Storia naturale degli uccelli

Trained as an engineer and draftsman, François-Nicolas Martinet (c. 1760–1800) became one of the leading engravers of bird illustrations in France, providing unprecedented realism in his hand-colored plates for some of the founding works in the nascent 18th-century science of ornithology. Much of his work was produced for Georges Louis Leclerc, le comte de Buffon, for Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (Natural History of Birds). Though Buffon’s text appears here in Italian only, the real reason to own this handsome (and frankly massive) slipcased volume is for the gorgeous reproductions of the plates—all 1,008 of them—that Martinet engraved for Buffon, many of which fill the 11 1/2 x 15-inch page.