Tortorel / Perrissin's RARE COMPLETE SUITE ILLUSTRATING THE WARS OF

THE RARE COMPLETE SUITE ILLUSTRATING THE WARS OF RELIGION - THE SAUVAGEOT – ODIOT – HOFER – de GANAY EXAMPLE TORTOREL, Jacques and Jean PERRISSIN. Le Premier volume, contenant quarante tableaux ou Histoires diverses qui sont mémorables touchant les Guerres, Massacres, & Troubles advenus en France en ces dernieres annees. Le tout recueilli selon le tesmoignage de ceux qui y ont esté en personne, & qui les on veus, lesquels sont pourtrais à la verité. [Geneva: Nicolas Castellin & Pierre Le Vignon, 1570]. First volume only (all published). Here is what AI says it’s worth: $24,462. Cost: Christie’s Paris 26 November 2019, lot 115 - EUR 15,000. Folio (15 1/4” x 11 3/16”, 388mm x 284mm). With an engraved-and-letterpress title-page, a manuscript preface, 39 double-page engraved plates and 3pp. manuscript table of contents. Collated complete, with the title-page as plate 1. Bound in early-XIXc calf with a gilt roll border. On the spine, five raised bands. Title (les quarantes tableaux) gilt to red morocco in the second panel. All edges of the text-block gilt. Gilt inside dentelle. Marbled end-papers. Green silk marking-ribbon. Boards starting, with the head-piece perished. Some abrasions to the boards, and scuffing, bumping and wear to the extremities. All plates backed onto celadon-tinted paper, with some marginal chips and splits filled. Scattered manuscript markings (e.g., to the title-page, to the caption of the first plate (no. 2). With the bookplates of Odiot, Hofer and Sauvageot to the front paste-down. With a partly-obliterated bookplate (personification of Time at a lectern) and the bookplate of Hubert de Ganay on the recto of the front paste-down. In all, a remarkably rare survival intact, (re-)bound in the XIXc and with a distinguished provenance. In 1569, Nicolas Castellin and Pierre Le Vignon commissioned a revolutionary book: one that sought to tell recent history pictorially. It was not the first to do so, but it was the first to be done not at the behest of a monarch or a party, not to glorify — but to inform the public. The story to be told was the origins of the French Wars of Religion, starting with the unexpected death of Henry II in 1559 (a splinter from a lance during a joust) and the power-vacuum that brought to a head the long-simmering tension between French Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots, Calvinists) and ending (by some reckonings) with the Edict of Nantes (1598), granting in name if not in fact religious equality of a kind. This peace obtained for most of the XVIIc, ending with Louis XIV’s Edict of Fontainebleau (1685). Such was the centrality of France that this conflict swirled out to include the monarchs and prelates of most of Europe: England and Scotland, Spain and Portugal, the Papal States. The consequences, as ever, were felt most acutely by the poorest and the least educated; thus this series of illustrations was a crucial means of dissemination of the relevant turning-points and events in the wars. Demand provoked various runs of the illustrations in copper and in wood at various scales; the present copy, as often (when complete examples can be found) is mixed. Whole sets of the tableaux are one of the traditional prizes of book-collectors, and the present copy has passed through distinguished hands. The binding owner, likely, was (Alexandre-) Charles Sauvageot (1787–1860), a polymathic collector. He was a violinist, co-founder of the département des arts decoratifs at the Louvre (now its own museum), historian and antiquary. His sale catalogue (from 3 December 1860, the present item lot 747) notes that the volume was “d’ailleurs très-bien conservé.” He was also likely the cause — if not the scribe — of the fine manuscript “avertissement” and table of plates. Its next recorded owner was Ernest Odiot (1828–1890), a collector principally of decorative objects. Philip Hofer (1898–1984) is one of the great figures of American book-collecting. After being graduated from Harvard, Hofer established and directed the department of printing and graphic arts at the Houghton; from 1933, he collected seriously in the field of illustrated books. In 1934 became the first assistant director of the Morgan Library. The book must have passed out of his collection, as the book was acquired from the sale of Hubert, comte de Ganay (1888–1974; Christie’s Paris 26 November 2019, lot 115). He was a similarly omnivorous collector from a long-descended Nivernais family. Benedict, Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin; Brunet V.892-895; Mortimer-Hofer-Jackson, Harvard XVIc French Books II.421; Robert-Dumesnil VI.46-69.

Estimate:£18,684.37

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