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Summary
Author: (Félibien des Avaux, Jean -François)
Title: Recueil historique de la vie et des ouvrages des plus célebres architectes.
Publication: Paris, la veuve de Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy 1687.
Price: £365
Reference: 05429
Full Description
4to. (16) + 249 + (19)pp, woodcut device on title leaf, 2 engr. headpieces. Contemporary full calf, joints cracked at hinges but the sewing still holding (a new spine was put on over the original spine and a gilt border added to the volume’s upper and lower covers at the end of the eighteenth century, but the added spine has since come away and the original spine remains!), crease to one corner. Gilt stamped monogram of an English nobleman of the early eighteenth century on upper and lower covers.
First edition, published without its author’s name on the title leaf. Although this book by Félibien on the great architects of classical antiquity and the earlier middle ages was reprinted several times, and is found in one edition or another in most major institutional libraries, it remains important in the literature of architectural history for its final chapter, which is the first to make a serious attempt to assemble what was known about the architects responsible for France’s great Gothic cathedrals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.