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Camille Enlart Les Monuments des croisés

Description

Camille Enlart.
Les Monuments des croisés dans le Royaume de Jérusalem. Architecture religieuse et civile. Paris, P. Geuthner, 1925-1928; 2 vols. text in quarto and 2 vols. plates, small folio, xvi-216 pp. - 514 pp. and 196 plates in phototypie, photolithographie and photogravure, text vols in paper wrappers with glassene (textblock vol 2 slightly loose), the sets of plates and folding plans in 2 printed card albums with their ties.
(Published in the series: Publication du Haut Commissariat français en Syrie et au Liban. Bibliothèque archéologique et historique, tome VII.)

A scarce and important publication.
£1650

Commentary

The first penetrating and monumental survey of medieval French art and architecture abroad and its influence on the orient, while not neglecting western borrowing from the east. It crowned the author’s work in this field which he started decades before with his studies in Cyprus. To quote the man who has continued this work, Jaroslav Folda, in “Crusader art in the Holy Land: from the Third Crusade to the fall of Acre, 1187-1291”, 2005: ‘…he came to the study of Crusader Art and architecture as a mature scholar at the height of his powers….Enlart’s achievement in the 1920s cannot be overstated’.

Not only was Louis Camille Enlart (1862-1927), who became director of the Museum of comparative sculpture or Trocadero in Paris, one of several talented and distinguished French archeologists of the time, trained at the Ecole des Chartes, he was also an excellent photographer and his cliches of many years working in the field, from Portugal to Syria, are an important part of national photographic Archives in France. They are also part of the beauty of this work because reproduced here with the best technology available at the time.