VREDEMAN DE VRIES, Hans.   ARTIS PERSPECTIVA' PLURIUM GENERUM ELEGANTISSIMAE FORMULAE,   multigenis Fontibus, nonnullisq' Hortulis affabre factis exornatae, in comodum Artificum, eorumq' qui Architectura, aedificorumq' comensurata varietate delectantur..... (with alternate title in German: Vilerleij kunstliche Stuck der edlen Perspective, sampt mehrerleij Wasserbrunnen und etlichen Lustgärten gantz wercklich gezieret.)       Antwerp: Theodorum Gallaeum, n.d. (ca   1600).          This rare series of engravings from designs by Hans Vredeman de Vries, the foremost figure in Northern European Renaissance architecture and decorative art, presents perspective views for a variety of fountains, most of them set prominently within urban squares or gardens. While all of Vredeman's publications were significant, both for their inventiveness and their widespread influence, this series is of particular interest for several reasons. Most obviously, important elements of Vredeman's two most famous and influential works, his HORTORUM VIRIDARIORUMQUE, and PERSPECTIVE ID EST, find precedents here. The HORTORUM's greatest significance derived from its status as the first published pattern book for garden design. While the ARTIS PERSPECTIVA, which preceded it by 20 years, presented patterns for fountains rather than gardens, these subjects inevitably over-lapped. Thus we find here four fountains placed within gardens and another eight placed within public squares or courtyards. Vredeman's characteristic cut parterres, fully developed in the later work, are also present in the gardens shown here, along with three examples of the type of elaborate trellised arcades which also appear later and were widely imitated in Dutch and German gardens of the seventeenth century. Similarly, while ARTIS PERSPECTIVA is not itself a treatise on perspective, its emphatic use of perspective does in some ways prefigure Vredeman's PERSPECTIVE ID EST, published nearly forty years later. It has even been erroneously described as a first edition of the later work by some early bibliographers. It is also important to recognize that most of the engraved works produced by Vredeman were intended as pattern books for architects and artists. ARTIS PERSPECTIVA is no exception to this, and in one important respect the models it presented were without real precedent. While its ostensible subject was fountains and their associated architecture and gardens, its more fundamental subject matter was the design of open urban space. As noted by Peter Fuhring, Renaissance artists and architects had already published illustrations showing isolated buildings or reconstructions of classical Roman building complexes, but in presenting here a series of complete compositions for city squares and urban open spaces Vredeman broke entirely new ground (see Fuhring's entry in HANS VREDEMAN DE VRIES UND DIE RENAISSANCE IM NORDEN, item 59). The carefully designed spaces surrounding his fountains, whether public squares or enclosed city gardens, are all as distinctive as the fountains themselves. They are intended not merely as backgrounds, but as elements in a larger visualisation of the Renaissance city as an architectural composition larger than its individual buildings. As such they form what can be regarded as the first pattern book for the design of the urban landscape. The first edition appeared in 1568. The present copy is from the third edition (of four), with a few of the etched plates partly reworked. Although the imprint has changed and some of the plate sequencing has been altered, the material in this edition is complete and unchanged. Rare.   Folio (38.6 x 26.3 cm); engraved title and 17 engraved views, numbered 1-18.   Hollstein Dutch/Fuhring 269-286; Hunt 103 (1568); Berlin Catalogue 3572 (1568), Springer pg. 20.          In recent boards with plates mounted on stubs; title soiled and stained; restoration to frayed margins on three plates and a few other minor paper repairs and soiled edges, but printed areas clean and in good condition. $3,500.00

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