The Bibliography of Perspective is the Perspective Research Centre’s specialist bibliography devoted to perspective and its many related fields.
Containing more than 15,000 titles, it brings together primary and secondary literature relating to perspective across art, optics, geometry, architecture, drawing, visual representation, imaging, science and technology.
The Bibliography forms Volumes 6, 7 and 8 of Veltman’s Encyclopedia of Perspective. The complete Encyclopedia of Perspective can also be browsed online in the Perspective Research Centre’s Digital Reader.
Browse the Encyclopedia of Perspective in the Digital Reader →
It is available in two complementary forms: the published Physical Bibliography of Perspective and the searchable Digital Bibliography of Perspective.
Physical Bibliography of Perspective
The Physical Bibliography of Perspective provides the published edition of this major research resource, designed both for scholarly reference and for exploring the historical development of the literature of perspective.
A separate page provides information about the published volumes, their organisation and the available editions.
The published edition, its three-volume structure, downloads and print access are described below on this page.
Digital Bibliography of Perspective
The Digital Bibliography of Perspective provides direct online access to the PRC’s searchable bibliography database.
Researchers can search and browse more than 15,000 perspective titles represented by over 26,000 bibliographic records, using fields including title, author, date, publication place, publisher, library or location, and notes.
Search the Digital Bibliography of Perspective →
Two Editions, One Research Resource
The physical and digital editions provide different ways of working with the same major body of bibliographical research.
- The Physical Bibliography of Perspective provides the published reference edition.
- The Digital Bibliography of Perspective provides a searchable online research database.
Together they form the Bibliography of Perspective: a major research resource for locating and exploring the literature of perspective across art, science and technology.
About the Digital Edition → · Open the Bibliography Database →
History and Methodology
The Bibliography of Perspective is the result of more than four decades of research by Professor Kim H. Veltman. What began in 1977 as a conventional bibliography developed into a much broader attempt to document, classify and understand the literature of perspective across different periods, countries and disciplines.
Its development raised fundamental questions about what belongs within the field of perspective, how changing terminology should be handled, how books and manuscripts should be classified, and how a bibliography can represent a subject whose boundaries themselves change through history.
Origins: the 1977 Perspective Conference
The Bibliography began in March 1977, in connection with the first world conference devoted to perspective. Marisa Dalai Emiliani, who was organising the conference at the behest of Eugenio Battisti, invited Veltman to prepare a bibliography following suggestions from B.A.R. Carter, Sir Ernst Gombrich and John White.
The project grew naturally out of Veltman’s earlier research into the history of optics, vision, representation, surveying and cartography. His doctoral research in London, including work in the North Library of the British Museum and contacts with specialists at the Warburg Institute, Institute for Ophthalmology, Slade School, Royal Academy and Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, had convinced him that perspective remained a remarkably open field.
A decisive turning point came with the publication in 1979 of Luigi Vagnetti’s bibliography of perspective, the product of decades of research. Rather than publish a work that was merely somewhat larger, Veltman asked Vagnetti for advice.
Vagnetti drew attention to major geographical gaps in existing scholarship, particularly with respect to China, Japan, India, South America, Africa and Australia, and encouraged a systematic international search.
An International Search
Veltman subsequently wrote 60 letters to major libraries in centres including Beijing, Calcutta, Canberra, Moscow and Rio de Janeiro.
Within six months, 55 libraries had replied, supplying lists containing anything from six to six hundred titles. Many records lacked normal bibliographical information such as publisher, place of publication or format, beginning a lengthy process of checking and verification.
By August 1986, the Bibliography was based on lists supplied by 125 libraries, while books and manuscripts had been consulted directly in 34 libraries. Important research centres included Göttingen, Leiden, London, Madrid, Paris and Wolfenbüttel, with Rome also identified in Veltman’s later account.
The international search continued to expand. Veltman later recorded that correspondence had grown to involve more than 180 libraries and had helped bring to light more than 8,000 titles of primary literature and approximately 7,000 titles of secondary literature.
From File Cards to a Computer Database
The early Bibliography was assembled on handwritten file cards.
