Félibien (des Avaux), (André)
Des principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, et des autres arts qui en dépendent. Avec un dictionnaire des termes propres à chacun de ces arts. Seconde edition.
Paris, Veuve de Jean Baptiste Coignard & Jean Baptiste Coignard fils 1690.
Full Description
4to. (24) + 797 + (1) pp, including 65 full-page engraved illustrations in text, with an additional copy of leaf Riii (pp 133-4), with a slightly reset text, bound in at end. Contemporary full mottled calf, neatly rebacked. Gilt-stamped armorial device of Freiherr von Donop in centre of upper and lower covers. Eighteenth century ink ownership inscription of A.Donop on a preliminary blank leaf. Ink ownership inscription of Gilbert R.Redgrave, 1868, on the previous preliminary blank leaf. Recently George Atkinson’s copy.
Second edition of Félibien’s book first published in 1676. Félibien, who then held official appointments as Secretary of the Académie Royale d’Architecture and historiographer of the Bâtimens du Roi, intended this as an introduction to the principles, techniques and vocabulary of the fine and applied arts, and he arranges his material into three separate sections dealing respectively with architecture, sculpture and painting. followed by a dictionary of terms. The first 300 pages are devoted to architecture and allied subjects, as are the first 46 of the engraved illustrations (which are an unexpectedly good source of information on the tools employed in the French building trade). The architecture section and the listing of architectural terms in the accompanying dictionary are of particular authority, for Félibien records in his preface that before publishing his book he had read the whole of it to meetings of the Académie Royale d’Architecture ; the Académie’s published proceedings show that these readings took place between September 1674 and February 1676, and during this period Félibien was able to revise his text in the light of advice and criticism from the Académie’s small but select membership (including at this time François Blondel, Libéral Bruand, François d’Orbay and Antoine Le Pautre). The present edition is an essentially unchanged reissue of the original edition. Thie present copy, owned in the eighteenth century by a member or members of the Von Donop family, aristocratic German landowners, subsequently belonged to Gilbert Richard Redgrave (1844-1941), art historian, book collector and bibliographer, and his acquisition date for it, 1868, is one of the earliest that we have noticed within his book collecting career. BAL Cat 1036 (1676 edition : the British Architectural Library also holds a copy of an edition of 1699 (BAL Cat 1037), but not the present edition); Millard, French Books 70 (1697 edition); Berlin Cat 2383 (1697 edition); Fowler Cat 118 (1676 edition); Cicognara 502 (this edition).