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Summary
Author: Desgodetz, Antoine
Title: Les edifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés tres exactement.
Publication: Paris, Jean Baptiste Coignard 1682.
Price: Sold
Reference: 09995
Full Description
Folio. Engraved title leaf, (12) + 323 + (1)pp, including 137 engraved plates. Contemporary full calf, gilt spine. Slight worming in upper blank margin of last seven ff, not affecting printed surface.
A good copy of the first edition of Desgodetz’s influential book on the buildings of ancient Rome. Desgodetz (1653-1728) had been sent to Rome in the mid 1670s by the French Académie d’Architecture to take reliable measurements of the principal surviving buildings of the ancient city, and returned to Paris in 1677 with the first really accurate drawings of Rome’s temples, theatres, baths and triumphal arches. There seems to have been some initial scepticism about the accuracy of his work from François Blondel and others, but this turned out to be groundless and the publication in 1682 of the present book, in which the engraved plates carefully reproduce Desgodetz’s original drawings, was a landmark in the provision of exact measured illustrations of famous buildings of the past.