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Summary
Author: (Félibien des Avaux, André)
Title: Description de la grotte de Versailles.
Publication: Paris, Imprimerie Royale 1679.
Price: £3,950
Reference: 07853
Full Description
Large folio. (2) + 11 + (1)pp, with engraved vignette on title leaf, engraved initial, engraved headpiece, and 20 engraved plates. Contemporary full panelled vellum, with blind-stamped central decorative device, a few minor scratch marks on upper and lower covers. A small stain at lower blank margin of leaf A1, and two repaired tears to lower blank margins of the plates, slightly extending into engraved surfaces but not into the engraved images themselves.
The best edition of this description by Félibien of the Grotto of Thetis in the grounds of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles. Félibien’s text had originally been issued in quarto and octavo printings in the early 1670s, but these had been superseded in 1676 by a large folio edition with handsome engraved plates showing the exterior and interior of the grotto, the sculptured bas-reliefs by Gerard van Opstal on its walls, and piers, candelabra and masks within the grotto executed in decorative shellwork. Five further plates showed other splendid free-standing sculptures, by Girardon, Regnaudin, Gaspar and Balthasar Marsy, Guérin and Tuby ; the finest of these, a double-page plate engraved by Edelinck from a drawing by Monier, is dated 1678, and although this plate is often added to copies of the 1676 edition, the present 1679 edition was the first to contain the full complement of plates as a matter of course. The volume in its large folio format had in fact been commissioned as part of the Cabinet du Roi series, recording the Louis XIV’s role as a patron of architecture, sculpture and painting, and the present edition is also, paradoxically, the last edition to include Félibien’s accompanying text, for eighteenth-century reissues of the Cabinet du Roi volumes comprise plates only without text.