The book ‚de sculptura, seu, statuaria‘ wasn’t so easy to become friends with. Firstly it is written in latin and additionally it has not one picture or illustration. Luckily the librarian in Einsiedeln was kind enough to help and give me some informations about the book. In other words the book and I had a friendship mediator. Nonetheless I hardly know anything about the content in the book but rather about the structure of it.
What I really enjoyed was getting in physical contact with such an old book, considering that this is a pretty unique possibility.
Unfortunately I couldn’t take along content-related informations what I think would have been also very interesting.
I don’t know how the situation was with other books but in my case the tasks were sometimes a bit unnecessary and sometimes even difficult to solve because I was only able to write about the structure of the book. For example the paragraph for task 2 and the paragraph for task 4 I wrote were almost identical because I had to write two times about the structure and couldn’t add informations about pictures or illustrations. I think it would be good for a next time to take into consideration that not all books are as understandable as books written in English or German and therefore adjust the tasks.
Nonetheless I see the idea behind these tasks and I agree that we shouldn’t only refer to informative sources from the internet. And in general I like to have a good book in my hands. But most importantly this whole experience was especially good as an addition to the lectures from prof. Delbeke since we hear almost every week about one of these books (sometimes even more than one). It totally makes sense that we get in touch with these or other books about architecture of the periods we learn about.