Published b, y Taschen, 1994, softcover, French/English, illustrated, 1007 pages, 14.5 cms x 19.8 cms x 6.2 cms, condition: basically as new.
Two-hundredand twenty-seven years ago, in 1798. Napoleon's attempt to conquer Egypt was a mad dream, a fiasco, but it gave rise to a new science : Egyptology. The 3.000 illustrations brought back from the expedition were published by order of the Emperor. They constitute invaluable testimony and we have reproduced them in full.
Gilles Neret (1933-2005) was an art historian, journalist, writer, and museum correspondent. He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He edited art reviews such as L'OEil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications.
This is a small-format reproduction of the first few volumes of the Description de l'Egypte commissioned by Napoleon in the very late 18th and early 19th centuries. As with many things ancient Egyptian, I have a mild obsession with the Description. I had despaired of ever having the opportunity to actually read the thing (other than seeing one open volume behind glass at the Library of Alexandria) and so was delighted to discover the existence of a mass-produced facsimile. Those savants, man, they got some real shit done while the French army was blundering around losing to the Brits. They produced hundreds of faithful renderings not just of the A-list temples and landmarks, but also details of hieroglyphs (that no one yet understood!), architectural drawings and elevations, to-scale site plans and maps (did they use balloons to get the aerial views? they are amazing), examples of everyday tools and implements, farming and manufacturing techniques -- you name it, they recorded it in glorious detail. And all BY HAND. The scale and skill of their work is breathtaking. I'm withholding a star because the book itself is quite small - it would have been better at about one-and-a-half times the size - and because I would have appreciated a more extensive introduction to the project than the three pages provided. But my goodness, what a treasure.
