BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

Consult in image mode

Transcribed version of the text

French

     As du Cerceau indicates in the headword introducing the series, it consists of engravings taken from Léonard Thiry (c1500-c1550), a Flemish painter who worked at Fontainebleau starting in 1536 under the direction of Rosso, an artist of numerous drawings, popularized partly by the engravings of René Boyvin (Livre de la conqueste de la Toison d’or, 1563). These drawings represent landscapes with antique ruins, showing among so many other examples the Renaissance taste for this genre, in particular among the Flemish artists (one thinks of course of Marteen van Heemskerk's drawings). The French were not to be outdone, and it is very tempting to connect Du Cerceau's publication of these antique ruins in 1550 with the publication of the Antiquités de Rome by Joachim du Bellay, in 1558. The department of the Estampes at the Bibliothèque nationale de France has a copy of it (Ed. 2b, petit in- folio). There is a second edition of this work published in Orléans in 1565.

Yves Pauwels (Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours) – 2009

Critical bibliography

H. Von Geymüller, Les Du Cerceau. Leur vie et leur œuvre d’après les nouvelles recherches, Paris/London, Rouam/Wood & Co, 1887, p. 300.

A. Linzeler, Inventaire du fonds français. Graveurs du seizième siècle, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 1932, 1, p. 55.

H. Zerner, L’Art de la Renaissance en France. L’invention du classicisme, Paris, Flammarion, 1996, pp. 128-129.