The PRC maintains the Bibliography of Perspective, initially developed by Professor Luigi Vagnetti and later extended by Professor Kim H. Veltman. Together, their research spans more than ninety years and documents approximately 15,000 titles from antiquity to the present.

The Bibliography of Perspective is freely available as three downloadable PDF documents. Printed copies are also available, as detailed below.

Bibliography of Perspective – printed volumes

The three volumes of the Bibliography of Perspective are available as printed books from Amazon and as free PDF downloads:

Bibliography of Perspective (Vol. 6) :: Chronological List: Antiquity – 1899 [4 MB pdf].
Bibliography of Perspective (Vol. 7) :: Chronological List: 1900 – 2020 [6 MB pdf].
Bibliography of Perspective (Vol. 8) :: Alphabetical List [8 MB pdf].

To order printed volumes simply perform a search on Amazon.com.

History and Formats

Creating the perspective bibliography was a monumental undertaking that took several decades to complete by multiple teams of people. This work was supported by several organisations, including the Vatican, the Warburg and Wellcome institutions, the British Library, the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Universities of London, Göttingen, York and Toronto.

The bibliography began as a card-index system before being transferred in 1986–1987 to a dBASE III Plus database running on an IBM-compatible computer. It was later made available online through the SUMS system from 2002 to 2020.

Unfortunately all of these systems are no longer available or in operation; and today the database exists in the form of three separate pdf files; whereby individual files can be searched for keywords in the normal way using a pdf reader.

Bibliography of Perspective

The bibliography should be regarded as a developing research resource. Some transfer errors remain from the extraction of data from the former SUMS database, including typographical errors, damaged foreign characters, incomplete records and inconsistencies in indexing and references.

The present PDF volumes were produced by exporting more than 26,000 database records, including multiple editions of individual works, into an Excel spreadsheet. These records were subsequently consolidated into approximately 15,000 distinct titles. Future editions will continue to correct the remaining transfer and cataloguing errors.

A commonly experienced problem when exporting a large data-set from one data format to another, is that a small number of incompatibilities may be evident in the final data set (list of titles). In this case problems in data-transfer are seen, and in particular some foreign characters have failed to properly transfer, and also a small number of data cells are empty or partially corrupted as a result. Plus the database lists every edition of each work, and sometimes the export became ‘confused’ between the many different versions of say, Euclid. Hence in a small number of cases, a work such as Euclid is listed many times and without differentiating between the different editions. We intend to provide a fix all of these issues in future editions of the bibliography.

Literature on Perspective – A Select Bibliography

Kim Veltman did create a far shorter bibliography on perspective, which can be seen below.

Literature on Perspective: A Select Bibliography (1986)

To be Continued…

Kim always ended our conversations with the adage; to be continued dear Alan.

In this vein, it was Kim Veltman’s sincere wish that students and researchers of all levels, no matter which disciplines they are from, would find this one-of-a-kind bibliography, plus his other works on perspective, eminently useful.

Rest assured that if and when you do make good use of the bibliography, that Kim is looking down from heaven, and smiling.