Kim Williams – författare

This is the first-ever English translation of Daniele Barbaro’s 1567 Italian translation of and commentary on Vitruvius’s Ten Books of Architecture, an encyclopaedic treatment of science and technology whose influence extended far beyond its day. Intended to both interpret and expand upon the Vitruvian text, Barbaro’s erudite commentary reflects his Aristotelian approach, particularly his fascination with the relationship between science and the arts. This treatise offers a window onto the architectural ideals of the 1500s, as well as then-current notions of philosophy, mathematics, music, astronomy, mechanics, and more. The text is accompanied by illustrations by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio and his contemporaries. Palladio’s own Four Books on Architecture, published in 1570, was just one of many treatises on architecture that was inspired by the ideas contained here.

An overview of Daniele Barbaro’s thinking is presented in a foreword by Branko Mitrovic´. The collocation of Barbaro’s treatise between those of Alberti and Palladio is addressed in a foreword by Robert Tavernor. Kim Williams provides a translator’s note to orient the reader. The text of the translation is cross-referenced to both Barbaro''s 1567 publication and standard divisions of Vitruvius. The volume includes a detailed index of subjects and an index of proper names.

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to contemporary scholars in an English translation, augmented by annotations relating the printed treatise to the three unpublished manuscripts in Italian and Latin of the work now conserved in Venice’s Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.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.

This book, edited by Kim Williams and Cosimo Monteleone, follows the publication of two other books dedicated to Daniele Barbaro and published by Springer: Daniele Barbaro''s Vitruvius of 1567 (Kim Williams, 2019) and Daniele Barbaro''s Perspective of 1568 (Kim Williams and Cosimo Monteleone, 2021). Therefore, it can be considered another installment in a series that has deepened the scientific treatises published by Daniele Barbaro.

Due to the numerous scientific interests that Barbaro matured in the years he spent at the University of Padua, we have invited experts in these topics to discuss Barbaro in relation to his training. In particular, the book opens with the essays of the two editors to frame its general theme in relation to mathematics. Cosimo Monteleone addressed the relationship between Barbaro''s perspective theory with Euclid''s optics, the Aristotelian process of knowledge and the ophthalmological discoveries of the University of Padova in the Renaissance. Kim Williams underlines how Barbaro''s arithmetic and geometry established `the most certain sciences'' and set the base of the `primary sciences''. A series of essays concerning Barbaro''s training at the University of Padua complete the theoretical framework analyzed by the two editors. These studies embrace the following subjects: mathematical instruments (Filippo Camerota), astronomy and sundials (Cristiano Guarneri), mathematics, geometry and polyhedral (Vera Viana), perspective and anamorphosis (Agostino De Rosa), botany and the foundation of the botanical garden (Stefano Zaggia), Vitruvius'' architecture (Ekaterina Igoshina, Ilya Anikyev, Anna Markova) and Aristotelianism (Branko Mitrović). A foreword by Xavier Salomon sets the stage for this book, outlining the innovations that Barbaro brought to scientific knowledge.

Barbaro''s scientific efforts are 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.

Leon Battista Alberti was an outstanding polymath of the fifteenth century, alongside Piero della Francesca and before Leonardo da Vinci. While his contributions to architecture and the visual arts are well known and available in good English editions, and much of his literary and social writings are also available in English, his mathematical works are not well represented in readily available, accessible English editions have remained accessible only to specialists. The four treatises included here – Ludi matematici, De Componendis Cifris, Elementi di pittura and De lunularum quadratura – are extremely valuable in rounding out the portrait of this multitalented thinker. The treatises are presented in modern English translations, with commentary that is intended to make evident the depths of Alberti’s knowledge as well as address the treatises’ mathematical, historical and cultural context, their classical Greek roots, and their relationship to later works by Renaissance thinkers.