PRC maintains the standard world Bibliography of Perspective; initially developed by Professor Luigi Vagnetti and later progressed by Professor Kim Veltman—who together spent over 90 years compiling a list of 15,000 perspective titles from throughout time.
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 a several organisations; including the Vatican, the Warburg and Welcome Institutes, the British Library, the Getty Center for the History of Art, and the Universities of London, Gottingen, York and Toronto.
Note that the database began as a card index system in the 1980s; before being transferred to a dBASE-3 database system on an IBM PC (1990s). Later the bibliography was made available on the web on the SUMS system (2002-2020).
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
You can download the Bibliography of Perspective below.
Please note that the bibliography should be considered work in progress, and because a number of transfer errors are evident due to extraction of the spreadsheet from the old SUMS system. Accordingly, the pdf file will be gradually updated and many typographical, indexing plus referencing errors fixed.
PRC_Perspective_Bibliography (14 MB pdf file – version 3.0 [date ordering])
The Bibliography of Perspective version listed above have been produced by automatically exporting the full contents of the world Bibliography of Perspective from a computer database, whereby the list was exported to an excel spreadsheet table with over 26,000 rows (includes multiple editions of some titles).
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.
Another version of the bibliography arranged by author alphabetical listing is available on the Encyclopedia page.
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.
-- < LATEST NEWS > -- The 'Bibliography of Perspective' is freely available as a pdf download above. The 'Bibliography of Perspective' is also available as a series of printed books from Amazon.com. Enjoy! Alan Radley -- 18.12.22 -- --- Dr Alan Radley FRSA | Scientific Director alan@perspectiveresearchcentre.com Perspective Research Centre www.perspectiveresearchcentre.com
Perspective Research Centre 
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