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Summary
Author: Clérisseau, (Charles-Louis)
Title: Antiquités de la France ... première partie. (Antiquités de Nismes).
Publication: Paris, Philippe-Denys Pierres (for the author) 1778.
Price: Sold
Reference: 09791
Full Description
Elephant folio. xxii + (2)pp, with 2 large engr headpieces, engr tailpiece, engr title-page vignette, engr frontis and 41 engr plates (of which 12 are double-page). Contemporary full mottled calf, with the gilt arms of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 2nd Duke of Newcastle, on the upper cover. Occasional faint browning at outer blank margins, but generally an unusually good, fresh and pleasing copy.
A handsome copy of this impressive volume which is the first part, all published, of a projected publication on the surviving Roman antiquities in France by the celebrated late 18th century painter and architectural draughtsman Charles-Louis Clérisseau. It provides accurate measured illustrations of the principal architectural features of the Maison Carrée, the amphitheatre, and the temple of Diana at Nimes, which superseded the older, less reliable illustrations of these buildings which had figured in architectural textbooks since the sixteenth century. Its impact on Clérisseau’s contemporaries can be judged from the fact that when Thomas Jefferson was asked in the 1780s to provide a design for the Capitol building at Richmond, Virginia, it was the Maison Carrée that he took as his model and Clérisseau to whom he turned for advice. Clérisseau’s intention was to produce a more extensive work covering other French towns with Roman remains, which as a whole would rival the Adam brothers’ volume on Spalatro with which he had helped twenty years earlier, but the present volume is quite sufficiently impressive by itself. This particular copy derives from the library of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 2nd Duke of Newcastle (died 1794), a great landowner who had successively inherited the title and estates of his father, the 7th Earl of Lincoln, and the title and Nottinghamshire estates of his uncle, the 1st Duke of Newcastle, a central figure in mid-eighteenth century British public life . BAL Cat 660 (Philip Hardwick’s copy) ; Berlin Cat 1901 ; Cicognara 3988.