Daniele Barbaro’s Perspective of 1568

A year after the second edition of his famous translation and commentary on Vitruvius, Daniele Barbaro published The Practice of Perspective, a text he had begun working on many years before. Barbaro was the first to publish a formal treatise entirely dedicated to the science of geometric perspective. In an informal style especially addressed to practicing artists and architects, Barbaro begins by drawing on and expanding the manuscript treatise of Piero della Francesca with regards to basics of perspective constructions for representing three-dimensional solids on two-dimensional media, and then goes on to show that perspective is a particularly suitable instrument for other scientific and artistic applications as well, including cartography, cosmology, stage set design, and anamorphosis.

Here for the first time Barbaro’s The Practice of Perspective is made available to contemporary scholars in an English translation, augmented by annotations relating the printed treatise to the three unpublished manuscripts in Italian and Latin of the work now conserved in Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.

A foreword by Philip Steadman sets the stage for this book. In-depth essays by authors Kim Williams and Cosimo Monteleone situate the treatise within the editorial panorama of the Cinquecento, outline the innovations that Barbaro brought to the study of perspective, and focus particularly on his creative explorations of geometric solids and the construction of clocks.

Sometimes dismissed in recent studies as a compilation of known principles, the aim of this present book is to reveal the truly innovative nature of Barbaro’s experiments and results and restore him to his rightful place as an original scholar of Renaissance perspective theory.

​Kim Williams is a writer and editor living and working in Italy. She received her degree in Architectural Studies from the University of Texas in Austin, and is licensed as an architect in New York State. Her apprenticeship was done in the offices of Philip Johnson in New York. She became interested in mathematics and architecture while writing Italian Pavements: Patterns in Space (Houston: Anchorage Press, 1997) about the role of decorated pavements in the history of Italian architecture. In 1996 she began the international conference series “Nexus: Architecture and Mathematics”, the thirteenth edition of which, Nexus 2020/21, will take place in Kaiserlautern, Germany, in July 2021. In 1999 she founded the Nexus Network Journal to provide a dedicated venue for scholarly research in architecture and mathematics.In 2000 she founded Kim Williams Books, an independent press for books about architecture and mathematics. Kim has published many articles in scholarly journals on the use of mathematical principles in architecture, including Mathematical Intelligencer and Leonardo. Her drawings have been displayed in both group and solo exhibits. She has participated in numerous international conferences. She co-edited, with Michael Ostwald, the 2-volume Architecture and Mathematics from Antiquity to the Future (Birkhäuser, 2015). She is editor for Springer of the book series "Mathematics and the Built Environment". Her latest book is Daniele Barbaro’s Vitruvius of 1567.


Cosimo Monteleone is Associate Professor of Descriptive Geometry and Architectural Representation at the Università degli Studi di Padova. In 2003 he obtained his degree in Architecture at the University IUAV of Venice, where he also earned his Ph.D. in 2010 in “Architectural Composition curriculum in Survey and Representation of Architecture and Landscape” with a study on the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright. His research focuses on architectural, urban and landscape survey; 3D modelling of architecture and city; augmented and virtual reality; gnomonic; science and technique applied to art and architecture; history of representation with particular skills related to Renaissance perspective. He is member of “Visualizing Cities”, an international research devoted to the analysis and the representation of the historical, urban and architectural transformations. He is member of the National Technical UNI - UNI / CT 047 / GL 03 (Technical drawing for building and installations). On the topics of his research he has published several essays, presented conferences, lectures, directed digital installations for national and international exhibitions. Among his publications is Frank Lloyd Wright. Geometria e Astrazione nel Guggenheim Museum (Rome: Aracne 2013). He has published two papers in the Nexus Network Journal: “Perspective at Palladio’s Time and Its Scientific Heritage” (with Andrea Giordano) and “The Perspective of Daniele Barbaro” (2019). His latest book is La prospettiva di Daniele Barbaro. Note critiche e trascrizione del manoscritto It. IV, 39=5446 (Aracne, 2020).