Nonnenmacher, Marco
Der Architectonische Tischler oder Architektur-Kunst und Säulen-Buch (etc).
Frankfurt & Leipzig (and Nürnberg), Widow of Christopher Riegel 1751.
Full Description
Folio. (6)pp, 32 engraved plates (of which plates 1-20 are large and folding, or double-page).Contemporary full mottled calf, with gilt-stamped armorial device of King Frederik V of Denmark in centre of upper and lower covers. Old circular ownership stamps of Royal Artillery Library , Copenhagen (at foot of title leaf) and of Royal Garrison Library, Copenhagen (on blank verso of title leaf). A good, fresh, clean copy, with 95 folio-size leaves of blank eighteenth-century paper bound in at the end.
A particularly good and pleasing copy of this rare volume of engravings of the classical orders, baroque-style altars, furniture and ornament. As the title page indicates, the engravings are from design drawings by Marco Nonnenmacher (1653-1720), the court cabinet-maker at Prague, in the then Austrian-ruled kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and a little further investigation shows that they date in reality from the first decade of the eighteenth century, the publisher having originally issued them in 1710 and this being a reissue with his widow’s name in the imprint. Even as a publication of 1710 the engravings reflect a more exuberant taste than was then fashionable in most of Western Europe, and Nonnenmacher’s designs for furniture (plates 19-22) and for distinctive acanthus-leaf ornament (plates 23-32) are especially striking. As previously observed in our series of catalogues, engraved publications pre-dating 1800 and concerned with architecture and design in the Czech lands or elsewhere in Eastern Europe are by no means numerous. Those that do exist are always interesting and seem invariably to be scarce ; both the 1710 and the 1751 issues of this book by Nonnenmacher were present in the Berlin collection (Berlin Cat 1179,1180), but copies are otherwise hard to track down, and there is no copy of either edition in the British Architectural Library. The present copy, recently de-accessioned from the Royal Garrison Library in Copenhagen, Denmark, is in what is clearly its original mid-eighteenth century binding, carrying the gilt-stamped arms of King Frederik V of Denmark, who reigned from 1746 to 1766. It can be deduced both from an neat old library stamp at the foot of the title leaf, and from gilt-stamped images of crossed cannons that form part of the armorial device on the binding, that the volume formed part of the specialist library of the Danish Artillery Corps, founded in the reign of Frederik V, and the volume’s preservation for well over two hundred years in official military libraries has ensured that it is in fresh and probably virtually unread internal condition. An added attraction is that the volume’s binder, in order to make the volume sufficiently thick to stand up to wear on library shelves, decided to bind in ninety-five additional leaves of folio-size eighteenth century blank paper at the back of the volume, and these are all still present today.