The Auersperg Album of Architectural Print: From Classical Rome through Renaissance Antiquarianism to Baroque Carniola

The paper investigates a valuable album of architectural prints that once belong to the Auersperg family in Ljubljana and today is at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The album contains more than one hundred architectural prints (mostly engravings and etchings) variously mounted on paper leaves or sewn into an original sixteenth century binding. Through a meticolous physical analysis performed at the Getty thanks to a Research Library Grant, the paper reconstructs the production process of the album. It was created in the Italian peninsula in different stages throughout the sixteenth century, and completed in Rome at the end of the century, possibly in Antoine Lafrery's workshop. Finally, the paper interrogates the impact that the album and its content of classical Roman architecture could have in Baroque Carniola, as well as the use that the Count Wolfgang Engelbert Auersperg, who signed the album with the date 1656, could have intended.