BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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Transcribed version of the text

French

     On February 12, 1644, Pierre I Mariette bought the original Vignola copper plates by Le Muet from Melchior Tavernier, who had engraved them. Mariette immediately made a reprint, substituting only his name and his address. When he died in 1657 these plates were passed down to Pierre II Mariette and then in 1664 to his stepson Nicolas Langlois when Mariette’s spouse Madeleine Collemont died. Under his own name Langlois made a new print, the third, undated. The dedication to La Vrillière was replaced with a plate of the five orders which had appeared in the Italian edition of 1573, already present in the Northern European polyglot editions (1617, 1619, 1620, 1629, 1640, 1642) and the Parisian editions of Pierre Firens (undated), of Nicolas Bonnart and Pierre Mariette, both published in 1665. This leads one to place Langlois’ publication during the same period.
     Tavernier’s Vignola was published for the last time at the shop of Jean Mariette at the beginning of the 18th century. Le Muet’s pioneer edition had been in competition with other editions for several decades. A counterfeit copy came out in Lyons in 1657 ; it was reprinted in 1658 and in 1684 with new plates and a new translation. In 1665 Pierre II Mariette himself had a completely new edition published which competed with the third printing of the original 1632 prints carried out by his stepson. François Jollain, working with Jean Le Pautre, did another one in 1671. In turn these editions would be bypassed by the edition published in 1691 by d’Aviler in his Cours d’architecture, in which Vignola constitutes the center.

Frédérique Lemerle
(Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CESR, Tours) – 2017

Critical bibliography

F. Lemerle, “Les versions françaises de la Regola de Vignole au XVIIe siècle”, In Monte Artium (Journal of the Royal Library of Belgium), 1, 2008, pp. 101-120.

F. Lemerle, “Vitruve, Vignole, Palladio et les autres : traductions, abrégés et augmentations au XVIIe siècle”, Architecture et théorie. L’héritage de la Renaissance, Tours, Cesr, June 3-4 2009/Paris, École d’architecture de Paris-Malaquais, June 5, 2009.

F. Lemerle, “À l’origine du palladianisme européen : Pierre Le Muet et Roland Fréart de Chambray”, Revue de l’art, 178, 2012-4, pp. 43-47.

F. Lemerle & Y. Pauwels, Architectures de papier. La France et l’Europe, suivi d’une bibliographie des livres d’architecture (XVIe-XVIIe siècles), Turnhout, Brepols, 2013, pp. 86-88.

M. Walcher Casotti, “Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola : Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura”, Elena Bassi (ed.), Pietro Cataneo, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola : trattati, Milano, Polifilo, 1985, pp. 499-577.