Main Content
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.