Fréart de Chantelou, Roland, sieur de Chambray
Le Mans 1606 – 1676 Le Mans

Parallèle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne: avec un recueil des dix principaux autheurs qui ont écrit des cinq Ordres.

Paris, Edmé Martin, 1650

folio (370 × 240 mm), (62) ff. signed a⁶ A–O⁴ and paginated (12) 1–109 (3); engraved title-page, forty full-page engravings, numerous smaller engraved vignettes and ornaments imposed with the text.

provenance title inscribed De Legendre — Theodore Besterman (1904–1976), exlibris¹ — by his bequest to the Taylor Institution Library, University of Oxford (deaccessioned 1984) — E.P. Goldschmidt & Company Ltd. — Private Collection, Dublin

Binding abraded, otherwise in very good state of preservation.

binding contemporary French calf; back decorated in gilt.

First edition of this important text on the rules and proportions of the Orders of Columns, an epitome of the standard works on the subject by Palladio, Scamozzi, Serlio, Vignola, and other Italian and French authorities. It comprises a series of explana­tory texts and visual comparisons showing how the Orders were employed by ancient and Renaissance architects and roundly condemns their incorrect usage and attempts at reform on the part of many architects. The book inaugurated the architectural part of the celebrated ‘Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns’.² Four subsequent editions of the Parallèle were published at Paris and John Evelyn’s translation, A Parallel of the ancient architec­ture with the modern (1664), went through as many editions in London.³

Image

The engraved title with oval portrait of the author’s cousin and instigator of the book, François Sublet de Noyers (1578–1645), is signed Tournier scul., pre­sumably Georges or Jean Jacques Tournier, the latter graveur du Roi and active circa 1650–1684; the engraving on page 63 is signed t. The other plates are unsigned works by Charles Errard (1601/1609–1689),⁴ who had met the author at Rome in 1640,⁵ where they had obtained casts of classical capitals and completed drawings of classical antiquities as study materials.⁶ After Errard’s return to Paris in September 1643, these drawings were translated onto copper plates.⁷

references Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung der Staatlichen Kunstbibliothek Berlin (1939), no. 2374; Laurence Hall Fowler and Elizabeth Baer, The Fowler architectural collection of the Johns Hopkins University. Catalogue (Baltimore 1961), no. 127; Leopoldo Cicognara, Catalogo ragionato dei libri d’arte e d’antichità posseduti dal Conte Cicognara (reprint Bologna 1979), no. 507; Architec­tural theory and practice from Alberti to Ledoux, exhibition catalogue edited by Dora Wiebenson (Chicago 1983), iii–A–14; National Gallery of Art, The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection, i: French books (Washington, dc 1993), no. 76; Avery’s choice: Five centuries of great architectural books, edited by Adolf Placzek (New York 1997), p.59 no. 78; Architectural theory: from the Renais­sance to the present: 89 essays on 117 treatises, with a preface by Bernd Evers and an introduction by Christof Thoenes (Cologne 2003), pp.240–247; critical edition (with the author’s Idée de la perfection de la peinture) and commentary by Frédérique Lemerle-Pauwels and Milovan Stanic (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2005)