Réne Magritte, Poster & Sheet Music Artist

by Stephen J. Gertz

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Yes, it's not a pipe, it's a poster. By Réne Magritte (1898-1967), known for his excursions into surrealism and "the treachery of images," his 1929 masterpiece, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, an icon of modernism and one of the most recognizable works of art of all time.

But before his explorations of the landscape of the mind, he worked as a commercial graphic designer, creating, for example, over forty covers for sheet music during the 1920s in the Art Deco manner. And, as above, posters, this one, created later in his career for the Film and Fine Arts World Festival in Brussels 1947, integrating surrealistic mind play into the composition.

Here, a woman is in the foreground to a movie screen, her forehead itself a screen: men project upon a woman a narrative they imagine, which may or may not reflect the reality of the woman's inner life and desires.

Magritte spent a large part of his life working in advertising, both to help sustain himself during lean times, and out of an interest in publicity.

He re-used the above image in 1949 for the second of these film festivals. This is the scarce smaller format.

These examples of Magritte's graphic work were part of Swann Galleries' Modernist Posters sale held this past Monday, May 12th.

Magritte designed the cover of the sheet music to L'Heure du Tango in 1925 for Brussels publisher L'Art Belge. 

The sheet music for Valse d'Amour, with it cover by Magritte, was published in 1926 by L'Art Belge.

Elle A Mis Son Smoking was also published 1926, it, too, issued by L'Art Belge.

Magritte's earliest oil paintings, dating c. 1915, were Impressionistic in style. His oil paintings 1918-1924 were influenced by Futurism and by the offshoot of Cubism practiced by Metzinger.  Female nudes dominate this period in his work.

Magritte worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory 1922-1923, and was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie la Centaure in Brussels made it possible for him to devote himself to painting full-time.

Magritte produced his first surrealistic painting, Le jockey perdu, in 1926. It, and others by the artist, were exhibited in Brussels in 1927 but met with critical scorn. Depressed by their poor reception, Magritte moved to Paris where he became friends with Andre Breton and became involved in the surrealist group.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Dust Jacket Designer Philip Grushkin From Comps To Final

by Stephen J. Gertz

Philip Grushkin working in his Englewood, NJ home studio, c.1950s.

A major archive of renowned dust jacket designer, Philip Grushkin, "whose work made him the standard-bearer throughout the publishing industry," (NY Times obit) is coming to market courtesy of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Booktryst got a sneak preview of its catalog, yet another key reference and collectible work as we've come to expect from the NYC-based super dealer.

Philip Grushkin was born in Brooklyn, NYC, in 1921, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He became interested in book dust jacket design as a teen and began collecting them, those of George Salter (1897-1967), the preeminent American dust jacket designer 1935-1965, his primary interest. He attended Cooper Union college as an art student, studying calligraphy and lettering with Salter, who became his mentor. He graduated in 1941.

After the war, he began to free-lance as a jacket designer, working for virtually all of the major New York publishers of the time: Alfred A. Knopf; Random House; Harper and Brothers; Harcourt, Brace and Company; Macmillan; and Doubleday; as well as smaller houses such as Farrar Strauss, John Day, and Crown. He became one of the go-to designers at Knopf because the great book and typeface designer W.A. Dwiggins declined to do dust jackets. Grushkin became part of a select group of dust jacket designers that included Salter, Charles Skaggs, and, on occasion, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Rand, and Alvin Lustig.

In 1947 he joined the the fledgling Book Jacket Designers Guild established by Sol Immermann (1907–1983), who, with H. Lawrence Hoffman, produced the jackets for the first one hundred titles published by The Popular Library. The BJDG established a code for dust jacket design, rejecting the poster style in vogue for pulp novels in favor of a descriptive, non-blaring style. Its manifesto, embraced by Grushkin, rejected:

• "The stunt jacket that screams for your attention, and then dares you to guess what the book is about."

• "The jacket that is born of the assumption that if the book has a heroine, or if the author is a woman, or the author's mother a female, the jacket must say SEX."

• "Burlap backgrounds, the airbrush doilies and similar clichés as well as the all too many good illustrations that were stretched, squeezed, tortured and mutilated to fit a jacket format with just enough room left for an unrelated title."

1953.