In 1986, Richard Dolen began developing a computer system which allowed the accumulated records to be entered into an IBM PC AT. During Veltman’s year at the Getty Center in 1986–1987, approximately 15,000 titles were transferred into electronic form while the painstaking work of verifying titles and locations continued.
The electronic Bibliography subsequently evolved through several generations of software. A database allowed records to be searched by fields such as author, title and place of publication, and the system was eventually placed online in 1995.
From 2000, a more comprehensive database was developed using web technologies. The long history of the project also revealed one of the difficulties of digital scholarship: software, database systems and transmission protocols can become obsolete even when the underlying research remains valid.
Three Fundamental Problems of Method
By 1981, Veltman had identified three fundamental methodological problems which transformed the Bibliography from a conventional list of titles into a much more ambitious research system.
1. How much of a work must concern perspective?
A book devoted entirely to perspective is straightforward to classify. The problem becomes more difficult when perspective forms only one volume of a multi-volume work, a chapter, a section or even a few pages.
Veltman therefore proposed a system capable of distinguishing books, articles, volumes, sections and chapters while retaining the relationships between them. A chapter could be treated as an individual bibliographical unit while remaining connected to the larger work which contained it.
This introduced explicit part–whole relationships into the Bibliography rather than treating every record as an isolated title.
2. What happens when meanings change through time?
The word perspective has not always meant the same thing. Its relationship with terms such as optics, projection, geometry, drawing, scenography and representation has changed significantly over the centuries.
Related categories such as axonometric, cylindrical, isometric, parallel and spherical perspective also have their own histories.
Instead of hiding these changes, Veltman proposed recording them. The system could distinguish between:
- works belonging to recognised categories of perspective;
- works included by earlier bibliographers but regarded as borderline;
- works omitted by earlier bibliographers but judged relevant;
- and the particular earlier bibliographies in which a title had appeared.
A bibliography could therefore do more than enumerate books. It could reveal how the perceived boundaries of perspective changed through time.
3. What happens when classifications change from place to place?
The classification of perspective also varies geographically and institutionally.
National catalogues and major classification systems have placed perspective under different headings. Individual libraries have likewise classified the subject under different combinations of optics, mathematics, architectural drawing, descriptive geometry, drawing technique, projection and related subjects.
Veltman concluded that creating yet another single classification system would not solve the problem.
The Multivalent Bibliography
Instead of beginning with one classification system and forcing each book into it, Veltman reversed the process.
The starting point would be the book or document itself. The Bibliography could then record the different ways in which that work had been classified by international systems, national catalogues, specialist bibliographies and individual libraries.
Differences between classifications thus became evidence rather than errors.
They could reveal how different cultures, periods and disciplines understood perspective: sometimes primarily as mathematics, sometimes as an artistic method, sometimes as optics, drawing, architecture or technology.
A highly specialised publication might connect with only a few fields. An interdisciplinary work such as Alberti’s On Painting could connect simultaneously with painting, painting technique, perspective, optics, aesthetics and other subjects.
By 1983, a project originally intended simply to produce an official bibliography of perspective had therefore evolved into what Veltman called a multivalent bibliography: a means of exploring relationships within knowledge itself.
This thinking later developed into the still broader idea of a knowledge package, in which the literature, classifications, definitions and ultimately the contents of a field could be studied together.
Perspective as a Changing Field
One consequence of this approach was the recognition that there can be no permanently definitive closed list of books on perspective.
Perspective is connected with numerous neighbouring subjects — including optics, geometry, projection, proportion, drawing, architecture, scenography, shades and shadows, instruments, space and representation — and each of those subjects has its own changing history.
An exhaustive bibliography of perspective therefore inevitably becomes a partial bibliography of its surrounding fields.
Rather than conceal this difficulty, the Bibliography was designed to include and identify borderline material. This makes it possible to see not only what perspective is considered to mean today, but how scholars and institutions have defined its boundaries at different moments in history.
Primary and Secondary Literature
The Bibliography distinguishes broadly between primary and secondary literature.
- Primary literature includes treatises and textbooks giving theoretical or practical instruction in perspective.
- Secondary literature includes works concerned with its history and with its philosophical, metaphorical, cultural and other interpretations.
