DU FOUILLOUX Jacques La Vénerie de Iacques du Fouilloux Escuyer, Seigneur dudit lieu, pays de Gastine en Poitou. Dédiée au Roy Treschrestien Charles, neufiesme de ce nom. Plusieurs receptes et remedes pour guérir les Chiens de diverses maladies. Plus l’Adolescence de l’Autheur.

Thiébaud, 294-295 (erroneous count of woodcuts) ; Souhart, 148 (erroneous count of woodcuts) ; Schwerdt, I, p. 152 ; Brun, p. 173 ; François Remigereau, Jacques Du Fouilloux et son traité de la vénerie. Étude biographique et bibliographique, Paris, 1952. See Mortimer, French, 187 (1562 edition).

First edition of one of the most beautiful French XVIth century illustrated books and one of the most important French hunting book.

Jacques du Fouilloux, a noble man from the Poitou region, was born at the château du Fouilloux close to Parthenay (Deux-Sèvres) in 1519, and died in 1580. This celebrated work is dedicated to King Charles IX, who was very found of hunting.

The importance of Du Fouilloux’s La Vénerie can hardly be overstated. It was the first major work on the subject since Gaston Phébus’s Livre de chasse, written in the late 14th century, and it remained pre-eminent for two hundred years.

A superb copy, one of the very few preserved in its original flexible vellum binding. It is the only copy known today with a contemporary provenance, that of Cardinal Strozzi (1513-1571), nephew of Queen Catherine de Medici.

This copy subsequently entered the collections of the Borghese princes, who sold it in 1892. It was included in the Bulletin Morgand and later in the collections of Paul Muret and Henri Burton.

Thiébaud notes that this first edition is ‘extremely rare’. He goes on to say that ‘it is also one of the most beautiful, with its elegant italic characters; it is the only one in small folio format’.

The illustrations comprise a total of 56 engravings, including the one on the dedication leaf (and not in addition to it, as Thiébaud and Souhart erroneously state), and 55 in the text.

The first (also the largest) woodcut shows « l’auteur agenouillé, en costume de chasse, offrant son livre à Charles IX entouré de plusieurs seigneurs de et de hallebardiers. » If French King Charles IX is indeed depicted on this image is heavily doubted by Thiebaud, as the latter was only a child when the book was printed. Thiebaud supposed that the image depicts in reality French King François II, who died on 5^th of December 1560. As the privilege of the book dates from 23rd December 1560 it is most likely that the image had not been changed for the new King. « Le roi, dans la gravure de dédicace est aussi grand que ses courtisans, ce qui ne convient nullement à Charles IX, âgé de dix ans en 1561. On en peut conclure que l’ouvrage, dont le privilège est du 23 décembre 1560, avait été composé pour être dédié à François II, décédé le 5 décembre 1560, et que c’est sa mort qui détermina l’auteur à le dédier à Charles IX, sans que pour cela changer la gravure, qui était déjà faite à l’intention de François II ».

The 55 beautiful woodcuts printed in the text depict numerous scenes of stag, wild boar, hare, badger and fox hunting. They illustrate the instructions given on choosing, training and caring for hounds. One of the most famous engravings is the hunters having a picnic lunch on the grass (p. 81).

”Effective use has been made of solid black areas with details in white in a block of a dog on leaf A8v and two blocks of boards on leaves M1r and M4” (Mortimer).

In addition to the woodcut illustrations, the scores of the hunting fanfares in this edition are printed, as they should be, on different strips of paper and mounted to the original staves, which are transparent and devoid of notes.

Important Provenances

Signature of Cardinal Strozzi on the last endpaper. For almost a century, the Strozzi family was attached to the French court and to the Medici family, to which it was linked by deep family ties. Cardinal Lorenzo Strozzi’s mother, Clarice de’ Medici, made him a cousin of the Queen. She appointed him to head several abbeys. Henri II entrusted him with the bishopric of Béziers in 1547. He was promoted cardinal by Paul IV in 1557. After triumphantly entering Béziers in 1557, Strozzi spent two years in Rome, then returned to Béziers at the end of 1559. In 1561, Lorenzo Strozzi became bishop of Albi, and his actions soon became rooted in a violent struggle against the Protestants at the start of the First War of Religion in 1562. Strozzi became Archbishop of Aix in 1567 and died in Avignon in January 1571. The Strozzi family also had interests in Poitou, Jacques Du Fouilloux’s region of origin, since Admiral Philippe Strozzi, nephew of the Cardinal, became Lord of Bressuire (Poitou) in 1581.

