Composition of the book in terms of typography and illustrations
The relation between text and illustrations in the book Alcune opere d’architettura is a very unsymmetrical one, as the texts is in general very spare and minimalist, while the illustrations, made with a copper print technique, speak mostly for themselves. By these means the book puts the imagery as its centerpiece, making the illustrations of works by the Italian architect Lacomo Barotio from Vignola close to fully independent of any sort of text. Having said that, the importance of the illustrations is also apparent on the front page, which by all means contains the most amount of text – the title and short description of the books content – still is surrounded by a copper print illustration.
No text, as far as it is present on a page is left by itself, and is by these means always accompanied by an illustration — although it would be better fitting to say, that the illustration is accompanied by the text. There is one extraordinary page in the book, being bigger than the other illustrations and pages (it os folded in the book) and containing by far the most amount of text. This big illustration is accompanied by a paragraph which seems to be a commentary by the author Francesco Villamena, but also a descriptive, numerated text explaining the illustration to the reader. All other illustrations, are either by themselves, without any form of text, or seem to only have the name of the illustrated architectural work above or beneath the image, and only rarely any other text at all.
This kind of organization of the text, in such a subordinate position in relation to the apparently superior imagery, suggests the text having the role of titling, commentary and descriptions accompanying these illustrations.
The illustrations are neither numbered, nor listed in a list of contents, leaving the reader in an uncertain of what is going to come next, when turning the page. Additionally this leads to a slight lack in organization throughout the book, which in any longer edit would have been a problem, but thanks to the very minimal and shot character (28 pages, from which 12 are used) of this book this does not lead to any sort of confusion.