BARTHÉLEMY (Jean-Jacques) Voyage du jeune Anacharsis... Lot 38

[BARTHÉLEMY (Jean-Jacques)] Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, dans le milieu du quatrième siècle avant l'ère vulgaire. À Paris, chez de Bure l'aîné, 1790. 7 volumes in-8, xxiv-382-(2 blank) + (8 of which the first 2 blank)-568 + (8 of which the first 2 blank)-560 + (8 of which the first 2 blank)-564 + (8 of which the first 2 blank)-543-(one blank) + (8 of which the first 2 and last blank)-511-(one blank) + (8 of which the first 2 blank)-130-(2)-cccxxii-(2 of which the last blank) pp. ; marginal tears to 4 text leaves. - Collection of maps, plans, views and medals of ancient Greece, relating to the voyage of the young Anacharsis; preceded by a critical analysis of the maps. Ibid. In-4, xlii pp. in a homogeneous binding, glazed fawn racine calf, smooth spines with partitions and fleurons, garnet-red title and tomaison, fine gilt frieze framing the boards, filleted edges, inner gilt roulette, edges gilt on red tint; headbands, spines and corners slightly rubbed, a few stains on the boards (period binding). COPPER ENGRAVED ILLUSTRATION comprising 31 copper-engraved plates by Guillaume de La Haye, i.e.: 2 folding and 29 double-page plates, all mounted on tabs in the atlas, including 24 bearing topographical maps and plans (11 enhanced in color) drawn between 1781 and 1788 by Jean-Denis BARBIE DU BOCAGE, sometimes based on surveys drawn up shortly beforehand for the Count of Choiseul-Gouffier. An "ANTIQUE ROMAN", LE VOYAGE DU JEUNE ANACHARSIS EN GRECE inhabited its author for the thirty years it took to write it. "I have composed a journey rather than a story", he wrote, and indeed this scholarly work is built around the account of a young Scythian's journey to Greece, living in the period between the century of Pericles and that of Alexander. Written in an elegant style woven with borrowings from classical Greek and Roman literature, the book reflects to some extent Abbé Barthélemy's deeply moving experience of his long sojourn in Italy to discover Greco-Roman remains. Far from mythological fables, Abbé Barthélemy set out to rediscover the past, based not only on facts, but also on traces gathered together in a kind of imaginary museum. A philosophical thinker before the Comte de Volney on the fragility of civilizations, he nonetheless sought to resurrect this Antiquity buried by the centuries, by arousing the enthusiasm and wonder of the reader, and succeeded even in his landscapes where, with accents reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he expresses a vivid sense of nature. The success of this undertaking prompted Louis de Fontanes to write: "All Antiquity rejuvenated by your care / Reappears before our eyes under its own colors, / And you give us back its genius". A NEOCLASSIAN MANIFESTO, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce promotes beauty based on the idea of perfection, combining simplicity and harmony. While it is in some ways reminiscent of the classicism of François de Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque (1699), it is also part of the intellectual movement that emerged in the second half of the 18th century, inspired by the aesthetic thinking of German theorist Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the 1750s and 1760s, and illustrated by the spectacular publications of Julien-David Le Roy's Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758) and Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier's Le Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (first published in 1782). Thus, at the crossroads of erudition and salon craze, Le Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce accompanied and nurtured a veritable Greek fashion that, in France, left its mark on architecture, the decorative arts and costume. In 1788, Madame Vigée-Lebrun gave a "Greek supper" after reading passages from the Voyage devoted to Spartan and Athenian feasts, at which the guests - court figures, writers and artists - were offered Greek food and wine, dressed in Greek style. Thanks to its success, Abbé Barthélemy's work played a significant role in the birth of a philhellenism that would find political expression in the first half of the 19th century. A PEDAGOGY WITH MORALIZING AIMS. For Abbé Barthélemy, it was also a question of offering readers a book that would enable them to "educate themselves by cultivating themselves", and he did not hesitate to paint the historical figures he evoked in colors that would offer them as models or repulsors, with allusions that were entirely contemporary. For example, Aspasie, wife of Pericles, who, like Madame de Pompadour, protected the arts and letters and influenced the prince's politics, is explicitly accused of contributing to the decline of the arts.