COUSIN, Jean, the Younger.

Very scarce early edition, using the same woodcuts as the 1589, of this very charming manual illustrating how to draw portraits and full human figures. All C16 and C17 eds are rare. The French Jean Cousin the Younger (1522-95) was a prolific woodcutter, son of his namesake artist known as ‘the Elder’. The Younger’s ‘Livre de Pourtraicture’ was intended as a companion manual to the Elder’s ‘Livre de Perspesctive’ (1560). There appear to be no surviving copies of the alleged early eds of ‘Livre de Pourtraicture’, especially the first of 1571; the earliest extant is 1589, with woodcuts by Jean Leclerc after Cousin the Younger. The same woodcuts were used, as here, in later reprints by Le Bé. Firmin-Didot suggests that Le Bé himself re-cut the illustrations (col.181).

‘Livre’ is addressed to painters, sculptors, architects, goldsmiths, and embroiderers, among others. For each topic, Cousin provides a one-page French explanation and a facing full-page woodcut with several diagrammatic and artistic vignettes depicting the male and female human body and its proportions from different angles, from the head to hands and feet, the bust, the arms, the legs, and full figures standing or lying down, all clearly influenced by Michelangelo in style and by anatomical works like Vesalius’ for the poses. ‘Printed drawing manuals, produced for artists as well as amateurs, functioned as pattern books of the body and sometimes included anatomy. Cousin’s manual […] shows the body whole and in parts, with several fore-shortened views. […] no real anatomical explanation is given, and they are instead analysed for their proportions and measures relative to other body parts’ (Kornell, p.130). An ‘Advertisement au lecteur’ alerts the reader unskilled in geometry that a final appendix illustrates concepts such as ‘perpendicular’, ‘orthogonal’, etc., an interesting reminder of the educational background of the average artist in the Renaissance. An important and rare illustrated book.