The distinction is deliberately not absolute. A technical treatise may also contain important historical material, while works apparently belonging to neighbouring subjects can provide essential evidence for the history of perspective.
Beyond Printed Books
The research was never restricted to conventional printed books.
The Bibliography and its supporting research record manuscripts, treatises, books, articles, different editions, variant names, unpublished works, lost works, disputed attributions and surviving repository locations.
Manuscript evidence is particularly important because many significant texts on perspective either circulated in manuscript before publication or were never printed at all.
The method therefore incorporates questions of provenance, survival, attribution, edition history and location as part of the bibliographical record.
A Chronological Research Tool
Chronology became one of the central organising principles of the Bibliography.
By arranging manuscripts, treatises, books and articles through time, the Bibliography can be used not merely to locate individual publications but to observe the emergence and development of themes, methods and terminology.
Where possible, records were also connected with information about surviving copies and locations. Lost or spurious works could be represented through reliable bibliographical references rather than silently excluded.
The result is both a reference resource and a means of studying the historical development of the literature itself.
Not Simply an Annotated Bibliography
Veltman did not intend the project simply to reproduce a short descriptive annotation beside every title.
Earlier bibliographers, particularly Vagnetti, had already provided extensive annotations, while resources such as RILA, RAA and BHA supplied descriptions of large parts of the art-historical literature.
Instead, the wider Encyclopedia of Perspective was designed to explore the principal theories, arguments and historical patterns surrounding the material recorded in the Bibliography.
Veltman described the aim as creating a “map of the field”: a framework within which individual contributions could be placed and understood as part of a much larger intellectual landscape.
A Long Tradition of Perspective Bibliography
The Bibliography also emerged from a much older bibliographical tradition.
Veltman identified dozens of earlier bibliographies containing sections devoted specifically to perspective and traced a gradual improvement in bibliographical practice over several centuries.
Early bibliographies often mentioned only a single work by an author and paid little attention to different editions. Later scholars increasingly distinguished editions, recorded their sources, identified surviving copies and treated conflicting evidence more critically.
Important stages included the work of Lipenius, Doppelmayr, Murr, Scheibel, Comolli, Murhard, Soden Smith, Schüling and, above all, Luigi Vagnetti, whose 1979 bibliography brought together literature from optics, art, architecture and mathematics on a previously unprecedented scale.
The PRC Bibliography can therefore be understood as part of a centuries-long development in the methods used to identify, verify and organise the literature of perspective.
Attempts at Automatic Updating
The development of electronic library catalogues initially appeared to offer a solution to the enormous task of keeping the Bibliography current.
During the early years of networked catalogues, three projects attempted to create automatic links between library databases and the Bibliography using Z39.50 protocols.
In practice, all three attempts failed.
The experience demonstrated an important principle which remains relevant today: large-scale electronic searching can greatly assist bibliographical research, but it cannot replace human checking, interpretation and verification.
A Twenty-Five-Year Hiatus
By the summer of 1987 the basic Bibliography existed in electronic form, although the accompanying historical and analytical studies remained unfinished.
Changes in Veltman’s academic and institutional circumstances eventually made continued work increasingly difficult. By the mid-1990s, the framework supporting the project had disappeared and the Bibliography entered a hiatus of approximately twenty-five years, during which only occasional titles were added.
The project was eventually revived. Alan Radley offered to publish Veltman’s work, while Bernd Alexander Kapeller assisted with the scanning of images. Veltman subsequently returned to the Bibliography and the wider Encyclopedia of Perspective.
The Challenge of the Digital Era
When systematic collecting resumed in 2017, the bibliographical environment had changed dramatically.
National library catalogues, union catalogues and other databases now contained millions of searchable records. Resources such as the British Library, National Library of China, Technische Informations Bibliothek, The European Library and WorldCat made quantities of data available that would have been unimaginable when the project began.
This created new opportunities — but also new methodological problems.
Modern catalogue searches may include books, journal articles, archival records and other media. Boolean searches can produce false positives. The word perspective is now used metaphorically across thousands of subjects unrelated to visual or geometrical perspective. Modern reprint programmes can also generate numerous manifestations of the same historical work.