Grushkin's hallmark, like Salter's, was his creative use of calligraphy and lettering in concert with a lightly drawn illustration. His early work tends to mimic Salter's but in the late 194os his own personal style began to emerge, with an emphasis on lettering and calligraphy often to the exclusion of illustration altogether. Perhaps his most recognizable and typical dust jacket from that period is that for Simone De Bouvier's The Second Sex (1953).

If you are unfamiliar with Grushkin his deceptively simple yet visually aggressive pictorial style is distinctive; once you see a Grushkin book jacket you will begin to see them all over the place on books published during the late 1940s - early 1960s.

"Grushkin forged his own brand of modernism, one that owed nothing to the work of Lustig, Rand, or Herbert Bayer, inventing a unique mixture of bold typographic hand lettering, dynamic background patterns, vibrant colors, and abstract symbolism. By the end of the 1950s, Grushkin’s style was distilled to the point where it resembled Paul Bacon’s 'Big Book Look,' with hand lettering - instead of calligraphy - taking center stage, augmented only by a tonally variegated background" (Paul Shaw, Philip Grushkin: a Designer's Archive, catalog to the collection).

Below, a few examples of Grushkin's work in development, from first comp to final jacket.

The Other Side of the Record (1947):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fifth comp.

Final.

The Train From Pittsburgh (1948):

First comp.

Second comp.

Third comp.

Fourth comp.

Fourth comp, side notes.

The fourth comp of Train..., unusually, has notations, not just by Grushkin, but also by "J" at Knopf (likely production manager Sidney Jacobs). Grushkin’s notes refer to the colors he plans to use - blue, red, and yellow - with a reminder that the jacket will be offset printed. The notation by “J” approves the design but suggests substituting the calligraphic lettering of Julian Farren's name to a clean, serif'ed typeface.

Fifth and final.

Mechanical - Shards of Glass.

Mechanical - Lettering.

Helix (1947):

Partial comp.

In what was, apparently, the first (and partial) comp for David Loughlin's novel, Helix (1947), Grushkin employs a blue background, a single swirling spiral, and title lettering running upward on a diagonal from left to right.

First complete comp.

In the above, the first complete comp for the Helix DJ, Grushkin loses the blue background and substitutes red, has the title lettering on a downward diagonal from left to right, acutely triangulates the author and title, features a series of smudgy, overlapping spirals, and adds a tiny ship moving along a black plane.

Second complete comp.

Grushkin's second complete comp for Helix refined his design in the first comp, downplaying the swirling spirals,  deleting the ship's black path, and adding black "gears," elements that made it to the final published dust jacket.

Final.

Grushkin's final design for Helix cleans up, clarifies, and polishes the second comp.

Limbo mechanical.

Final.

The lettering mechanical for an early comp of Grushkin's DJ for Bernard Wolfe's classic science-fiction novel, Limbo (1952) bears a different subtitle than the final. "A Voyage of Discovery and Adventure in the Fantastic World of 1990" must have seemed a tantalizing teaser in 1952. The teaser to the final certainly hammers it home: "A diabolic tale - mad, merry and monstrous - of men and women caught in the vortex of history yet to happen! Check out that mad, merry, and monstrous year, 1990, more frightening that Wolfe could ever have imagined:

• Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces after acting as dictator of Panama for five years.

• Notorious Gambino crime family leader John "the Dapper Don" Gotti was arrested and charged with racketeering, murder, and various and sundry illegal activities.

• Marion Barry, the flamboyant mayor of Washington D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine in an F.B.I. sting set up in a D.C. hotel room.

• British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned. 

• The first McDonald's restaurant opened in Moscow, becoming for many a symbol of the nation's new progressive free market ideology.

• The World Wide Web was created, along with the first ever web page and web browser.

• Time Inc and Warner Communications, two of the largest media companies in the world merged to create giant Time Warner.

That's some vortex. We're lucky to have made it through 1990 alive.

The Grushkin archive consists of his book jackets (with related comps, roughs and mechanicals); binders of his cover designs for Mercury Publications; letterhead and logo designs; related ephemera; and a collection of book jackets by George Salter: over 2,000 total items in all, 150 of which are highlighted in the catalog, with the largest and most important portion being the dust jackets by Grushkin.

"'His life was literally books,' said his son, Paul, noting that some 10,000 volumes lined the walls of the Grushkins' home.

"Yet, he was an invisible presence, his work evident only to a book's author, the publisher's editorial and design staff, the printer and the bindery" (Times obit).

