Summary

Author: (Belgrado, Jacopo)

Title: Dell’architettura egiziana dissertazione d’un corrispondente dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Parigi, membro dell’Istituto di Bologna, dell’Accademie di Padova, di Siena, di Cortona, di Ravenna, d’Udine, e pastor arcade.

Publication: Parma, Stamperia Reale 1786.

Price: Sold

Reference: 09887

Full Description

First and only edition. In 1785 the Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles Lettres in Paris had offered a prize, the Prix Caylus, for the best essay on the architecture of the ancient Egyptians, a topic which was beginning to be fashionable in educated circles in France and Italy. The prize was won by the celebrated architectural theorist Quatremère de Quincy, but Quatremère de Quincy did not have his winning essay published until 1803, and the present essay, published as by an anonymous correspondent of the Académie des Sciences in Paris but in fact written by Jacopo Belgrado, a Jesuit scholar with a teaching post at the University of Parma, was the first competition entry to be published. The competition entry submitted by the Florentine architect Giuseppe del Rosso was published in the following year, 1787, and there was thus a fifteen-year period during which the opinions on Egyptian architecture expressed by Belgrado and Del Rosso held the field. In the present essay Belgrado discusses such topics as the relationship between Egyptian and Greek architecture and the relative dating of Egyptian buildings and of the Temple of Solomon. We have ourselves previously catalogued a copy of Del Rosso’s essay (our catalogue 7, item 38), but we have not had a copy of the present item until now. The British Architectural Library holds copies of both the Del Rosso and Quatremère de Quincy essays, but not this one. Two copies only reported to NUC (Yale, Harvard).