Comparison
My concept of the comparison is first of all built up on the way the book is structure. The first few chapters seem to be from the original book « Li cinque ordini dell’architettura civile » written by Michel Sanmicheli, because of the way that the chapter is structured, titled and the font that it’s written in. The following up chapters are named after the most influentual archictects and architecturetheoretics from the italian renaissance. It begins with the man all oft he italian renaissance is based of, Marco Vitruvio Pollione and sorted by the time they lived ist Leon Battista Alberti, Andrea Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, Sabastiano Serlio and Giacomo Vignola. The chapters for each of this architects are only 2 pages long and have no images or drawing in them. The second half of the book is where it starts to get interesting. The five main chapters are named after after the 5 orders of architecture, starting with the tuscan order, doric order, ionic order, corinthian order and at the end the composite order. This is actually no surprise because the titel oft he book already tells that it is about the five orders. But the build up of this chapters is very interesting because they consist of three parts. The first part is always titeled by michel sanmichel and consists of text and also hand-drawn techical drawings of the columns with exact mesurements. The second part consists also of text but the drawings that are shown there are always from the italian renaissance architects and Vitruv. Its always two similar drawings right next to each other with one or two pages of text. In the third part there is always 7 different versions of a drawing of the architrav and each one of these drawings is signed by one oft he mentioned architects.
Its because of this structure that the concept i chose is comparison. Each one of the last five chapters is built up in a way that makes it possible for the reader to compare the different versions of the orders and to see the similarities and differences in those drawings, even though the reader can not understand the text.
Another interesting aspect of the book ist he way the pages look. Especially between the different chapter there are noticable differences such as the thickness of the paper or just the overall condition. With this aspect and the fact that this version oft he book is a treatise from the original «Li cinque ordini» made by Alessandro Pompei, who was also an architect but lived around 200 years later than the architects mentioned in the book. I came to the interpretation that this book was put together with chapters and parts the original book, from michel sanmichel, aswell as parts of different other books.