The only architectural treatise to survive from classical antiquity, De Architectura (On Architecture), was written around 25 BCE by the Roman architect and military engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 90-c. 20 BCE). Vitruvius borrowed terminology and concepts from earlier Greek and Hellenistic architectural treatises, such as Hermogenes of Priene’s writings on the principles of architectural symmetry, but all of the sources he cited are lost. About 80 medieval manuscript copies of De Architectura exist. Though the text of Vitruvius’s treatise was copied and recopied by hand over many centuries, none of the original illustrations have been preserved.
The oldest and most accurate manuscript (British Library MS Harley 2767) was found in the library of the St. Gall monastery in 1416 by the scholar and manuscript hunter Poggio Bracciolini. Probably created in the early 9th century, perhaps in the palace scriptorium of Charlemagne in Aachen, this manuscript was brought to Florence where it was studied by Renaissance architects such as Alberti and Brunelleschi. A printed edition of the treatise in Latin was published in Rome in 1486, and over the following decades translations appeared in many other languages.
Somewhat textually corrupted manuscript copies of De Architectura were known to fourteenth-century Humanist scholars such as Petrarch and Boccaccio. But the oldest and most accurate manuscript copy of De Architectura (British Library MS Harley 2767) was rediscovered in the library of the St. Gall monastery in 1416 by the scholar and manuscript hunter Poggio Bracciolini. Probably created in the early 9th century, perhaps in the palace scriptorium of Charlemagne in Aachen, this manuscript was brought to Florence where it was studied by Renaissance architects such as Alberti and Brunelleschi. A printed edition of the treatise in Latin was published in Rome in 1486, and over the following decades translations appeared in many other languages.
The treatise consists of 10 books. We will read the Preface and the first 5 chapters of Book I. Note that this pdf file has all of Book I; we will only discuss the Preface and chapter 1-5 of Book I (i.e. up to page 53).
