Album artistico de Toledo. Colleccion de Vistas y Detalles de los principales Monumentos Toledanos

First and only edition of this remarkable lithographed album devoted to Toledo, published in parts at Madrid between 1847 and 1848 under the direction of Doroteo Bachiller, Lithographer to the King, with the collaboration of several distinguished artists, among them José Vallejo y Galeazo, Andreas Pic de Leopold and Luis Carlos Legrand.

Picturesque views of the city alternate with studies of its most remarkable architectural details, forming one of the most ambitious Spanish lithographic enterprises of the mid-nineteenth century. The work is absent from the Katalog der Ornamentstichsammlung of Berlin.

The album is illustrated with 51 lithographed plates hors texte - the number confirmed by the National Library of Spain - to which our copy adds two duplicate plates.

 Although the original prospectus announced one hundred lithographs, the undertaking came to an end after seventeen parts, making these fifty-one plates the complete work as ultimately published.

Half black morocco, smooth spine decorated with gilt typographical ornaments, original black moiré paper boards preserved, title in gilt to the upper cover, original printed wrappers to the parts preserved, corners bumped, a few small tears to the margins of the boards and edges, modern binding. Occasional foxing.

The text was written by the historian and Orientalist Manuel de Assas y Ereño (1813-1880). The section devoted to the Synagogue of El Tránsito draws extensively upon José Amador de los Ríos's Toledo pintoresca (1845). This detail is of particular significance in the history of Spanish art: when the present album was published, the monuments of Toledo were still described simply as examples of Arab architecture. It was only eleven years later, in his reception address to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, « El estilo mudéjar, en arquitectura » ["The Mudéjar Style in Architecture"], that Amador de los Ríos coined the very concept of Mudéjar art.

The album follows in the wake of Alexandre de Laborde's Voyage pittoresque et historique de l'Espagne and finds its Spanish counterpart in Parcerisa and Piferrer's Recuerdos y bellezas de España. Together, these great Romantic publications sought to record and preserve Spain's architectural heritage before time and modernity altered it. Toledo naturally occupied a central place in this endeavour, its monuments preserving, better than those of any other Spanish city, the intertwined legacies of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Spain.

A rare album, at once a landmark of Spanish Romantic topographical lithography and an important milestone in the early study of Mudéjar architecture, the concept itself not being formally defined until little more than a decade later.