45 - BERNARDINO A.: Trattato delle Piante Immagini de Sacri Edifizi di Terra Sancta disegnate in Ierusalemme. Firenze, 1620

BERNARDINO A.: Trattato delle Piante Immagini de Sacri Edifizi di Terra Sancta disegnate in Ierusalemme. Firenze, 1620 Second edition, but the first that is magnificently illustrated. Folio. Contemporary vellum. Engraved title page within an architectural border. Complete with thirty-four (34) folio engraved plates, containing forty-six fine illustrations by the celebrated Jacques Callot (1592-1635), the greatest French engraver of the early 17th century. Inconsistent pagination, large printed device on verso of the final leaf dated 1619. Marginal repairs; inner joints of some leaves strengthened. Bookplates of Jean Philibert Peysson de Bacot at front and John and Michael Bury at rear. Father Bernardino, a Franciscan of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, traveled and resided several years in the Levant in the late 16th century. His drawings, executed according to the rules of perspective, introduced a new standard of naturalism and topographical veracity for Holy Land sites, the very first of their kind in any Levant publication. Many monuments, now altered or lost, are here depicted as they still stood in the late 1500s. This edition was highly influential: it introduced naturalism into illustrated travel books and shaped later visual representations of Jerusalem and the Levant. Rembrandt himself owned a copy, from which he borrowed Bernardino’s rendering of the Temple of Jerusalem as a domed octagonal structure. The first edition of this travel narrative appeared in 1609, unillustrated. This 1619 edition, with Callot’s engravings, is the true landmark. Jean Philibert Peysson de Bacot, an 18th-century French bibliophile with a library of 1,750 volumes dispersed at auction in 1779, once owned this copy. Not in Atabey, Blackmer, or any other major collection. An early and highly influential illustrated account of the Levant. Very rare.