Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books is honoured to have been included in Sir Norman Rosenthal’s Forever collection for the Frieze Masters 2020 Online Viewing Room. The item chosen by Sir Norman, Jean Pélerin’s Von der Kunst Perspectiva, is the first German edition of this seminal treatise on perspectival drawing, one of only six German copies in the world.
To Pélerin, perspective could be captured on the page, accurately calculated to show the world as the human eye sees it. This printed book constructed and continues to provide a valuable foundation upon which artists can build.
The work of Jean Pélerin fits seamlessly into the Forever collection not only because of its continued impact on European art, but because of its historic influence too. For instance, one domestic interior pictured in the book may have inspired Dürer’s perspectival rendering in his engraving of St. Jerome in his study (c. 1514). Perspectival art more generally impacted the Bauhaus, De Stijl and more modern art movements.
See more about this work here or in our video on Perspectives.
