The volume contains the transcription as well as the historical-critical analysis of the second part of the treatise “About Civil Architecture by Baldassarre Orsini”, an unpublished work of the eighteenth-century “painter-philosopher” in Perugia: a precious manuscript, preserved in the Academy of Fine Arts “Pietro Vannucci” of Perugia, that, although designed with specific educational purposes (Orsini, long-director of the ancient Academy of Design in Perugia, is a believer in the need for a solid scientific background), shows explicit relationships with the cultural debate of the time and is sensitive to the profound theoretical-conceptual changes throughout Europe, around the second half of the eighteenth century, embodying the irreversible crisis of humanistic principles and opening up the doors of modernity. If the first part of the Treaty pursues the systematization of art based on the rules of geometry and proportion, the second is a textbook, dedicated to the technical aspects of construction, illustrated with a large body of drawings.