"My Dad was also a book designer. He handled in his lifetime close to 1500 books, for many publishers, but most for Harry N. Abrams, the worldwide leader in artbooks. He told me a book design is successful when it's invisible, meaning the reader never has to labor to overcome the designer. In a good book design, the grid and typographic elements illuminate the author's concept along with the book's contents. Nothing jars that reader from experiencing the book - nothing in the design is so boastful that it's the designer who's calling out, before anything else, 'look at MY cleverness'" (Paul Grushkin). 

Book lovers, special collections librarians, and aficionados and collectors of dust jackets will be fortunate to score a copy of the Grushkin Archive catalog, luckier still to acquire the archive itself. While it's not unusual to track a writer's progress through their archive, it isn't often that we have an opportunity to see a dust jacket designer in the midst of their process from conception to completion.

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All images reproduced with the express permission of Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, with our thanks.
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An Arts & Crafts Poster For A Bookbinder

by Stephen J. Gertz

Modernist poster madness continues on Booktryst; the goodies at Swann Galleries' recent sale keep piling up. 

TH. H. Molkenboer (1871-1920) designed this poster for Amsterdam bookbinder Elias P. Van Bommel in 1897.

After completing his studies in Amsterdam, Molkenboer worked in various fields of the Applied Arts including pottery and book ornamentation. This  poster, portraying a bookbinder in profile absorbed in his work, is a very rare example of woodblock technique applied to poster art.

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Image courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.

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Book Illustrator Ben Shahn Does Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

WE WANT PEACE / REGISTER - VOTE. (1946).

"His codified signature neatly scribbled under any of his images conjures up a peerless world of visual and emotional realism" (Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, 1988).

Born in Lithuania in 1898, artist Ben Shahn immigrated to New York with his family in 1906. He apprenticed with a commercial lithographer in 1911 while still a high-school student, and earned his living in the trade until the early 1930s, when he began to receive recognition as a fine artist.

In 1934, after exhibitions of his series of paintings about the Dreyfus and Sacco-Vanzetti affairs, he was commissioned to produce a mural by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The following year, Rexford Tugwell, a prominent member of Roosevelt's "brain trust," invited Shahn to join the Resettlement Administration. He worked as an artist in the agency's Special Skills Division and was an unofficial, part-time member of Roy Stryker's photographic section.

His first significant contact with graphic design, however, came in 1942 when he was hired to work in the Office of War Information. Shahn later told biographer Selden Rodman that his chief duty was "to explain in posters to the people who need it what is being done for them and to the others what they are paying for."

This image above  was "used by the CIO in a voter registration drive. [And] it represents, perhaps, the best of Shahn's poster work. One cannot soon erase the memory of the hollow-eyed young face begging for peace. Nowhere is Shahn's genius for drawing more evident than in the thrust of the pleading hand...Using the image of this child in the context of an election campaign seems to say that in a democracy the first step toward healing the ravages of war is to exercise one's right to vote" (Kenneth W. Prescott, The Complete Graphic Works of Ben Shahn, p. 132).

Based upon his painting Hunger, Shahn recalled, in 1964, that he told Roy Stryker that a certain photograph of soil erosion would not have a strong impact on viewers. "Look Roy," Shahn said, "you're not going to move anybody with this eroded soil - but the effect this eroded soil has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people."

WARNING! INFLATION MEANS DEPRESSION. (1946).

This poster, another for the CIO, "of a farmer, whose seeming integrity and strength greatly impressed Shahn" (Prescott p. 132),  is based on a photograph Shahn took during the 1930s while traveling through Arkansas as a member of the Resettlement Administration and Stryker's photography unit.  It is a haunting image of a troubled working man, memories of the Great Depression fresh and alarming,  yet with an optimistic message to allay his fears : "Register - Vote."

BREAK REACTION'S GRIP / REGISTER VOTE. (c. 1946).

In the years after World War II, Shahn took on a new threat, anti-Labor, Establishment radicals. "The one arm, dressed in coat sleeve and shirt cuff, with hand clasping a colorful map of the United States, represents the country's supposedly small, but powerful, reactionary forces. The poster suggests that however strong, their power could be broken by the greater strength of the progressive forces, as represented by the larger, sleeveless arm" (Prescott, p. 131).

OUR FRIEND. (1944.)

