Overview
- First-time English translation of an important Renaissance treatise on perspective
- Features a comparisons of the treatise as published in 1568 and the unpublished manuscripts
- Reveals the truly innovative nature of Barbaro’s experiments and results
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About this book
A year after the second edition of his famous translation and commentary on Vitruvius, Daniele Barbaro published The Practice of Perspective, a text he had begun working on many years before. Barbaro was the first to publish a formal treatise entirely dedicated to the science of geometric perspective. In an informal style especially addressed to practicing artists and architects, Barbaro begins by drawing on and expanding the manuscript treatise of Piero della Francesca with regards to basics of perspective constructions for representing three-dimensional solids on two-dimensional media, and then goes on to show that perspective is a particularly suitable instrument for other scientific and artistic applications as well, including cartography, cosmology, stage set design, and anamorphosis.
Here for the first time Barbaro’s The Practice of Perspective is made available to contemporary scholars in an English translation, augmented by annotations relating the printed treatise to the three unpublished manuscripts in Italian and Latin of the work now conserved in Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.
A foreword by Philip Steadman sets the stage for this book. In-depth essays by authors Kim Williams and Cosimo Monteleone situate the treatise within the editorial panorama of the Cinquecento, outline the innovations that Barbaro brought to the study of perspective, and focus particularly on his creative explorations of geometric solids and the construction of clocks.
Sometimes dismissed in recent studies as a compilation of known principles, the aim of this present book is to reveal the truly innovative nature of Barbaro’s experiments and results and restore him to his rightful place as an original scholar of Renaissance perspective theory.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Cosimo Monteleone is Associate Professor of Descriptive Geometry and Architectural Representation at the Università degli Studi di Padova. In 2003 he obtained his degree in Architecture at the University IUAV of Venice, where he also earned his Ph.D. in 2010 in “Architectural Composition curriculum in Survey and Representation of Architecture and Landscape” with a study on the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright. His research focuses on architectural, urban and landscape survey; 3D modelling of architecture and city; augmented and virtual reality; gnomonic; science and technique applied to art and architecture; history of representation with particular skills related to Renaissance perspective. He is member of “Visualizing Cities”, an international research devoted to the analysis and the representation of the historical, urban and architectural transformations. He is member of the National Technical UNI - UNI / CT 047 / GL 03 (Technical drawing for building and installations). On the topics of his research he has published several essays, presented conferences, lectures, directed digital installations for national and international exhibitions. Among his publications is Frank Lloyd Wright. Geometria e Astrazione nel Guggenheim Museum (Rome: Aracne 2013). He has published two papers in the Nexus Network Journal: “Perspective at Palladio’s Time and Its Scientific Heritage” (with Andrea Giordano) and “The Perspective of Daniele Barbaro” (2019). His latest book is La prospettiva di Daniele Barbaro. Note critiche e trascrizione del manoscritto It. IV, 39=5446 (Aracne, 2020).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Daniele Barbaro’s Perspective of 1568
Authors: Kim Williams, Cosimo Monteleone
Translated by: Kim Williams
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76687-0
Publisher: Birkhäuser Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76686-3Published: 07 September 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-76689-4Published: 08 September 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-76687-0Published: 06 September 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXIII, 386
Number of Illustrations: 255 b/w illustrations, 32 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Science, Architectural History and Theory, Mathematics in Art and Architecture