Since last september i got to know the book „la prospettiva pratica“ by Bernardina Contino. After the first task, i honestly didn’t really expect to build a deep friendship with my book, but rather a superficial one, because we only had to collect the key information about the book. All of the information we needed could be found on the internet, so we didn’t even had to look at the book as an object but more as a topic we look up. So i expected the other tasks to be similar to the first one and that in the end of the year I would know some things about the book but not really understand what the message is and what meaning it had for the time when it was written.
But this changed really fast as we had to physically get in touch with the book. For the first time in my life I held such an old book in my own hands. Thinking about how many other people already read that book and learned something from that book is crazy. I also did not expect it to be in such a good condition, especially because the cover looked really used und not too pretty. But the text as well as the images inside were in a really good condition. This made it a lot easier to get to know the book and understand it. As it is written in Italian, i could not understand the text, but the beautiful, very detailed images helped me a lot to understand the content and gave me accessibility to the message of the book.
I must say that the time that was calculated in Einsiedeln was not enough. Learning something about the library, visiting the monastery and filming the video for task 2 was just too much for only one afternoon. I think it was very unfortunate that I could only look at the book for like 10 minutes in person because it was the most interesting and most important task for the friendship.
Nevertheless it helped me a lot to become „friends“ with the book. Seeing how the book is carefully kept in the library made me realize the worth of such an old book. Also having a feeling for the texture, the color and the size helped me a lot in the further tasks. I made the book a real thing and not only a document on the internet.
In combination with the lectures it was a very useful to have a friendship with your very own book. Knowing the meaning of books for architecture but also for the people made me automatically question the meaning of my book for the people and for history. I think my book is very important for the evolution of learning to draw in perspective and is still very helpful today, as it isn’t bound to a certain time. I think that in the future i will refer to this book a lot, a it is the only old book that i know that well, what makes it a lot easier to talk about it. So I guess this friend will accompany me for a very long time.