Giovan Battista Bertani: Gli oscuri e dificili passi dell’opera ionica di Vitruvio
Anatomy of the book:
What shocks the reader as most special about the book is, of course, the fact, that it is not really a physical book for itself, but rather a chapter in a collection of two books. Also the title page is missing. While the first two thirds of the book are reserved for texts and drawings from another architecture-philosopher, our book takes up but the last third of it. The whole book is quite large format, 300 mm to 380 mm, not really befitting any standard book size and features a variety of different sized drawings, some occupying whole pages, others but a small part of it. They are all about depicting all sorts of aspects of the Ionic Columns and the Ionic Order. Some are more technical, some rather artistic and others are just here to analyze ratio and coherence of the different elements the columns consist of. The book is organized by the sequence of the pictures and different paragraphs and not by chapters or anything of that sort. Altogether it contains 20 illustrations spread over the 27 pages i consists of.