De l’Orme’s Graphics Language: Between Stereotomy and Orthogonal Proto-Project

Stereotomy has always been a subject matter of speculation by scholars who have been involved in Descriptive Geometry. It is well known, in fact, how the latter has its roots in the trait art. Part of proceedings that Gaspard Monge will theorize at the end of 18th century, were commonly used previously to solve dimensional and angular implicit problems of the science of cutting stone. In 1567 in Paris, the French architect Philibert de l’Orme published The Premier Tome of Architecture. The volume made up of nine books, it is an architecture treatise which contains two books, the Livre III and the Livre IIII, devoted to the art of trait. The topic of this essay will be the decryption and the translation—in a contemporary key, according to the tools provided by the modern Descriptive Geometry and by the current digital modelers—of one of the trait contained within the two books mentioned above. The aim of this essay is to verify the one-to-one relationship that exists between the object and his representation, therefore the correspondence that there is between de l’Orme’s graphics language and Monge’s projective processes of one trait concerning vault proposed in the treatise. The verification of this connection will be done by means of the use of digital space models of the architectonical objects examined by the French author. The surfaces connected to them will be digitally proposed again and, with them you will showed the operations of rabatment, translation and/or proto-projective that could render evident de l’Orme’s representative universe.