Concept: Repetition
The feature which impressed me the most about the book “Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura”, written by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, is the aspect of repetition. This rule book contains a lot of repetitions in structural form and in content form. First I talk about the structural form of the book. The book includes very beautiful and detailed copper engravings. Page after page – the structural form of drawings is repeated. The texts and paragraphs are never the main focus, they are always secondary. This concept is very different to all of his predecessors, as Vignola was one of the first who decided to not explain the illustrations with long, never ending paragraphs, to let the illustrations speak for themselves. With this concept of repetitions of drawings, Vignola chose to eliminate all other information and different ways to illustrate or provide information, so the reader has to and will concentrate on the main important content – the five orders. The next point I want to talk about is the repetition of the content. Because Vignola explains the five orders with those illustrations, the illustrations show columns. Vignola has a systematic way with how he wants to explain the individual five orders. First toscan thendoric, ionic, korinthian and last composit . He introduced every order individually with their elements, structured into colonnade, arcade, arcade with pedestal, single forms of pedestals and base, single forms of capital and entablature. He repeats this systematic form with every single order. After that, special cases of the doric and composite order, construction instructions are following. First the 32. copper engraving was planned to be the end of the book. “Il resto si vede” (the rest shows) is written on that page, which shows again that Vignola actually wanted to focus on the main things. After that about four or five non numbered illustrations, his own designs of caprarola and cancellaria as well as a fireplace are following. This part of his book doesn’t really follow the structure before which could be explained by Vignola originally planning to release this part in a second book. A function of repetition gives the reader a better overview and understanding of the information shown. The repetition gives the reader an expectancy, a patterning. It also helps to draw the reader’s attention to an idea or make the main idea more memorable. So for Vignola it was quite clear that those orders are very important for architecture. His own designs at the end were not fundamental yet, that’s why those don’t follow the structure ruling the main part of the book.
Keywords: Structure, Focus (on the important), Illustrations