Even the largest international catalogues do not always identify every edition of a heavily reprinted publication reliably.
From Complete Coverage to Explicit Selection
The scale of modern electronic information eventually made the original goal of a completely exhaustive bibliography impractical.
The response was not to abandon systematic research, but to adopt more explicit selection criteria.
These included:
- consulting national-library records specifically for linear perspective;
- excluding clearly metaphorical uses such as “a social perspective” or “a perspective on…”;
- excluding general drawing publications where perspective was not a significant subject;
- using WorldCat selectively to investigate editions;
- including relevant secondary literature recorded in major national catalogues;
- using specialist bibliographical resources such as BHA and RILA where appropriate;
- and avoiding indiscriminate duplication of enormous bodies of material already readily searchable elsewhere.
The methodological shift was therefore from an unattainable ideal of including everything to a system of documented and defensible selection.
Printed Bibliography and Digital Database
The published Bibliography and the computer database were conceived as related but distinct research tools.
The printed Bibliography provides a stable chronological reference resource in short-title catalogue form.
The electronic system permits a much richer structure: searching by fields, linking related records, preserving multiple classifications and representing relationships between books, chapters, editions, categories and other bibliographical entities.
The digital environment therefore extends rather than simply reproduces the printed Bibliography.
A Bibliography Designed to Reveal a Field
The methodology of the Bibliography of Perspective ultimately combines several forms of research:
- international library searching;
- direct examination of books and manuscripts;
- verification of titles, editions and locations;
- chronological organisation;
- recording relationships between books, volumes, sections and chapters;
- identification of borderline and related material;
- comparison with earlier bibliographies;
- multiple simultaneous classifications;
- documentation of changes in terminology through time and place;
- manuscript, attribution and provenance research;
- and the use of electronic databases alongside traditional bibliographical scholarship.
The result is therefore much more than a list of titles.
The Bibliography of Perspective was designed both to locate the literature of perspective and to reveal how the field itself has been defined, classified, expanded and reinterpreted across centuries, countries and disciplines.
Consulted Institutions and Research Network
The Bibliography of Perspective was assembled through an extensive international programme of library research, correspondence, catalogue searching, manuscript investigation and institutional collaboration extending over several decades.
By August 1986, the Bibliography was already based on lists supplied by 125 libraries, while books and manuscripts had been consulted directly in 34 libraries. Veltman later recorded that the wider international correspondence and research network had expanded to involve more than 180 libraries.
This international search helped to bring to light more than 8,000 titles of primary literature and approximately 7,000 titles of secondary literature, forming the foundation of what ultimately became a bibliography of approximately 15,000 perspective titles.
The institutions associated with the project did not all play the same role. Some were libraries in which books and manuscripts were examined directly; some supplied bibliographical lists or answered queries; some were searched through catalogues and databases; others preserved manuscripts and rare source material; and a number of universities, institutes and foundations supported the development of the project.
Understanding the Library Counts
Several different figures occur in Veltman’s account and refer to different stages or forms of involvement:
- 125 libraries — by August 1986 the Bibliography was based on lists obtained from this number of libraries.
- 34 libraries — books and manuscripts had been directly consulted in this number of libraries by August 1986.
- More than 180 libraries — Veltman’s later account describes the international correspondence and research network as eventually expanding beyond this number.
The surviving published volumes do not provide a complete recoverable list of all 125 or more than 180 libraries in one place. Veltman states that an earlier Index I.C. listed cooperating libraries and many of the librarians who assisted with texts and queries concerning rare and spurious editions.
The alphabetical appendix at the end of this page therefore lists only those libraries and repositories that can presently be individually identified by name in the surviving published material examined by the Perspective Research Centre.
Principal Libraries and Research Centres
Among the most important centres of direct research were Göttingen, Leiden, London, Madrid, Paris and Wolfenbüttel. Veltman’s later account also identifies Rome among the important centres of research.
Herzog August Bibliothek — Wolfenbüttel, Germany
The Herzog August Bibliothek was one of the principal working bases for the Bibliography. From 1977 to 1984 Veltman worked there on the project with the support of a series of research fellowships.
