Le théâtre de l’art de charpentier
- Title oft the concept: illustration
- Paragraph : The book “Le théâtre de l’art de charpentier” written by Mathurin Jousse in 1659 already suggest in his title that it is about the work of a carpenter. He starts the book of with some sort of a preface. He talks about the role of architecture as an own science, his opinion and why it is beautiful and important. The book is cleary directed to (male) layman.
«il n’y en a point dont la connaissance foit plus belle, la practique si necessaire à tout le monde que l’architecture »
«car si nous mesurons l’excellence de chaque art à ses effets, nous trouverons qu’il n’y en a point qui en produisent de si beaux et deléctables à l’oeil, pour les belles symmetries et proportion qui s’y gardent. »
(« Denn wenn wir die Exzellenz jeder Kunst an ihren Wirkungen messen, werden wir feststellen, dass es keine gibt, die für das Auge so schöne und köstliche hervorbringen, für die schönen Symmetrien und Proportionen, die dort erhalten bleiben.“)
In this part oft he books he also introduces the reader to what the book includes and gives an idea of the 5 orders. Mathurin includes a simple sketch to each sort of column order. It is not only easier to explain for him but also a lot more readable for a layman.
The rest of the book is built similar: Mathurin Jousse wants to reach the reader visually: not only does he use a lot of sketches with legends to support his writing, he also uses majuscles to introduce new chapters of the book. I would estimate, that about 70 percent of the book is pure illustrations. Mostly he explains something in the first place and draws a technical sketch/ plans as a second step: so he uses one page for each. You have to have both of them : the drawings are unreadable without the writing. Some of the plans look similar: sometimes he compares similar parts of the architecture, sometimes he refers to something that appeared earlier, sometimes he zooms into the plans to give a more detailed look. He also splits parts of the architecture in his drawings, so the layman can see how it is built up or linked to another part. He works with ground plans, sections and dashed lines: so some sort of architectual understanding is presupposed. About the legends: He uses the legends on his sketchs to show how each parts oft he architecture is called. On Page 14 for example Mathurin Jousse splits a coulumn to its differents parts (squarred fillets, cime, echina etc.) sometimes he marks part oft he architecture with letters, so he can simply indicate a letter in his running texts and not hast o describe, which part he is talking about. Sometimes, there are small notes on the edges of the book, which also makes it easier to understand and supports the reading flow, because you don’t have to look it up on another page.
At the and oft he book you can find something called «table» which can be translated to a directory to guide you through the book. - Keywords: Illustration, explanation, visually
Romi Bassler 17-732-983