Petitot, (Ennemond-Alexandre)
Raisonnement sur la perspective, pour en faciliter l’usage aux artistes. Dédié aux mêmes.
Parma, Frères Faure 1758.
Full Description
Folio. Engraved title leaf in French, engraved title leaf in Italian, engraved leaf with statement from publisher, (4) + 20pp, 9 engraved plates. Early twentieth-century (?) blue-paper boards, cloth spine. A good, clean copy.
First and only edition of this scarce and attractive treatise on perspective by Petitot (1727-1801), architect at the court of the Duke of Parma. Petitot had trained as an architect under Soufflot and at the Académie Royale d’Architecture in Paris, where he won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1745, and as the only French-trained architect to take up an official position at an Italian court he was a significant figure in the dissemination of the neo-classical style developed by French and Italian architects from the 1740s onwards. His suite of engravings, Mascarade à la Grecque, first issued in 1771, is a famous satirical celebration of the fashion for Greek Revival ornament. The present book, the first of his published works, is a more sober presentation of his ideas on architectural perspective and on drawing the human figure, but its clearly drawn engraved images and its very careful typographical design reflect Petitot’s position as a neo-classicist who disliked the excessive ornamentation favoured by many older contemporaries. It also reflects his then very recent establishment of an academy of fine arts in Parma where he was to teach architecture and architectural drawing to some of the ablest North Italian architects and designers of the next generation. Berlin Cat 4736 ; Cicognara 853 ; not in BAL Cat.