PETITOT, Ennemond Alexandre - Lot 76

PETITOT, Ennemond Alexandre Suite of Vases Parma, Benigno Bossi, stucator to H.R.H. the Infante Duke of Parma, 1764 BEAUTIFUL EXAMPLE OF A STRANGE BOOK OF VASES WHERE NEO-CLASSICISM COMES CLOSE TO EXTREME MANIERISM: SUPERB SUITE ENGRAVED IN PARMA AFTER PETITOT'S DRAWINGS ORIGINAL EDITION In-folio (365 x 275mm) Condition of the dedication leaf with the inscription "A Monsieur le marquis de Fellino". COLLATION and ILLUSTRATION: 4 ff.n.ch (title, frontispiece, 2 dedications) and 31 numbered plates, all etched by Benigno Bossi CONTEMPORARY BINDING. Marbled fawn calf, spine ribbed, compartments decorated with fleurons and corner irons, three fillets framing the boards, two fillets around the edges, marbled edges. The frontispiece and thirty-one plates show curious neoclassical vases decorated with plant or animal elements, often of fantastic inspiration, from the collections of Léon Guillaume du Tillot (1711-1774), Marquis of Felino, Prime Minister of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza between 1759 and 1771. A patron of the arts and a man of taste, this excellent administrator developed the arts, fashion, industry and agriculture in the duchy. He created an academy of fine arts, a museum of antiquity and a printing works, while reorganizing and modernizing the public library and the university (one of the oldest in Europe). In collaboration with the architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801), to whom we owe the design of this suite of vases, du Tillot modernized the city of Parma, which in just a few years became one of the architectural and decorative gems of the European Enlightenment. His secular management of the duchy and the opposition of Marie-Amélie de Habsbourg-Lorraine, wife of the new Duke Ferdinand de Bourbon, led to the downfall of Guillaume du Tillot, who returned to France via Spain to die. After winning first prize at the Académie d'Architecture de Paris in 1745, Petitot, an architect from Lyon and a pupil of Soufflot, had spent time in Rome, where he was a companion of Piranesi, before settling in Parma with Duke Philippe, son-in-law of Louis XV and a patron of Bodoni (cf. exp. Piranesi and the French, 1740-1790, Rome, Académie de France, 1976, pp. 250-260). Master ornamentalist Benigno Bossi (1727-1792) was one of the most elegant and eclectic artists of his time. He had followed his father to Germany. Like his father, he worked as a stucco artist in Nuremberg and Dresden. After settling in Parma in 1757, he entered the service of du Tillot and became one of Petitot's collaborators, for whom he produced architectural ornaments and engravings, a discipline in which he excelled. A few years later, he published another famous engraving suite, the superb Mascarade à la grecque (1771). BIBLIOGRAPHY : Guilmard, Les Maîtres ornemanistes, 27 -- Berlin Kat, I, 1081; see BAL, III, 2508 for a suite of twelve plates engraved by Basan in 1770, including six taken from the Parma edition --W. Cole "The states of Petitot and Bossi's Suite de Vases" in Print Quaterly, X, 1993, pp. 156-16: "complete sets (in any state) of Petitot's Suite des Vases are rare" -- the Vershbow copy had an inelegant modern binding -- Mary L. Myers, French Architectural and Ornament Drawings of the Eighteenth Century. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991, no. 91, pp. 163-165, ill.