The library provided access to major collections, specialist literature and interlibrary-loan material and became an important setting for the development of the wider bibliographical methodology.
The scale of this work is indicated by Veltman’s acknowledgement that approximately seven metres of photocopies were ordered through interlibrary loan at Wolfenbüttel.
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek — Göttingen, Germany
The Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek at Göttingen was another major research centre.
Its staff introduced Veltman to standard reference works, national book catalogues, specialist bibliographies and the approximately 800-volume Real-Katalog, providing routes into literature that was often difficult to discover through conventional subject searching.
Leiden — Netherlands
Leiden is identified by Veltman as one of the particularly important centres in which books and manuscripts were directly consulted during the preparation of the Bibliography. The particular library is not identified in the relevant surviving passage.
London — United Kingdom
London was one of the principal centres of research and played an especially important role in the intellectual development of the project.
Institutions associated with Veltman’s research there included:
- British Museum — North Library
- Warburg Institute
- Institute for Ophthalmology
- Slade School
- Royal Academy
- Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
Research in the North Library of the British Museum included material on optics, perspective, surveying and cartography and contributed to Veltman’s recognition that perspective remained an open and insufficiently catalogued field.
Madrid — Spain
Madrid is identified as another of the major centres in which books and manuscripts were directly consulted. The specific library is not identified in the relevant passage.
Paris — France
Paris was likewise one of the principal centres for consulting books, manuscripts and related research material. The particular library referred to in the general consultation statement is not specified there, although numerous Parisian repositories appear elsewhere in the research.
Rome — Italy
Veltman’s later account also identifies Rome as an important centre in which relevant books and journals were consulted.
International Library Correspondence
The international scope of the Bibliography expanded dramatically following discussions with the Italian historian of perspective Luigi Vagnetti.
Vagnetti pointed to major geographical gaps in existing perspective bibliography and encouraged Veltman to contact libraries beyond the areas traditionally represented in European scholarship.
Veltman subsequently sent 60 letters to major libraries. Among the places specifically identified were:
- Beijing
- Calcutta
- Canberra
- Moscow
- Rio de Janeiro
Fifty-five replies were received within six months. The lists supplied contained between six and six hundred titles and became the basis for a prolonged process of checking, identification and bibliographical verification.
The international network subsequently grew far beyond this initial correspondence, eventually involving more than 180 libraries.
Libraries and Catalogues Used to Study Classification
The project did not merely search catalogues for titles. Library catalogues themselves became evidence for understanding how the meaning and classification of perspective changed between institutions, countries and periods.
Library of Congress — United States
The Library of Congress was used both as a bibliographical resource and as an example of the multiple ways in which perspective could be classified.
Relevant material could appear under such headings as architectural drawing, drawing technique, descriptive geometry and projection rather than under a single heading of “perspective”.
Stanford — United States
The Stanford catalogue was used to demonstrate how “see also” relationships could connect perspective with drawing and numerous neighbouring fields.
Seattle — United States
The Seattle catalogue provided another example of how apparently simple subject headings could lead to very different networks of associated categories.
Canberra — Australia
Canberra was important both in the international library correspondence and as an example of the limitations of catalogue terminology: a search for “linear perspective” did not necessarily retrieve works concerned with perspective in its artistic or mathematical senses.
Major Modern Library and Union-Catalogue Resources
As large library catalogues became available electronically, the Bibliography increasingly made use of national and international bibliographical resources.
Technische Informations Bibliothek (TIB) — Hanover, Germany
The Technische Informations Bibliothek was used for comparative searches involving “linear perspective” and “perspective” and for examining patterns of publication and modern reprinting.
British Library — United Kingdom
The British Library became an important source for later bibliographical checking. Secondary literature on linear perspective recorded in its catalogue was incorporated into the later Bibliography.
National Library of China — China
Secondary literature on linear perspective recorded by the National Library of China was likewise incorporated into the later research.
Danish National Library — Denmark
The Danish National Library was examined as an example of the changing nature of modern national catalogues, particularly their expansion beyond books to include periodical literature.
The European Library
The European Library (TEL) provided a means of cross-searching the holdings of national libraries and comparing records for terms such as “linear perspective”, “perspective” and “perspectives”.
