Conventions
drawing, rules, possibilities
As the book is written in Latin, I did not understand a lot of the book. This is the reason why I mainly concentrate on the last few double pages of the book, which contain many smaller and bigger drawings. As far as I understood the book is kind of a guide to architects or others who are interested on how to draw a building. The title of book also points into the direction that it is some sort of drawing guide. On one side the book makes an introduction into the basic principles and also techniques of drawing. There is for example a chapter dealing about ink and colors and near the end of the book there are also some detailed illustrations of drawing tools like special rulers and so on. But on the other side it seems like the author did even want to go further and introduce the main conventions of building plans. This can be seen by looking at the last few pages where you can find different floor plans, elevations and sections. In the sections you can see for example many different ceiling types like different vaults but also flat ceilings and in the relating floor plan you see how to differently mark them with dashed lines. It is for example also shown how different types of heating ovens should be drawn in the floor plan. I guess it was important to the author that you not only learn the drawing techniques but also how architectural plans should be drawn according to the conventions in order make them easily readable to others. That is of course the main goal of such conventions and it makes sense that you should at least mention them in a drawing guide for buildings. In addition to the drawing conventions the book most probably also deals with conventions on construction, building decorations and so on. This can be seen for example when looking at the figures concerning roofs where different roof types are shown and you can see how they were constructed. There are also a lot of figures showing various possible window finishings. All the figures at the end of the book are labeled and sometimes the different elements within in a drawing are even marked with letters, so it seems to me as if those figures are references to the text, which is unfortunately in Latin. This would mean that not only the figures deal with the concept of conventions but the text most probably also mentions them and maybe even explains them.