My project examines early modern examines early modern topographical writing and illustration, with a focus on its relation to the early literature of architecture. This tradition provided a vehicle for historical writing that was often better suited to architecture – which was necessarily collaborative and often took generations to complete – than the biographical approach more appropriate for documenting painters and sculptors and their works, which developed simultaneously. Moreover, the topographical tradition was far more inclusive, both chronologically and geographically, than were other forms of writing on the arts that heavily favored antiquity and modernity and tended to privilege Italy, France, and a few other regions. In these respects, these early sources contain many of the elements of what would become the modern scholarly literature of architecture, which are often difficult to trace in the canonical early literature.