WorldCat
WorldCat was used as a major international union catalogue for searches by subject, date, medium and edition.
It was also used selectively to investigate different editions of works. Veltman noted, however, that even a resource on this scale did not always provide a complete edition-by-edition record of extensively reprinted publications.
European National Libraries
Records from a number of European national libraries were consulted specifically in connection with linear perspective.
The research compared material from national collections including those of Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Comparable material from China, Japan, Russia and the United States was also examined.
National and Union Catalogues
National Union Catalogue (NUC)
The National Union Catalogue was used to provide holdings information for material published before 1956.
Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN)
The Research Libraries Information Network was used for later publication and holdings information.
Research Libraries Group
The developing bibliographical concept was discussed with representatives of the Research Libraries Group at Wolfenbüttel in 1983. This discussion helped bring the project to the attention of the Getty Trust.
Reference and Indexing Resources
The research also drew on a wide range of specialist reference and indexing tools.
At Göttingen, Veltman was introduced to resources including:
- Art Index
- Répertoire d’Art
- RILA — Répertoire International de la Littérature de l’Art
National book catalogues specifically mentioned in the research include:
- Brinkmans
- Estreicher
- Lorenz
- Pagliaini
The Göttingen Real-Katalog, extending to approximately 800 volumes, provided access to further specialist literature.
Specialist bibliographies explicitly named include:
- Draud
- Lipenius
- Murr
- Murhard
- Riccardi
Veltman also refers to approximately thirty additional specialist bibliographies.
Getty Bibliographical Resources
The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica was a major institutional centre for the Bibliography.
During Veltman’s Getty year in 1986–1987, approximately 15,000 titles were transferred into electronic form while titles and locations continued to be verified.
The Getty Trust provided the support which made this period of full-time research possible.
The Getty Art History Information Program also provided important institutional and staff assistance.
Later bibliographical research made selective use of:
- BHA — Bibliography of the History of Art
- RILA
- RAA — Répertoire d’art et d’archéologie
Research and Supporting Institutions
A number of other institutions contributed to the intellectual, institutional or financial environment in which the Bibliography developed.
Warburg Institute — London
The Warburg Institute formed a central part of Veltman’s doctoral research environment and the early development of his approach to the history of perspective.
Institute for Ophthalmology — London
Research connections with the Institute for Ophthalmology, particularly through Robert A. Weale, contributed to the investigation of vision and visual science.
Slade School and Royal Academy — London
B.A.R. Carter, Professor of Perspective at both institutions, was one of the important advisers to the project.
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine — London
Work with Kenneth D. Keele contributed to Veltman’s investigations and reconstructions of Leonardo da Vinci’s perspectival experiments.
University of Toronto — Canada
The University of Toronto became an important institutional base for the continuing development of the Bibliography and its computer database.
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology — Toronto
The Institute provided an important academic environment during the later development of the research.
Maastricht McLuhan Institute — Netherlands
Veltman’s later institutional work at the Maastricht McLuhan Institute formed part of the history of the project during the period before the Bibliography entered its long hiatus.
Gesellschaft für Klassifikation — Germany
Veltman joined the Gesellschaft für Klassifikation while seeking solutions to the problems posed by changing terminology and competing classification systems.
His developing approach to the Bibliography was presented to the society in 1984.
Brigham Young University — United States
A series of lectures at Brigham Young University in 1986 helped Veltman clarify the ideas behind what became the multivalent bibliography.
Funding and Institutional Support
The long development of the Bibliography was supported at different stages by organisations including:
- Volkswagen Foundation
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Thyssen Foundation
- Gerda Henkel Foundation
- Getty Trust
- Canada Council
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
- BSO/Origin
Repositories Represented in the Source Research
The Bibliography and the accompanying Encyclopedia of Perspective identify numerous libraries and collections in which important manuscripts, drawings and rare primary sources survive.
These repositories form part of the project’s source apparatus. Their appearance in the research does not necessarily establish that each institution was physically visited by Veltman.
This distinction is important because manuscript location, catalogue consultation, correspondence and direct physical consultation represent different kinds of bibliographical evidence.
