Including books on Francisco De Hollanda.

We offer in this list a wide-ranging selection of books on the art and architecture of Southern Europe and of Latin America, centering round a small group of books from the library of the late John Bury (1917-2017), who was particularly interested in the art and architecture of Portugal and Spain, and of their colonial territories in Central America and South America.

One of Bury’s specialist areas of knowledge was the life and artistic achievement of the Portuguese court painter, architect and sculptor Francisco de Hollanda (1517-1585), and we list here Bury’s collection of editions of Francisco de Hollanda’s writings and of scholarly monographs on him, many of them difficult to find in the book trade today. Francisco de Hollanda’s role in the history of sixteenth-century art and architecture was by no means peripheral, for as a young student of military architecture in Italy in the late 1530s he had made the acquaintance of Michelangelo, and his recollections of conversations with Michelangelo, written up by him in a probably embellished form in later life, remain one of the vividest sources for Michelangelo’s character and processes of thought. Other books in the present list range from books that are cheap and useful to books that are of considerable rarity and value, and we highlight here the volume publishing Le Corbusier’s lengthy speech delivered to a conference in Rome in October 1936 (item 54), and the huge volumes of Demetrio Salazaro’s pioneering study of the early medieval art and architecture of Naples and Sicily, published over a long period of time in the 1870s and 1880s, and illustrated in part, unusually for the period, by actual mounted photographs (item 57).