At the very beginning I almost lost myself on the website of the Xenotheka online library because on the main page there were a couple of very interesting articles about modern japanese architecture that really sparked my interest. After I regained my focus I started my search by doing the obvious. I simply tried to enter the keywords found in the title of my book “Grand escalier du chateau de Versailles”. So I typed in staircase and Versailles. I was surprised that there were very few books dedicated to his famous piece of architecture. Although there wasn’t a vast amount of books to choose form I found my first book written by Thomasin called “Recueil des figures, groupes, thermes, fontaines, vases, statues, et autres ornemens de Versailles”
Before even looking into the contents of this piece of literature I noticed their similarity because the book covers looked alike. But the similarities have just started at that point. Both are dedicated to King Louis Le Grand. They include numerous extremely detailed drawings of the Castle Versailles only difference being some different objects like fountains only present in Thomasins work. I really enjoyed looking at these carefully crafted little pieces of art and I gained a lot of respect for the authors and their work. The keywords stairs/stairway/staircase led to many interesting books but those primarily focused on modern architecture which sadly wasn’t that useful for me. So I had to figure out a different approach. I tried to remember the contents of my book and I noticed that the book also heavily focussed on architectural ornaments. This thought led me to my second book “baroque and Rococco: Architecture and decoration” by Anthony Blunt.
Those two share many similarities but most importantly they both focus on architectural ornaments. The difference lays in the methods used to create these images. Whilst in my Book all images were hand drawn Thomasin used photography to analyse the architecture. It was very interesting to see two different methods used to basically achieve the same goal. I’ll have to admit that I prefer the more traditional drawings over the photography because I feel like it’s a much larger effort.
Student Number: 21-941-216