1. Vitruvius Pollio.
Les dix livres d'architecture de Vitruve, corrigez et tradvits
nouvellement en françois, avec des notes et des figures.
Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1684. 2d ed. rev., cor., and augm.
Green Library, Special
Collections, XX(4743239.1) In Process
The De architectura
libri decem of Vitruvius (c90-20 B.C.) is the only architectural
treatise to survive from the Greco-Roman period and is perhaps
Western civilization's most important single architectural text.
Monastic copyists preserved it during the Middle Ages; it was
rediscovered in about 1414 in the library of the monastery of
St. Gall by Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist. The first printed
version appeared in the 1480s, and the work gradually became enormously
influential among Renaissance architects and antiquarians, with
as many as 166 editions published thereafter, according to a survey
done in 1978 by Luigi Vagnetti. In this edition, Claude Perrault
(1613-1688), who was both an architect and a classical scholar,
provided a French translation and an encyclopedic commentary.
To illustrate the text, Perrault also collected many excellent
engravings, after such leading artists as Antoine Le Pautre and
Sebastien Le Clerc.
2.
Walter, Jeanne and Philippe Lamour, eds. Plans. Paris:
[Plans], 1931-32. With contributions by Hubert Lagardelle, Le
Corbusier, Francois de Pierrefeu, and Pierre Winter. 13 vols.
Art Library Stacks
NX2 .B8 1931
A rare, lavishly illustrated avant-garde journal that analyzes developments
in European architecture, politics, literature, and the arts of
the 1930s. Plans evokes a strong international flavor, and the
volumes refer frequently to trends in the United States, the Soviet
Union, Germany in the last years before Nazism, and Italy under
fascism. Le Corbusier, a provocative and monumental figure in
the history of modern architecture, played a seminal role in the
formation of this journal and contributed many of his drawings
for its illustrations. Le Corbusier scholars in recent years have
become increasingly interested in his political involvements in
the 1930s. Plans is probably the principal documentation
of this aspect of Le Corbusier's life.
3. Saint Beatus, Presbyter
of Liébana. [In Apocalipsin] Beato de Liebana, codice
de San Pedro de Cardena. Barcelona: Moleiro, 2001. 2 vols.
This set is a facsimile of an illuminated manuscript of the eighth-century
commentaries on the Apocalypse by a Spanish monk, Beatus of Liébana
(d. 798). The copy on which this facsimile is based was made between
1175 and 1185 at the Monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña
in Spain. Its leaves--some of which have been separated from the
codex over the years and have ended up in various collections,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York--were reunited
by the publisher for this edition.
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