Lux claustri. La Lumiere du cloistre. Representees par figures emblematiques, dessignées & gravées par Jaques Callot. Paris, François Langlois,

£2,750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

First edition of this emblem book celebrating the cloistered life of the monks of the Carthusian Order and dedicated to the prior of the Paris Charterhouse, Augustine Joyeulx. The subjects are not what one would necessarily expect from a religious emblem book, they are all allegorical in nature with many from the natural world, and some supernatural, such as emblem no. 2 of the “Watchful eye”. Most are set in a sparse landscape where signs of civilisation are just noticeable in the far distance which reflects the hermitic existence of the Carthusians. Each emblem has a motto and verse in French and Latin and is printed on one side of the leaf only. Jacques Callot (c. 1592-1635) was one of the outstanding etchers of the Baroque era. He was prolific as printmaker and draftsman and introduced many innovations to the etcher’s art. In Florence he worked for the Medici court and after the death of Cosimo II de’ Medici returned to his native Nancy where he remained for the rest of his life. His most famous work, on the cruelties of war, was Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre which influenced Goya’s series on the same subject almost two centuries later. At around the same time as this publication ‘Light of the Cloister’, Augustine Joyeulx commissioned the baroque artist Eustache Le Sueur’s (1619-55) famous series of twenty-two paintings representing the life of Saint Bruno, executed c. 1645-48, to decorate the walls of the Charterhouse’s freshly renovated small cloister (almost all of

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