Shahn's political orientation was patent, his views powerful. "This poster was used in the hotly contested 1944 campaign in support of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth term. Shahn presented Roosevelt as a warmly sympathetic man whose visage looms father-like above the crowd" (Prescott p. 128). The image, in retrospect, is a bit disconcerting, the obvious influence of Social Realism suggesting the cult of personality exploited by Stalin in Soviet propaganda. You can, in fact, substitute Stalin's image for Roosevelt's and wind up with a typical 1930s Soviet poster celebrating Papa Joe.

Be that as it may, his work here (and, ultimately, most of his work) was infused with a strong concern regarding the forces that undermine the common man, each a visual editorial protesting social injustice. Shahn was always a champion of the less fortunate.

Shahn's uncle was a bookbinder; he allayed Shahn's childhood hunger for books by bringing him volumes from his shop. After World War II he was chosen by Look magazine as one of the "World's Ten Best Artists." He abandoned painting for good and adopted graphic work for better. The book dust jackets he created (amongst other celebrated graphic designs) during the 1950s and 1960s remain classics.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Seven More Stunning Modernist Posters

by Stephen J. Gertz

More from Swann Galleries' Modernist Posters sale, held yesterday.

James Harley Minter designed this poster, Bal Pa'Pillon, in 1931 for The Kokoon Club of Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1911 by Carl Moellman and William Sommer, young American artists inspired by the Dadaist movement and similar avant-garde organizations in Europe, and modeled after New York's Kit Kat Club. The club held annual costume balls, which began in 1913 and continued through 1938.

"This decadent, cubist-influenced image is an electric, microcosmic view of Cleveland's avant-garde artistic community. Presaging the psychedelic posters of the 1960s and reflecting many of the concurrent graphic art trends in Europe, this poster, and the entire series for the club's yearly balls, are bright, bold, daring and stand out as exciting and innovative examples of American design. Each poster also served as an invitation to the event, with the invitee's name written in across the bottom" (Nicholas D. Lowry). I hope Margaret Brennan had as much fun at this soirée as I did viewing its poster.

I am pleased to report that the head-snapping whiplash I experienced after learning that Cleveland possessed an avant-garde artistic community has been successfully treated via review of gangbuster Elliot Ness's checkered career as Cleveland's Public Safety Director followed by an unsuccessful run for mayor of Cleveland in 1938. I have no snobbish animus toward Cleveland; I simply had no idea that the city possessed a hip culture. 

For more about The Kokoon Club of Cleveland, including a survey of other gorgeous posters for its costume balls go here.

For Viaggiate Di Notte (1930), designed by famed graphic artist Adolphe Mouron Cassandre (1901-1968) for Wagons Lits (a railroad sleeping car company),  the artist chose an "unquestionably persuasive" (Mouron p. 69) symbolic and poetic approach to advertising.

"The breathtakingly simple device of a red light glowing in the foggy darkness of a railroad siding is perfectly consistent with our poetically charged experience of looking out the window of a speeding night express" (op cit, Mouron).

"It is an elegant and inviting approach, evoking travel by night. The poster exists with different text variants, but this one is the least cluttered. This is also the rare Italian version. We could locate only one other copy in the collection of the Suntory Museum in Japan" (Lowry).

Cassandre, again. Turmac / La Cigarette is one of his earliest posters, designed in 1925. "It predates the time when his work began to reflect his radical and ingenious design theories. He employs a sensuous approach which doesn't appear again in his work until 1937, when a similar smoldering cigarette is featured in his poster for Sensation Cigarettes. Nevertheless, it also foreshadows some of his subsequent graphic finesse: within the stylized smoke and the outside border, he plays with the interchange between shades of blue, white and black in a manner that presages his typographic work in later posters such as Pivolo, Nord Express and Étoile du Nord. The actual typography on this poster is an exceptional mix of Art Deco and the Arabesque. We have not found another copy at auction for the past 30 years" (Lowry). 

Jac Leonard (1904-1980), a Canadian artist, created Beware The Walls Have Ears c. 1940, It's one in a series of posters printed by Canada's Wartime Information Board, similar in aim and approach to those published by the American War Office in its Careless Talk Kills series issued during World War II.

A swastika-eyed secret villain, photo-montage, bold, bright typography and powerful imagery - this progressive design has it all and makes its point as firmly as a hammer to the noggin.

Edgar Scauflaire (1893-1960) was a Belgian artist who studied at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Liége, where he was born. Many of his paintings clearly reflect the influence of Picasso and Braque. He also designed murals and tapestries. This Art Deco-inspired, aquatic allegory is one of at least two posters used to promote the International Exposition de L'Eau of 1939.

