Concept: Differentiation
In the book Architecturae Civilis, Dieussart clearly differentiated the two forms of telling us his information: text and pictures. Also, he differentiated the content he is telling us about by comparing different versions of certain architectonic structures.
On every page, which includes a drawing or any other illustration, is no text at all. The only written things on these pages are numbers and main key words here and there. He uses the numbers to help the reader understand the proportions and the scale of the Architecture which is illustrated in the book.
When reading the book, there is a clear structure recognizable. The chapters are always structured the same way. First, he explains his concept with the help of a text. He wrote a largely scaled title for every chapter, which is then followed by an explanatory text. The text is then then undermined with beautiful illustrations. This really helps, me or generally people who do not live in the 18th century, to understand the content, because the old German is written with an old font, which makes the text hard to understand in my opinion.
After every page which includes an illustration, an empty page follows. This is because the ink from the previous page is still visible and would destroy the illustration on the next page. It is like writing with Edding in a book.
The transition between the text and the illustrations is always the same. Dieussart uses a certain symbol to create a border between the two mediums he sues to explain his theories.
When focusing only on the illustrations, I realised Dieussart is also clearly differentiating between the drawings and therefore shows a comparison of the architectonic structures. This occurs mainly when he is explaining columns. He takes two different columns, splits them in half and places them next to each other. So, by combining these columns, they appear more “apart”, because it makes the differences of the columns much more obvious. I do not think I would recognize as many differences if he just showed the whole two columns next to each other, because the split columns are mostly of the same type (Corinthian and Corinthian for example).
So, he does not really compare types of columns. Instead, he is comparing the proportions and the scale of certain columns.
In conclusion, the differentiation in the book is used to have a clear structure in the book itself and to compare elements within the content of the book.
Key words: comparison, structure, explanation