cottart plates illustrate the entrance facades and doorways of eleven churches built in Paris and its environs by major architects of the first half of the seventeenth century. The drawings for them were made at the end of the 1640s by the Parisian architect Pierre Cottart, and they were initially published by Cottart himself in Paris in 1650, under the title "Recueil de plusieurs pièces d'architecture qui sont à Paris et aux environs", with a dedication to Cottart's then patron, the Marquis de Rostaing (BN, Inventaire du Fonds Français, Graveurs du XVIIe siècle, vol. iii, p. 183, nos 4-16). They are good contemporary evidence for what recently built churches were then considered to be of architectural merit, and the architects whose work is featured include Le Mercier and Mansart. Cottart also illustrates a design of his own for the portal of the church of the Pères de la Merci, which seems to differ from the portal as executed. These engravings are however more normally found in an Antwerp reissue of 1660, issued under the new title "Recueil des plus beaux portails de plusieures églises de Paris" ; the reissue omits the original dedication leaf but includes all the original plates, slightly rearranged and renumbered. Our copy is of this reissue, as is the British Architectural Library copy (BAL Cat 724).The ownership inscription at the front of the volume identifies the volume as having belonged to "Johannes Baptista van den Kerckhoven", evidently the Flemish artist J.B. Van Den Kerckhove (died 1772), painter of an altarpiece in a church in Louvain.