After studying art at the Munich Academy under Julius Diez and Angelo Jank, Hermann Keimel (1889-1948) went on to become a teacher at the same institution. He was a member of the artistic group "The Twelve," and also of the new Munich Association of Poster Artists. He designed numerous commercial posters, generally employing a crisp Art Deco style. Muenchner / Plakat Kunst (1931) is his masterpiece and remains an icon of poster self-promotion: to promote an exhibition of Munich poster art Keimel constructed this cubist face out of colored sheets of printing paper.

Manilo Parrini (1901-1968) created this striking aeronautical-themed poster for the 3d International Aircraft Exhibition held in conjunction with the Milan Trade Fair of 1939.

He worked during Mussolini's regime in Italy, which is to say in a monumental, over the top, grandiose glory of Rome epic style, light on subtlety; the anvil school of messaging. Here, in a Fascist salute to Il Duce, he incorporates a trio of fasces on the tail fin of the plane in the foreground, while the three planes in the distance are streaming the colors of the Italian flag behind them.

In case anyone misses the symbolism of fasces on the tail, it's a visual representation of baciarmi il  Fascista culo,  if not an official, explicit political slogan, a casually implicit one.

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Réne Magritte designed posters and sheet music? Stop by Booktryst tomorrow for the story.

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Images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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Stunning Modernist Posters At Swann Galleries

by Stephen J. Gertz

Today, Monday, May 13, 2013, Swann Auction Galleries is hosting a spectacular graphic arts sale, an extravaganza of Modernist posters, 253 lots of some of the most visually arresting images you'll ever see. It's so impressive that Booktryst is devoting this week to highlights from the auction.

"His name should have an important place in the history of posters because of his innovative aesthetics." So notes the Bénézit Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs of Orsi, of whom little is known despite the fact that he designed as many as 1,000 posters. Bénézit  praises Orsi's sense of simplification, his bright colors and his creative ideas.

Philips Electronics was one of his primary clients. Here is Lampe Flourescente, printed by Bedos & Cie, Paris, c. 1940. As Nick Lowry, head of posters at Swann (and now its president), notes "the pointillist effect he creates to advertise a fluorescent light bulb is a classic example of the extent of his talent. The diagonal of the bulb itself, the unique handling of the coloring, the typography and the overall feeling of fluorescence make this an exceptional image."

Charles Verschuuren Jr. (1899-1955) was an illustrator, cartoonist and part-time painter born in the Netherlands. He designed over 100 posters before emigrating with his family to New York City in 1922. Once settled he contributed many illustrations to the Brooklyn Eagle Sunday Magazine. He also designed posters for the WPA and briefly worked for Disney.  This poster, designed c. 1917, was for Drukkerij Kotting, the Amsterdam printer for whom Verschuuren did all of his design work before moving to the United States.

Sven Hendriksen (1890-1935) designed this poster, a bold image amplified by shadow effect, in 1934 for the moderate left-wing Danish Worker's Party, which published Social-Demokraten, a newspaper printed by Jensens Trykkerier of Copenhagen. Henriksen was a self-taught artist turned graphic designer who created this poster for the paper's 60th  anniversary. I'm particularly attracted to the image because if its implicit subtext of reading as a political act.

Otto Baumberger (1889-1961) was one of the most prolific Swiss poster designers, with well over two hundred designs to his credit. Beginning in 1917 he regularly worked for upscale Swiss clothing retailer PKZ.

As Lowry notes, "this poster [created in 1923] is not only the best he produced for the company but is also an icon in poster history. The tweed coat is rendered in near-photographic perfection to the point where you can practically feel the fabric. Baumberger took a totally new approach to advertising by ingeniously incorporating the poster's text into the image in the form of the label in the coat.

"With this poster Baumberger cemented his role as master of the 'Object Poster,' (a title he earned four years earlier with a classic image of a top hat), and began the trend of 'New Objectivity' within the Swiss school of Graphic Design. A sensation from the day it was issued, this image remains compelling and proves to be one of the finest of the PKZ posters."

Pierre Segogne (?-1958) was a prolific poster designer for the cinema yet he and his work have been largely been forgotten and certainly under appreciated. But for a short period during the 1920s he was extremely inventive and developed a singular style using a stencil technique, applying colors using either a sponge or a roll. This gave his posters a singular appearance.