Appendix: Alphabetical List of Identified Libraries and Repositories
The surviving published material examined by the Perspective Research Centre presently allows 25 individual libraries and repositories to be identified explicitly by institutional name.
This is not the complete historical list of the 125 libraries supplying lists, the 34 libraries directly consulted by August 1986, or the later network of more than 180 libraries. It is the portion of that much larger network whose institutional names can presently be recovered explicitly from the published material examined so far.
- Bayerische Staatsbibliothek — Munich, Germany
- Biblioteca Ambrosiana — Milan, Italy
- Biblioteca dei Concordi — Rovigo, Italy
- Biblioteca Laurenziana — Florence, Italy
- Biblioteca Nazionale — Naples, Italy
- Biblioteca Riccardiana — Florence, Italy
- Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal — Paris, France
- Bibliothèque Nationale — Paris, France
- Bibliothèque publique et universitaire — Geneva, Switzerland
- Bibliothèque universitaire — Geneva, Switzerland
- Bodleian Library — Oxford, United Kingdom
- British Library — London, United Kingdom
- British Museum, North Library — London, United Kingdom
- Danish National Library — Denmark
- Herzog August Bibliothek — Wolfenbüttel, Germany
- Library of Congress — Washington, D.C., United States
- National Art Library — South Kensington, London, United Kingdom
- National Library of China — China
- Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek — Göttingen, Germany
- Österreichische Nationalbibliothek — Vienna, Austria
- Pierpont Morgan Library — New York, United States
- Sächsische Landesbibliothek — Dresden, Germany
- Technische Informations Bibliothek (TIB) — Hanover, Germany
- Universitätsbibliothek — Munich, Germany
- Vatican Library — Vatican City / Rome
Additional Named Consultation and Correspondence Centres
A further nine geographical centres are explicitly associated with consultation or international library correspondence, although the particular institution is not identified in the relevant surviving passage:
- Beijing — China
- Calcutta — India
- Canberra — Australia
- Leiden — Netherlands
- Madrid — Spain
- Moscow — Russia
- Paris — France
- Rio de Janeiro — Brazil
- Rome — Italy
Important: these nine centres should not simply be added to the 25 named institutions and described as “34 consulted libraries”. Some concern correspondence rather than direct consultation, some overlap geographically with named repositories, and the surviving evidence does not identify them as the missing names from Veltman’s historical figure of 34 directly consulted libraries.
An International Research Network
The Bibliography of Perspective was therefore never the product of a single library or a single catalogue.
It developed through a combination of:
- direct examination of books and manuscripts;
- international correspondence with libraries;
- interlibrary loan;
- national and international catalogue searching;
- specialist bibliographies and indexes;
- manuscript and repository research;
- electronic bibliographical databases;
- and collaboration with scholars, librarians, universities and research institutions.
The resulting Bibliography reflects an international research network extending across more than 180 libraries over the history of the project, even though the complete historical list of those institutions has not yet been recovered from the surviving published material.
Published / Physical Edition
The Physical Edition of the Bibliography of Perspective is the published three-volume edition of Professor Kim H. Veltman’s international bibliography of perspective.
Together, the three volumes contain approximately 15,000 titles extending from antiquity to 2020 and bring together manuscripts, treatises, books, articles and other literature relating to perspective and its associated fields.
The Bibliography forms Volumes 6, 7 and 8 of Veltman’s Encyclopedia of Perspective. The three volumes are available as printed books through Amazon and can also be downloaded from the Perspective Research Centre as free PDF editions.
The Three-Volume Bibliography
The published Bibliography is organised in two complementary ways.
- Volumes 6 and 7 arrange the literature chronologically, allowing the historical development of perspective literature to be followed through time.
- Volume 8 reorganises the corpus alphabetically, providing a practical reference tool for locating authors and titles.
The chronological and alphabetical volumes therefore provide different routes into the same major body of bibliographical research.
Download the Three Volumes
All three volumes can be downloaded from the Perspective Research Centre free of charge. Printed editions are also available through Amazon.
Volume 6 — Chronological List: Antiquity–1899
Download Volume 6 — Free PDF →
Find the Printed Edition on Amazon →
