Construction
Keywords: History, Engineering, Drawings
Della trasportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabbriche di Sisto V is a book written and published by Domenico Fontana in 1590. The book is covered in a green case with an undecorated brown lid. The cover doesn’t reveal anything about the book’s topic. “Della trasportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabbriche di Sisto V” is a book from Domenico Fontana and appeared in 1590. The first appearance of it is very noble.
If you skim through this antic book, the concept is clearly visible: The book is divided into pages that feature texts, which appear to be very dense and high in information. And some few pages that only contain technical drawings, but never both. When you open the book, the first few pages are just empty pages. They are followed by the title page, which fills the hole page with its very big letters. When you start going through the rest of the book, the regularity of the texts and the drawings are clearly visible. Each chapter normally start with four or five pages fully cowered in words and sentences without a single image or drawing. These pages didn’t even contain a single decoration. They just appear to be full of important information. After that there’s always another text with the title “Libro Promo” and the text under that is organized in a triangle shape and not like a normal paragraph. And after this text there’s always a page with captions which are used to understand the images and what they represent, or for which purpose a specific tool or thing was used. And at the end of each chapter there’s an image, drawing, sketches or plans which are extremely detailed and decorated. On this image some certain parts are marked with a letter, which are explained in the “Libro Primo”. They mainly seem to be a technical drawing which summarizes the hole written part of the chapter. These images are so detailed that you could use them to recreate the hole thing again which this sketches and paintings. And that the detailed drawings don’t get smudged the images are always followed by an empty page. And this scheme is repeated through the hole book.
To summarize, the hole book is like a construction diary which explains very detailed how this giant and heavy Obelisk was transported from Egypt and placed in Vatican. And the hole Construction and Transport of it is presented in the book through texts images sketches, drawings and paintings.