The book „la prospettiva pratica“ by Bernardino Contino is organized by chapters. In the beginning of the book, each chapter is only one page long. As the content gets more complicated, each chapter is placed on one double page. Every chapter includes one paragraph of text and one illustration belonging to the text. Whereas in the beginning, the text is placed in the upper part of the page and the corresponding illustration is placed below the text, later on the paragraph is placed on the left hand side and the sketch is placed on the right hand side. The respective chapters are based on the previous ones, so the book gets more and more complicated. This explains, why the texts become longer and the illustrations get bigger and more detailed.
The illustrations are mostly perspective views. In the beginning they only show simple geometric elements, that are drawn two-dimensional. In the middle of the book, the geometric elements are drawn three-dimensional. In the end, he shows different architectural elements. Almost every illustration is composed in the same way. He shows you the corresponding element in a front oder top view and generates the perspective view of it through some helping connecting line.
The images are labelled according to the chapters. If there is more than one illustration per chapter, it’s not labelled separately because its placed on the same page anyways. I think the illustrations are always placed beneath the corresponding text because it makes the reader automatically reviewing and understanding what he just read. The illustration have a big meaning in the book, as they are very detailed while the text is very monotonous and simple and sometimes a lot shorter that the space, that the illustrations need.
In terms of formal structure, every page contains only one column of text, which isn’t even parted in several paragraphs. One paragraph and its corresponding illustration form one chapter together, so one chapter extends over one page and later over one double page. There are three exceptions, where the text paragraph extends to the next page of the book.
The first line on every text page names the according chapter, the numbers of the chapters are written in Roman numerals. This is followed by the heading (title) of the chapter, which is written in a bigger font than the rest of the paragraph. Lastly there is one more noticeable detail: the first letter of every paragraph is calligraphic and framed with some kind of flourishes.