Les livres d'architecture

A title page drawn in the 19 ^th century with the mention “Détails d’Architecture d’après l’antique par Jacques Androuet du Cerceau”, probably by the hand of the collector Callet, introduces these twenty-eight engravings. They show details of the orders which are witness to a vast antique culture and to a very pronounced taste for rare and atypical examples. Du Cerceau’s sources are very diverse but the modes of representation (pure profiles, profiles generating oblique lines in perspective with ornamental details, a view di sott’in sù for the cornices) go back to the Coner codex, one of the most famous collections of Renaissance drawings, which was copied prolifically. Moreover, Philibert De l’Orme’s Premier tome consists of representations which are very close to those proposed by Androuet: the Doric capital of volume 152 appears on the second engraving of the man from Orléans, and the ornate bases he proposes further are closely related to those drawn by Philibert in folios 178v° and 204v° . Both share the same tendency towards the exercise of very ornate orders, characteristic of the French architectural aesthetics in the second half of the 16 ^th century.

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

Critical bibliography

T. Ashby, “Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Roman Buildings attributed to Andreas Coner”, Papers of the British School at Rome, 2, 1904.

H. von Geymüller, Les Du Cerceau. Leur vie et leur œuvre d’après de nouvelles recherches, Paris/London, Rouam/Wood & Co, 1887, pp. 306-307.

A. Linzeler, Inventaire du fonds français. Graveurs du seizième siècle, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 1932, 1, p. 59.

Y. Pauwels, L’architecture au temps de la Pléiade, Paris, Montfort, 2002.

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