Insignium Romae templorum prospectus exteriores interioresque... in lucem editi anno MDCLXXXIIII. Rome: Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi, 1684. (bound with:) Disegni vari altari e cappelle nelle chiese di Ro

£3,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Printer and engraver Giovanni Giacomo de’ Rossi’s (1627-1691) handsome Prospectus , containing a series of 72 plates depicting the interiors and exteriors of baroque churches of Rome, bound with his fifty-plate Disegni vari altari e cappelle nelle chiese di Roma , on the altars of the city’s churches. The first volume contains an engraved dedication to Cardinal Gaspare Carpegna (1625-1714), and the second, printed by Giovanni Giacomo - with the final few plates giving the name and address of his son Domenico - to Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Albani (1649-1721), later Pope Clement XI. De Rossi enjoyed ‘unrivalled success’ as an architectural printer in Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, in part thanks to a papal privilege from Pope Alessandro VII that guaranteed the protection of his publications for ten years. The Prospectus ‘gathers together a considerable sample of contemporary architecture in Rome that is systematically depicted…the illustrations are not perspectives, but orthogonal projections, which allow a building to be objectively represented in two dimensions. […] The importance [of De’ Rossi’s books] as a portable gallery of beautiful buildings for the visitor to Rome, and, more significantly, as a tool for late seventeenth and eighteenth century architects, has long been acknowledged and can scarcely be overestimated’ (Aceto, ‘From building to print’, pp.697-8). Thirty plates at the centre of the first work were printed in 1650 by Francois Collignon

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