Essai sur le beau. Nouvelle Edition, augmentee de six discours, sur le Modus, sur le Decorum, sur les Graces, sur l'Amour du Beau, sur l'Amour Desinteresse.

Paris: L. Etienne Ganeau, 1770 Expanded edition, edited the abbé Guillaume Germain Guyot, of Andre's literary essay on "the beautiful," discussing the beauty of morals, costumes, music, and the grace of the body. The Essai sur le beau won him great fame and is considered a classic in the history of aesthetics. Laffort-Bompiani calls the work "du premier traité d'Esthétique paru en France." "The Essai sur le beau…was Cartesian in its foundations, and Platonic and Augustinian in its conclusions that beauty is a transcendental perfection, but this set of lectures was influential, even on the empirically minded Diderot, who borrowed from it and discussed it in his essay on beauty in the Encyclopedia" (Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present).. Contemporary mottled calf, gilt decorated spine with brown calf label. . Twelvemo. Old ink ownership mark on title-page, numerical rubberstamp on a preliminary blank. A very good, clean copy. The mathematician Yves-Marie André (sometimes referred to as Yves-Marie de L'Isle Andre, 1675-1764) entered the Society of Jesus in 1693. Although distinguished in his scholastic studies, he was, because of his Gallicanism, Cartesianism, and Jansenism, assigned to scientific studies and made royal professor of mathematics at Caen, where he remained for thirty-nine years. He was intimately associated with Malebranche and kept up an extensive correspondence with him. In addition to Essai sur le Beau, he wrote Traité de l'homme (1766), and a biography of Malebranche