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.