Friends with and old book
« Les dix livres d’architecture de vitruve. Corrigez et traduits nouvellement en François, avec des Notes et des Figures ». That’s the title of the book. According to the title, the book is a translation of the latin original. Furthermore, it’s a correction and some notes are added to it. It’s also dedicated to the King (“au roy”).
The book doesn’t have a list of contents, but after a letter and a preface it’s ordered according to the book it’s relating to (Vitruvius 1 to 10 and the chapters of those books).
What’s special about the book, that it does have a lot of illustrations. Some of them are just some simple hand drawings in the middle of the text. They are mostly labeled in some kind of way. Other illustrations are beautifully drawn. They almost look like pictures, because of their accuracy. Those illustrations are often in the size of a whole page. On top of them is always a floorplan, to get a better understanding of the situation.
The book is really thick. It’s understandable, because it’s a “summary” of ten books. The pages are also rather large, probably because of the big illustrations, that had to fit.
Perrault (the author of the book) was a french story writer. He was mostly famous because of his fairy tale collection. He was also a senior official. That’s probably why he wrote this book “for the King”. I think the general intentions of the book were, to make the important informations of the Vitruvius book accessible to the french people and maybe correct them a bit.