Abregé des dix livres d'architecture de Vitruve.

1674. Pairs, Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1674. 12mo. Title, (x), 224 pp, (1 pp), 11 engraved plates with explanations, (54 pp) for the "Explication des mots difficiles" and 1 page privilege and errata. Contemporary calf, spine goldtooled (corners sl. rubbed and top and bottom of spine sl. damaged). Edges sprinkled red. Millard, French says on this: "This small, abridged version of Vitruvius' De Architectura appeared the year following the publication of Claude Perrault's folio translation and encyclopedic commentary on the entire Vitruvian treatise (Les dix livres d'architecture...). Although the text follows the original, Perrault, taking up a suggestion from Book 3 of Philibert de L'Orme's architectural treatise, selected and rearranged Vitruvius' text. Perrault has divided the material into a preface and two parts, followed by eleven plates reduced from illustrations in the larger Vitruvius. Part I contains an introduction to the topic of architecture, including material from Vitruvius' Book I, and a rearrangement of Vitruvius' original text under headings corresponding to the ancient author's definition of the three parts of architecture: solidity (firmitas), which includes comments on building materials, foundations, walls floors, and interior finishes; commodity and disposition (utilitas), interpreted by Perrault as including both the orientation of the building and the arrangement and proportions of interior spaces (commodity), and the designing of plans for specific building types (disposition); and beauty (venustas), where Perrault unfolds his theory of positive and arbitrary beauty as it is related to the orders. He also elaborates on Vitruvian typologies of proportion and ornament, including Vitruvius' five styles of columnar arrangement. Part 2 is concerned with descriptions of building types... The eleven small engraved plates bound after the text are reduced by Sebastien Le Clerc from the engravings in Perrault's folio translation and commentary on De architectura. The plates are further demonstrations of the establishing of typologies and norms... They include many types of wall construction, of temples, and of the orders, with two plates on details of Ionic and Corinthian capitals, one illustration of the Collisseum, and one of a war machine. A small glossary of difficult technical terms used in the text is appended. Despite its significance as a forerunner of future developments in architectural theory, as well as its position as another exemplar of Perrault's position on architectural issues, this book is rarely mentioned, and has not received the attention it deserves. It is clear that Perrault intended this work for the instruction of the amateur in architectural taste; the book is a precedent, even a unique one, for later eighteenth-century literature that instructs the general public in the appreciation of the "theory" of subjects of a professional nature. Despite the single, absolute system of architecture developed in this study of typologies and a theory of beauty tied to contemporary absolutist standards, this work is in the forefront of a trend that would do away with those concepts related to absolute monarchial standards and open the way to eighteenth-century development of individual choice and taste." The plates in our edition have been engraved after those of Le Clerc but differ in small details. [Millard, French, 169; Not in Fowler].