First French edition of Van Campen's famous description of the Amsterdam City Hall (the present day Royal Palace), with more than a hundred plates of the architectural features and sculptures of the building, including ground plans, elevations, and sections of the interior and exterior. Particularly impressive are the giant plates of the tympana, which are more than 160 cm wide when fully unfolded. The work also includes the famous plate of the extraordinary cartographic mosaic floor of the Burgerzaal, which shows the zodiac signs that were originally painted on the celestial map in the middle, but are now no longer visible on the floor itself due to fading.
The City Hall is the most famous and last major work by Jacob van Campen (1595-1657), the greatest Dutch architect of the 17th century. He began work on the design in 1640, and though the building opened in 1655, it was not actually completed until 1665. It was called "the eighth wonder of the world" at the time, and is still considered the most important Dutch monument from the 17th century. It was designed to show off Amsterdam's wealth and magnificence. This is especially visible in the Burgerzaal, the heart of the building, which depicts Amsterdam as the centre of the world. The impressive mosaic floor, with a celestial map in the centre and the two maps of both hemispheres of the world on either side, symbolises that the world was at Amsterdam's feet. These maps are the largest ever made. They show Abel Tasman's then recent discoveries in Australia and Tasmania. Many discoveries from his second voyage remained otherwise unpublished until the end of the 17th century.
The present work is the French edition of Van Campen's Afbeelding van 't stadt huys van Amsterdam (1664). The plates were drawn by Hubert Quiellinus (1619-1687), and Danckert Danckertsz. (1634-1666) and his father after drawings by Jacob Vennekool (17th century), and were first published in Quiellinus' Prima [et secunda] pars praecipuarum ... curiae Amstelrodamenis (1655-1663) and Afbeelding van 't stadt huys van Amsterdam in dartigh coopere plaaten ... geteeckent door Jacob Vennekool (1661). As such, most of the present engravings were published before the building was completed, and may therefore reflect Van Campen's plan more closely than the finished building itself.
The edges and corners of the boards are scuffed, the spine has been rubbed, with loss material, old restoration at the head and foot of the spine. The text leaves are lightly browned, the plates are very clean. BAL 132; Berlin Kat. 2235; STCN 182312917 (5 copies, of which 1 incomplete); cf. Fowler 77 & 274 (1661 Danckerts eds.); for the map, see also: Schilder, Australia Unveiled, map 66; Shirley 423.