Promenades dans Rome, par M. de Stendhal. Tome premier [-second]

Two volumes, 8vo (216x125 mm). Vol. I: [4], iv (avertissement), 450, [2] pp., the final leaf containing the errata; Vol. II: [4], 592 pp. With two engraved frontispieces (original tissue guards preserved), respectively depicting St Peter's Basilica and Trajan's Column, engraved by François-Louis Couché (?Couché fils?) after Christophe Civeton, and a folding Plan des Vestiges de Rome antique et des douze Collines voisines du Tibre with hatching indicating the hills. The plan is known in two states, before and after the addition of hatching; some copies contain both states, although Cordier's bibliographical description calls for a single folding plan. Contemporary quarter green morocco, spine gilt in compartments with five raised bands, marbled endpapers and edges, blue silk bookmarks; binding slightly rubbed and worn. Bookplate ?CE Rappaport libri rari Roma? Some occasional foxing and staining, as frequently encountered in this edition, but a good, attractive copy. First edition. Promenades dans Rome occupies a distinctive position among Stendhal's writings on Italy. Presented as a succession of dated observations extending from August 1827 to April 1829, it is considerably more than a conventional guidebook or literal travel diary. Rome becomes the framework within which Stendhal moves continually between ancient history, Renaissance and Baroque art, the monuments and churches of the modern city, papal government, contemporary manners, music, social observation and his own theory of aesthetic response. The apparent immediacy of the journal form thus conceals a deliberately constructed work in which accumulated memories of repeated visits to Rome are combined with extensive reading and retrospective composition. The book is particularly revealing of Stendhal's method as a writer on art. Rather than attempting an antiquarian inventory of monuments, he repeatedly asks what a work of art actually does to the spectator: Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio, the Carracci, Guercino, Canova and the architecture of Rome become occasions for examining taste, beauty, enthusiasm, boredom and the instability of received judgments. The result forms an important complement to his earlier Histoire de la peinture en Italie, but in a freer and more personal form, in which criticism, autobiography and the experience of travel constantly overlap. Rome is likewise treated as several cities occupying the same physical space: the surviving capital of antiquity, the city fashioned by the Renaissance popes and their artists, and the contemporary capital of the Papal States. Stendhal's interest in monuments is therefore inseparable from his fascination with Roman society and politics. The churches, galleries, ruins and palaces function not merely as objects to be inspected but as evidence from which he reconstructs historical character and measures modern Rome against the passions of its past. This characteristic mixture of guide, historical meditation, art criticism and psychological observation accounts for the work's unusual vitality and for its continuing appeal beyond the literature of travel. Dictionnaire de Stendhal, Paris, 2003, pp. 563-566; L. Carteret, Le Trésor du Bibliophile romantique et moderne, Paris, 1925, II, p. 352; M. Clouzot, Guide du bibliophile, Paris, 1953, p. 257; Cordier, Bibliographie stendhalienne, X, 75-1; G. Vicaire, Manuel de l'amatuer de livres du XIXe siècle, Paris, 1894, I, col. 455. …