L. Jacquemin - Guide du voyageur dans Arles - 1835

Traveler's Guide in Arles, containing indications of most of the natural products of its territory, and the description of its ancient monuments, from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, by L. Jacquemin, 1835

Louis Jacquemin (1797–1868) is the central figure of the archaeological renaissance of Arles in the first half of the nineteenth century. Member and perpetual secretary of the Arles Archaeological Commission, of which several town halls entrusted him with the direction, keeper of the rich lapidary museum and of the city’s monuments, he was also the correspondent of the ministry for historical works, member of the Institut historique de France, and of the academies of Rome, Nîmes, Marseille, Mâcon, Geneva, Toulouse and Béziers. Jacquemin, together with Honoré Clair and Jean-Jacques Estrangin, forms a trio that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was the driving force behind one of the most extraordinary rediscoveries of antique culture and taste that a city has known since the Renaissance.

The Traveler's Guide in Arles is regarded by contemporaries as a work that became, so to speak, classic, produced in a typic ally romantic spirit – that of a generation for whom, according to F. Billot, the taste for ruins and history had never been so vivid and general. The work successively treats the natural products of the Arles area – the Crau, the Camargue, the marshes, the fields – then the set of monuments of the city arranged in chronological order: the ancient monuments (amphitheater, theater, obelisk, columns of the forum, the Alyscamps road), the medieval buildings (Saint-Trophime and its cloister, the Christian sarcophagi), and those of the Renaissance.

What distinguishes and especially highlights this Traveler's Guide, according to the period critics, is that the renaissance of knowledge of the Arlesian monuments precisely dates from its publication. Jacquemin, having never speculated about his works, a second edition – ardently desired – was never realized. The work thus remains a unique edition, first and last, an irreplaceable documentary of Arlesian archaeology and topography at the threshold of the era of listing of historical monuments – the first list of the Commission supérieure des Monuments historiques, which listed the amphitheater, the theater, the columns of the forum, the obelisk, the Palace of Constantine, the Alyscamps, Saint-Trophime and its cloister and the Montmajour Abbey, appeared in 1840, five years after Jacquemin's Guide.

1835, 15 x 23 cm, 480 pages. Various folds, tears and stains on the cover, with paper losses on the back. Browning."