It would of course be totally unethical for me to review a book of which I am one of the authors. However, as my contribution is only six of two-hundred pages, of which three are illustrations, and the book is one that could/would/should interest some (many) of my readers, I’m going to be unethical and review it anyway.

Thinking 3D is an intellectual idea, it is a website, it is exhibitions and other events, it is a book but above all it is two people, whose idea it is: Daryl Green, who was Fellow Librarian of Magdalen College, Oxford and is now Special Collections Librarian of the University of Edinburg and Laura Moretti, who is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews. The Thinking 3D idea is the historical investigation of the representation of the three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional page particular, but not exclusively, in print.

The Thinking 3D website explains in great detail what it is all about and contains a full description of the activities that have been carried out. For those quarantined there is a fairly large collection of essays on various topics from the project.

In 2019 Thinking 3D launched a major exhibition with The Bodleian Libraries Oxford as part of the commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, Thinking 3D From Leonardo to the Present, which ran from March 2019 to February 2020 and which I have been told was quite exceptional.

As an extension and permanent record of that exhibition Bodleian Libraries published a book, Thinking 3D: Books, Images and Ideas from Leonardo to the Present[1], which appeared in autumn 2019. This is both a coffee table book but also, at the same time, a piece of serious academic literature.

The book opens with a long essay by Green and Moretti, The history of thinking 3D in forty books, which delivers exactly what the title says. This is an excellent survey of the topic and it is worth reading the book just for this. However, it does contain one historical error that I, in my alter ego of the HIST_SCI HULK, simply cannot ignore, at least not if I want to maintain my hard won reputation. Having introduced the topic of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus the authors write:

As mentioned above, the oft-published heliocentric diagram, and its theoretical propositions, are what launched this book into infamy (the book was immediately put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books [my emphasis]), but the execution of this relational illustration is simple and reductive.

De revolutionibus was published in 1543 but was first placed on the Index sixty-three years later in 1616 and more importantly, as I wrote very recently, not for the first time, it was placed on the Index until corrected. These corrections, which were fairly minimal, were carried out surprisingly quickly and the book became available to be studied by Catholics already in 1621.

Other than this I noticed no other errors in the highly informative introductory essay, which is followed by an essay from Matthew Landrus, Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years on, which examines Leonardo’s three-dimensional perception of the world and everything in it. It was for me an interesting addition to my previous readings on the Tuscan polymath.

The main body of the book is taken up by sixteen fairly short essays in four categories: Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture and Anatomy.

Geometry starts off with Ken Saito’s presentation of a ninth century manuscript of The Elements of Euclid, where he demonstrates very clearly that the author has no real consistent, methodology for presenting a 3D space on a 2D page. This is followed by Renzo Baldasso’s essay on Luca Pacioli’s De divina proportione (1509). Here the three dimensional solids are presented perfectly by Pacioli’s friend, colleague and one time pupil Leonardo. We return to Euclid for Yelda Nasifoglu’s investigation of the English translation of The Elements by Henry Billingsley in 1570. This volume is totally fascinating as three-dimensional figures are present as pop-up figure like those that we all know from our children’s books. The geometry section closes with a book that I didn’t know, Max Brückner’s Vielecke und Vielflache (1900) presented by George Hart. This is a vast collection of photographs of paper models of three-dimensional figures, which I learnt also influenced M. C. Escher a master of the third dimension.

Karl Galle, Renaissance Mathematicus friend and guest blogger, kicks of the astronomy section with Johannes Kepler’s wonderfully bizarre presentation of the planetary orbits embedded in the five regular Platonic solids from his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Yours truly is up next with an account of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius (1610) and it’s famous washes of the Moon displaying three-dimension features. Also covered are the later pirate editions that screwed up those illustrations. Stephanie O’Rourke presents one of the most extraordinary nineteenth century astronomy books James Nasmyth’s and James Carpenter’s The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite(1874). This contains stunningly realistic photographic plates of the Moon’s surface but which are not actually real. The two Jameses constructed plaster models that they then lit and photographed to achieve the desired effect. We close the astronomy section with Thinking 3D’s co-chef, Daryl Green, taking on a survey of the surface of Mars with the United Stated Geological Survey, Geological Map of Mars (1978).

Turning our attention to architecture, we travel back to the twelfth century, with Karl Kinsella as our guide, to Richard of St Victor’s In visionen Ezekielis; a wonderfully modern in its presentation but somewhat unique medieval architectural manuscript. The other half of the Thinking 3D team, Laura Moretti now takes us up to the sixteenth century and Sebastiano Serlio’s catalogue of the buildings of Rome (1544), which has an impossibly long Italian title that I’m not going to repeat here. We remain in the sixteenth century for Jacques Androuet du Cerceau’s Le premier [et second] volume des plus excellent bastiment de France (1576–9), where our guide is Frédérique Lemerle. Moving forward a century we close out the architecture section with Francesco Marcorin introducing us to Hans Vredeman de Vries’s absolutely stunning Perspective (1604–5).

It would not be too difficult to guess that the anatomy section opens with one of the greatest medical books of all time, Andreas Vesalius’ De fabrica but not with the full version but the shorter (cheaper?) De humani corporis fabrica libroum epitome, like the full version published in 1543 in Basel. Our guide to Vesalius’ masterpiece is Mark Samos. Camilla Røstvik introduces us to William Hunter’s The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (1774), as she makes very clear a milestone in the study of women’s bodies with its revolutionary and controversial study of the pregnant body. For me this essay was a high point in a collection of truly excellent essays. We stay in the eighteenth century for Jacques Fabien Gautier D’Agoty’s Exposition anatomique des organes des sens (1775). Dániel Margócsy present a fascinating guide to the controversial work of this pioneer of colour printing. Anatomy, and the book as a whole, closes with Denis Pellerin’s essay on Arthur Thomson’s Anatomy of the Human Eye (1912). Thomson’s book was accompanied by a collection of stereoscopic images of the anatomy of the eye together with a stereoscope with which to view the 3D images thus created; a nineteenth century technology that was already dying out when Thomson published his work.

The book closes with a bibliography of five books for further reading for each essay, brief biography of each of the authors, a glossary of technical terms and a good general index. All sixteen of the essays are short, informative, light to read, easily accessible introductions to the volumes that they present and maintain a high academic quality throughout the entire book.

I said at the outset that this is also a coffee table book and that was not meant negatively. It measures 24X26 cm and is printed on environmentally friendly, high gloss paper. The typeface is attractive and light on the eyes and the illustrations are, as is to be expected for a book about the history of book illustration, spectacularly beautiful. The publishing team of the Bodleian Libraries are to be congratulated on an excellent publication. If you leave this on your coffee table then your visitors will soon be leafing though it admiring the pictures, whether they are interested in book history or not. I don’t usually mention the price of books that I review but at £35 this beautifully presented and wonderfully informative volume is very good value for money.

[1] Thinking 3D: Books, Images and Ideas from Leonardo to the Present, edited by Daryl Green and Laura Moretti, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2019.