Leo von Klenze – Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe

Klenze, Leo von.

Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe für die Ausführung bestimmt oder wirklich ausgeführt.

München, Stuttgart und Tübingen in der J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung 1830 [- 1842].

8 deliveries in 7 issues. 2 sheets, 11 pages, 1, 1 sheet, 11 pages and 48 plates.

76 x 56 cm (!). Loose in the original delivery wrappers with lithographed cover titles.

EUR 4800

Very rare first edition of Klenze’s ‘Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe’. The work is exceptionally rare in its first edition, the number of copies sold was probably 300, and mostly only incompletely available in libraries. The double edition VII/VIII with its own title ‘Walhalla in artistischer und technischer Beziehung’ with two tinted lithographed views by C.A. Lebsché, among others.

Leo von Klenze (1784-1864) was a versatile man – an architect, painter, and writer – best known for his work as the court architect to Ludwig I, king of Bavaria. His first real architectural training was in Berlin from 1800-1803, in the circle of Friedrich Gilly. A little later, in Paris, he was introduced to the architectural theories of Jean Nicolas Louis Durand and spent a short time working in the atelier of Percier and Fontaine. His early work included a modest theatre at the court of Napoleon’s brother Jerome, in Kassel – but at the end of the Napoleonic era (1814) he went to Paris and then to Vienna. In 1816 he was called by Ludwig I to Munich, which he was to make his permanent home and where he would play an important role in transforming the city right up to years just before his death. Although he had designed the Glyptothek in 1816 incorporating elements drawn from the Propylaea of the Acropolis, a trip to southern Italy and Sicily in 1823 gave him his first real exposure to Greco-classicistic architecture – and an opportunity for more direct contact with Greek buildings came in 1834, when he was sent to Greece by Ludwig I on a mission during which he became involved in the restoration of the buildings on the Acropolis. Klenze was the architect of the earliest Rundbogen church in Germany (Allerheiligen Hofkirche in Munich, 1827) and the earliest Renaissance palazzo in Germany (the Leuchtenberg Palace of 1816, modeled on the Palazzo Farnese in Rome).

Condition: Very clean and fresh copy. The oversized original wrappers with minor marginal wear. The missing text page 7/8 is enclosed as a facsimile, plate 6 from volume 2, supplemented from a copy of the second edition, this somewhat less wide-margined and browned in the margins.

Catalogue of the Berlin Ornamental Engraving Collection 2174 Florian Hufnagl, Leo von A detailed description in: Klenze und die Sammlung Architectonischer Entwürfe. Worms 1983 [=Commentary volume to the facsimile edition Worms 1983].