Vitruvius Scoticus;

£35,000 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

A beautiful unsophisticated copy of the notoriously rare Vitruvius Scoticus, the paramount source for the history of classical architecture in Scotland. What was to become William Adam's (1689 - 1748) magisterially-intentioned yet still mysterious Vitruvius Scoticus was first mentioned in a letter in 1726 and by late 1727 Adam was issuing subscription receipts for a book of 'My Designs for Buildings c. in 150 Plates'. Initially proposed as a book in the manner of James Gibbs' Book of Architecture ('the first book in England to be devoted entirely to the designs of a living architect'), Adam intended clearly to rival Gibbs, to publicise his own work and to seek promotion and patronage from the new King, George II. By 1733, Adam had found an Edinburgh-based engraver suitable for the task (and one who may have shouldered some of the cost) in Richard Cooper, a student of John 'Friar' Pine and 'an acknowledged teacher and connoisseur of the fine arts'. Indeed, it may have been Cooper who was the first to suggest a generalisation of the work and the assumption of a distinct Scottish character with the new title Vitruvius Scoticus. Cooper worked solely from the limited resource of Adam's own designs and under the stricture that there would be no theoretical work in the publication and was therefore limited and slow in what he was able to achieve. It is clear that Cooper's engravings were finished by the early 1740s but the reasons the work was then abandoned - not for the last time

• Binding: Hardcover

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