This book presents an exploration of the arch from the points of view of architecture, mathematics, engineering, construction history, and cultural symbolism. Leonardo da Vinci described the arch as "two weaknesses which, leaning on each other, become a strength," a metaphor for the way that science and art lean on each other to strengthen our lives.

A year after the second edition of his famous translation and commentary on Vitruvius, Daniele Barbaro published The Practice of Perspective, a text he had begun working on many years before. Barbaro was the first to publish a formal treatise entirely dedicated to the science of geometric perspective. In an informal style especially addressed to practicing artists and architects, Barbaro begins by drawing on and expanding the manuscript treatise of Piero della Francesca with regards to basics of perspective constructions for representing three-dimensional solids on two-dimensional...