AntiquarianBookNews.com

• I think all of the above images were obtained from the Digital National Library of Serbia — Old Graphics and Old Maps (partial flash sites: clicking ‘print’ gives full size jpeg image).
• More old prints and photos at City Museum of Belgrade (I saved a couple of the images in the set; but they are fairly small).
• Belgrade photo album by Vlado Marinkovic.
• The World Factbook on Serbia/Wikipedia on Belgrade.
• Satellite view of Belgrade.
• History of Serbia and Montenegro from the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Raska and Prizren.
• [some of the above images have been spot cleaned and sorry the text has been stripped of the non-latin letters: had to type them from the flash interface]

“François Nicolas Martinet engraved illustrations of birds for books by some of the most influential ornithologists in 18th-century France. Born in 1731, Martinet was trained as an engineer and draftsman. Engraving illustrations for books probably began as a secondary profession, but as his popularity and output grew it must have consumed the majority of his time. Martinet’s son Alexandre eventually assisted him and made many engravings, as is known from signatures and dates on the prints. Martinet also had two sisters, Angélique and Marie Thérèse, who were engravers as well, but it is not known if they worked with him. Towards the end of his career, Martinet drew upon his experience in engraving birds for others to publish his own ornithology books, producing plates until his death sometime in the late 1780s or early 1790s (sources disagree on the year).

To understand the significance of François Martinet’s work, it is important first to recognize the difficulties involved in producing illustrations of birds in the 18th century. This provides a foundation for viewing the development of Martinet’s bird illustrations and their contribution to works that became classics in the history of ornithology and makes possible a fuller appreciation of the beautiful hand-colored plates in Ornithologie, the folio reproduced in this digital edition.”

The detailed historical and bibliographic article about Martinet’s legacy (by Leslie K. Overstreet and Kathryn E. Zaharek) provides an overview and introduction to a marvellous (and old) website from the Smithsonian Institution: ‘Ornithologie by François Nicolas Martinet’.

The above images (extensively background cleaned) are a small selection from the more than one hundred and seventy plates available in large size format at the Smithsonian site. I’m fairly sure I’ve posted a couple of them before from their original publications - under a different author - but I can’t seem to locate them. At least my tastes are consistent.

French architects Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine (1762-1853) first met while attending the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 1780s. Their deep friendship and shared professional tastes were solidified during a subsequent three year sojourn at the French