VREDEMAN DE VRIES, HANS
PICTORES, STATUARII, ARCHITECTI, LATOMI
£4,500
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photography
Auction: 31 January 2019 at 11:00 GMT
Description
et quicunque principum magnificorumque virorum memoriae aeternae inservitis, adeste: & hunc libellum varias coenotaphiorum, tumulorum & mortuorum monumentorum formas. [Antwerp], excudebat Hieronymus Cock, 1563. Folio, 27 engraved plates (including an engraved title page), later half brown morocco, cloth boards, later paper wrappers bound in, title page a little dusty, a couple of marginal wormholes, some offsetting from the plates, plates not bound in original order, book plates of John and Michael Bury
Footnote
Note: Berlin Katalogue 3641: USTC 404399 [Galle edition]; The New Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700. The Van Doetecum Family Part II: The Antwerp Years 1554-1575, edited by Ger Luijten and Christian Schuckman, Rotterdam, 1998, nos. 300-326. Through his various publications, Vredeman de Vries is recognised as the 'foremost among sixteenth century Netherlandish [architectural] authors [...] an engraver, architect, and painter of prodigious imagination and talent' (Millard, Northern European Books, p.19).
The British Library describes its copy as having numbered plates whereas the present copy has unnumbered plates. Both the BL and USTC also describing it as 4to. USTC gives the printer as Philip Galle. Galle, who acquired the plates at a later date, does not appear on the present version of the title, and neither it nor the other plates have Latin captions.
The impressions of the 27 plates (title page + 26) that make up the present copy of the Coenotaphiorum appear to be early states, before numbers and before lettered texts were introduced into the lower margins. We have not been able to trace any other examples of a complete set of these early impressions. However, there are three prints in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, described in Hollstein, which evidently match the present set and which could be the surviving remnants of a once-complete set.