The First Published History of Universal Architectural Models. Jean-Nicholas-Louis Durand’s Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes (Paris 1800), and the Extended Italian Edition of Giuseppe Antonelli (Venice 1833)

Abstract

“Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes”, published in Paris in 1799-1800 by Jean- Nicholas-Louis Durand, at the height of the positivistic climate engendered by the contemporary culture of encyclopedism, plays an important role in architectural historiography. The volume allowed architectural students and architectural enthusiasts alike the first opportunity to study a vast range of architectural design models of all periods and places organised into typological categories, illustrated in highly didactic and homogenous drawings. The immediate success of the “Recueil” was guaranteed by the simultaneous publication (in 1800) of an explanatory text to accompany the illustrative material, written by Jacques Guillaume Legrand in accordance with Durand. More than thirty years later, the Venetian editor Giuseppe Antonelli proposed a re-launch of the “Recueil” intended to meet the contemporaneous historical and critical context of modern Europe, publishing a bilingual Italian-French edition of highly commercially ambitious scope. The Venetian “Raccolta”, which appeared in 1833, united Legrand’s text with Durand’s illustrations, - and importantly included almost double the illustrations- with the addition of antique buildings, and also included modern architectural models, alongside contemporary Italian, French and German architectural design projects. This contribution intends to set Antonelli’s ambitious undertaking into the contemporaneous critical and vivacious academic cultural climate of the Venice of the 1830’s, and also includes a thorough examination of the additional illustrations that were added by the Venetian publisher to the original French canon.