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BELLORI, Giovanni Pietro, and Joseph Marie SUARES. Veteres Arcus Augustorum triumphis insignes Ex Reliquiis quae Romae adhuc supersunt cum imaginibus triumphalibus restituti antiquis nummis notisque… illustrati. Rome, Ad Templum Sanctae Mariae de Pace [Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi], 1690. FIRST EDITION. Large folio (49,2x33,5cm). [1], 52 ff. (incl. 5 leaves of text and 47 leaves carrying 49 plates) [i.e. 46]. The unnumbered leaf is the title page. The 52 numbered leaves include in one sequence leaves of text ( 2, 16-19) and leaves of plates. The leaves of plates include two leaves carrying bis plates (6,7); so that there is a total of 47 leaves carrying 49 plates. Twenty-three of the numbered leaves of plates are single (1 [engr. dedic.], 8, 24-41, 49-51) and 24 are double (3-7, 9- 15, 20-23, 42-48, 52). Twenty-nine plates (4-8, 24- 45, 49, 50) are signed as drawn and engraved by Pietro Sancti Bartoli; the dedication plate (pl.1), as designed and drawn by Pietro Lucatelli. The printer is named in the colophon (leaf 19 verso): 'Ex Typographia Io: Francisci de Buagnis'. Seventeen plates carry the publisher's imprint. The book is dedicated by the publisher de Rossi to Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (grand-nephew of Pope Alexander VIII). C18th elegant half-leather and marbled paper. Gilt title over label and decorations to spine. All edges sprinkled in red. Some little flaws to the extramities of the covers and the corners. A really beautiful copy, bright crisp and clean, printed on strong paper. The plates show reconstructions of the arches or details of their relief sculptures. They are largely a conflation by De' Rossi of plates from Bartoli's Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris sculpturae vestigia (1693) and from J.M. Suares's Arcus L. Septimii Severi Aug. Anaglypha (1676), with a few apparently new plates based on a sketch-book by one of the Sangallo family. It is singular , wrote Stendhal, that so useless a thing should give such great pleasure; the style of the triumphal arch is an architectural conquest . Not only were commemorative arches erected throughout the Roman empire, but in modern times the form was revived - as at Lorsch Abbey (ca. 800), in Naples at the Castelnuovo (ca. 1452-71), at Paris in Porte St Denis (ca. 1670), the Arc de Triomphe (1806-36) and the Arc du Carrousel (1806), and at London in the Marble Arch (1825-8) and Constitution Arch (1827-8); and an echo of the form sounds in the façades of Alberti's church of St Francis ('tempio Malatestiano'), Rimini (ca. 1450), Salvi's Trevi fountain, Rome (1732-57) and Adam's garden front of Kedlestone Hall, Derbyshire (ca. 1760). Millard, I, 216, p.123; Cicognara 3608; Graesse I, 330. Seller Inventory # ABE-1651395280333
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