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Art History
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DUERER, Albrecht. Della simmetria de I corpi humani, libri quattro. Venice, Domenico Nicolini, 1591.
(6), 143, (1) ff., with double leaves for M5, Q4, Q5 as described by Mortimer, and including 110 full and 4 double pages of diagrams for measurement and 39 further diagrams in text. Bound in contemporary limp vellum, title written in ink on spine in a neat hand. Ex-libris on front end paste down; discreet ownership inscription on title. Minor handsoiling and some dust on title and scattered leaves; faint waterstain on two double pages, one with minor repairs at fold; generally excellent.
$12,500 A very fresh and attractive copy of the first Italian edition, first issue, of this important handbook for painters, sculptors and anatomical illustrators, translated from the first Latin edition (1528), by Giovanni Gallucci, who added a fifth book. This edition also contains Pirckheimer’s “Life of Albrecht Dürer,” originally appearing in the first German edition, which notes the artist’s relationships with Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna and his controversial influence on Italian art. “This work embodies the first application of anthropometry to aesthetics, and is technically interesting because it contains the first attempts to represent shades and shadows in wood engraving by means of crosshatching” (Choulant, p. 145).
Books One and Two deal with a geometrical theory of human proportion giving numerous examples of the male and female anatomy drawn according to strict mathematical ratios. Book Three, by far the most controversial, contains the “aesthetic excursus,” which Panofsky calls “the final statement of what may be called Dürer’s philosophy of art.” Here Dürer argues, contrary to Alberti and the practice of Michelangelo, for realism over the kind of idealism which requires the artist always to embellish or “emend” reality. For Dürer, there was no objective norm for beauty: the crude, the ugly, the fantastic and even the monstrous had their legitimate place in art. At the time, such a view was almost heretical. Book Four deals with bodies in motion and foreshortening and includes 60 full-page woodcut illustrations of the human anatomy
* Mortimer I. 169; Choulant, Anatomic Illustration, pp. 143-47; Schlosser, 269, 274; Cicognara 321; Bohatta 20 & 21; Meder XXIX; Hartung & Karl 34.92; Panofsky, Dürer, 273ff.
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