Roland Fréart de Chambray

Roland Fréart, sieur de Chambray (13 July 1606 – 11 December 1676)[1] was a French writer, collector, and a theorist of architecture and the arts.

[1] While in Rome he studied architecture and met the collector Cassiano dal Pozzo and the painter Nicolas Poussin,[1] as well as the artists Charles Errard and Jacques Stella.

[5] Fréart de Chambray completed a translation of the full text of Andrea Palladio's Quattro Libri (Venice 1570) into French[6] for the first time.

An earlier publication of the first book only, by Pierre Le Muet (1645), had made a very free translation, adjusted to conform to French practice; it proved popular and was freely pirated in the following decades.

Its "Dédicace à ses frères" is an open letter to his brother connoisseurs and patrons, hoping "to banish this capricious and monstrous fashion of building that some moderns have unhappily introduced as a heresy in the art, by I know not what licentiousness against its precepts and Reason itself".