Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe (Italy)
Bianchi (Lidia)

(20.5 cm), xiii, 113 pp., [16] leaves of plates. 108 catalogue entries. Publisher’s pictorial wrappers. - Catalogue for an exhibition centred on a group of 86 architectural drawings by Fuga for projects in Rome, from 1722 until 1751. Drawings by Fuga of ephemeral constructions (macchine for fireworks and catafalques) are included. Also shown were drawings by lesser contemporaries: Luigi Vanvitelli, Giovanni Antinori, Giacinto Ballerini, Filippo Cesari, and G.A. Bianchi; nearly half the exhibited works are reproduced. “The catalogue provides the material for a complete reassessment of the achievement of Fuga, whose anti-baroque, proto-neo-classic style emerges as having its source in his birthplace Florence rather than Rome, the city of his adoption… [It] will be of permanent value to anyone interested in Roman architecture of the first half of the eighteenth century, a subject which has at present received very little attention” (from a notice by F.J.B. Watson, in The Burlington Magazine, volume 98, August 1956, pp.287-288). ¶ From the library of Joseph Clemens, Prinz von Bayern (1902-1990), sold by Schneider-Henn, Kunstbücher und Dokumentation aus der Bibliothek Joseph Clemens Prinz von Bayern, Munich, 11-12 May 1992, lot 894. Clean tear in lower wrapper (2 cm).