This poster was designed in 1923 for Diany Dorange, a circus performer with a popular equestrian act. A program from 1925 bills her as the star performer at l'Empire, one of the largest Parisian Music Halls. Gitty-up.

This poster for Vitalis - Les Rayons Qui Guérissent was designed by Henry Farion (?-1991) c. 1935.

Nikola Tesla and George Lakhovsky (who, as everyone knows, invented the MWO-multi wave oscillator; it wasn't, as I presumed, Moe Howard; thanks, Nick Lowry, for setting me straight) were celebrated in France; the use of electricity for curing all manner of physical woe was widespread. Electrotherapy kits for home use, such as those produced by Vitalis, were sold in sets that came in their own cases with separate attachments suited to treat different parts of the body. Such electrotherapy kits were prevalent in America until they were banned in the 1930s.

American men of a certain age will scratch their heads and let the dandruff fall where it may: in the U.S., Vitalis was a popular hair tonic offered in barbershops - along with Brylcreem, Wildroot Cream-Oil, Kreml, and Dapper Dan - as an alternative to "greasy kid-stuff," as its advertisements characterized the competition. With a couple of toes in the grave I confess to having used Vitalis and Brylcreem as a '50s kid in a desperate attempt to keep my curly hair straight and flat on my scalp and forestall its inevitable explosion into a Jew-'Fro for as long as possible. It's a little known fact that the trend for long, curly hair during the 1960s was established for my personal benefit, Harpo Marx my hairstyle model. 

Nicholas D. Lowry, the popular appraiser on Antiques Roadshow who enjoys "drinking scotch while listening to heavy metal music" (AR bio),  appears to be a fan of Vitalis - the hair tonic not the electro-stimulator.

Just who F. Tarazona - the designer of the above celebration, c. 1925 ala Weimar, of 1920s music hall decadence and excess - was remains a mystery, as does the specific location in Spain of Teatro Apolo - Velasco.

Be sure to stop by tomorrow when Booktryst continues its look at Modernist posters offered by Swann Auction Galleries.

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View the entire catalog in 3D here.
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All images courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries, with our thanks.
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A Magnificent 16th Century Woodcut On Perspective

by Stephen J. Gertz

The above woodcut, one of the most dramatic of the sixteenth century, is the variant title-page to the first edition of Daniele Barbaro's La Practica della Perspectiva, a virtual summary of contemporary architectural theory and the first systematic treatise on the practical applications of perspective, published in Venice by Borgominieri in 1569.

It's geometrical representation of a mazzocco, or interlaced ring in perspective, surrounded by satyrs and cherubs with drawing instruments.
 

The first edition of La Practica della Perspectiva was published in two issues, identical except for the date of imprint (1568 for first). Some copies of either issue also contain this variant title-page. A copy that has recently come into the marketplace, for example, is a second issue with the variant woodcut title page. Although this more dramatic title-page is found in both issues, it is far less common in the marketplace.

Many of the schematic woodcuts are closely related to Albrecht Dürer’s artist manuals, and the woodcuts of stage sets borrow from Italian Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1552), who wrote eight books on architecture 1537-1575, and discussed the use of perspective in the theater in the second book of his Archtettura series, Le premier livre d’architecture... Le second livre de perspective, de Sebastian Serlio..., mis en langue francoise, par Jehan Martin... (Paris, Jean Barbé, 1545).
 

Barbaro (1514-1570) studied a variety of subjects including mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Padua. He had a diversified career: he was appointed for the creation of the research-oriented botanical garden in Padua, was a Venetian ambassador to the English court, and was made patriarch elect of Aquileia. He also directed the iconographic program for the ceiling of the Sala dei Consigli dei Dieci—frescoed by Paolo Veronese—at the Ducal Palace in Venice.

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BARBARO, Daniele. La Practica della Perspectiva. Venice: Borgominieri, 1569. First edition, second issue. Folio [340 x 210 mm]. 195 pp., (6) ff. Variant woodcut titlepage. Approx. 220 woodcut text illustrations. Bound in early vellum, with minor worming and chipping to covers, and title written in ink in an old hand on spine. Quire H4 (pages 57-64) is misbound as Ha, H, Hd, Hc, with all leaves present.

Fowler 36; Mortimer Italian, 39; Vagnetti E IIb23; Wiebenson III-B-7; Berlin Kat. 4694; Kemp, The Science of Art, 76-8; p. 189.  

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Image courtesy of Martayan Lan Rare Books, currently offering this title, with our thanks.

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