The signature on the last flyleaf of the copy is certainly an ex-libris, much more than an unlikely inscription or possible ex-dono. The handwriting appears to be Italianate. The location of this bookplate suggests the existence of Cardinal Strozzi’s personal library. Numerous provenance searches have failed to find any trace of it. Similarly, we have been unable to find any comparative manuscript documents to establish whether or not the Strozzi ex-libris is autographed (on the rarity of Strozzi manuscripts: ‘a very small number of letters by Lorenzo Strozzi exist in France. His correspondence was part of the Coislin manuscripts stolen in 1791 and taken to Russia. In addition, most of the Strozzi papers passed into the archives of the de Fiesque family, into which the Strozzi papers had been merged’, M. Bellaud Dessalles, Les Évêques italiens de Béziers, Paris, 1901, p. 33).

Three centuries later, the Strozzi copy was included in the huge sale of Borghese books held in Rome in 1892, following the impoverishment of the family and the poor business dealings of Prince Paolo Borghese. His Italian career remains to be discovered. The opening photograph in the catalogue, showing one of the most beautiful libraries in Europe, is particularly striking. Paradoxically, it is the book’s slight defect – the few engravings underlined in ink by a hand that is no doubt childish – that makes it possible to follow the trail. The very precise reference in the catalogue, ‘rel. molle vélin (rel. anc.) […] 3 figures repassées à l’encre’, leaves little doubt as to the identification of the copy in this catalogue and in the Bulletin Morgand of 1900, which specifies the Strozzi provenance. Prince Borghese owned a number of hunting books, including the Du Fouilloux of 1573, which was recently re-sold, and a superb copy of the Mitelli.

In 1934 J. Thiébaud listed ‘a dozen different known copies’, including, for example, a copy now in a private collection bound in 17th-century calf. Of these, it is notable that only the Strozzi-Borghese copy is preserved in a binding strictly of the period. Among the copies known today, we can add the copy bound in blond sheep in Italy towards the end of the 18th century for Ferdinand I (1751-1825), King of the Two Sicilies, now in the collections of Qatar (Cat. Clavreuil, January 2002, no. 45, €200,000, previously sold at auction in 1985 in Paris). Finally, the copy from the Du Verne-Bernis collection in an unsigned nineteenth-century binding, washed, which could be one of the copies in the Thiébaud census, recently came up for sale (Paris, 5 October 2016, lot 71, €267,000). Of all these copies, the only one with a period provenance is that of Cardinal Lorenzo Strozzi, one of the great princes of the Church in the 16th century. Marcel Jeanson, owned two copies of the first edition, the dated and undated issue, but both preserved in a nineteenth-century binding.

Small restoration in the outer margin of the first endpaper and the outer margin of the title page. Small brown stains in the inner margins of book Q without affecting the text, small natural paper tears in the upper corner of R5 without affecting the text, some occasional toning or foxing. A small number of engravings have had their lines redrawn in black ink by a hand probably infantile and certainly pre-dating the eighteenth century: some very faintly (2), others modestly (3) and 4 more strongly. Among the latter, the ink has created small gaps in two engravings (p. 5 and p. 98).

Detailed provenance : Cardinal Lorenzo Strozzi (1513-1571) : “A Monseigneur le Révérendissime Cardinal Strozzi”, inscription in ink on the verso of the endpaper – Prince Paolo Borghese (1845-1920), 9th Prince of Sulmona, Catalogue of the library of H. E. D. Paolo Borghese, Prince of Sulmona, Rome, Vincezo Menozzi, from 16 May to 7 June 1892, p. 135, lot 844, which states: ‘rel. molle vélin (rel. anc.) [… ]: “rel. molle vélin (rel. anc.) [… ] 3 figures repassées à l’encre”, cf. : https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt ?id=mdp.39015033646277&seq=156&q1=fouilloux). The copy is also mentioned in the preface amongst the highlights of the sale, p. XI : “exemplaire très propre et très frais”. Paolo Borghese, the famous Italian gastronome, squandered his fortune: he sold the Villa Borghese to the Italian state in 1901, to which the art collections were transferred in 1903. The Borghese archives were acquired by the Vatican Library in the time of Leo XIII – copy cited by J. Thiébaud, as it was most likely acquired by Damascène Morgand in this sale; it appears in the Bulletin Morgand of 1900, p. 113, no. 38064.: “exemplaire du cardinal Strozzi, grand de marges, dans son ancienne reliure. Quelques figures ont été repassées à l’encre”) – Paul Muret (book-plate, note in his sales  from 30 Octobre 1936 or 25 January 1937 of which we were able to consult the sales catalogues thanks to Librairie Giraud-Badin) – Henri Burton (book plate, sale Paris, Drouot, Arcole, 11 mars 1991) – Yves Burrus.