Vitruvius

Vitruvius served under Caesar and Augustus and wrote “The Ten Books on Architecture”, the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity. His demand for firmness, commodity and delight and his description of the orders became the guiding rule of the Renaissance once the text was rediscovered in 1414.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was born around 80 BC and died some time after 15 BC. The little we know about him comes almost entirely from his own book. He received a broad education in geometry, astronomy, music, medicine and law, which he himself considered necessary for an architect. He served as a military engineer under Julius Caesar, designing and repairing war machines such as catapults and siege engines. After the civil wars he received, by his own account with the support of Augustus’ sister Octavia, a pension that allowed him to devote himself to writing. He does not appear to have been particularly successful as a practising architect.

The only building Vitruvius himself describes is a basilica at Fano on Italy’s Adriatic coast, which no longer survives. His great achievement is instead “De architectura”, ten books on architecture written around 30–15 BC and dedicated to Augustus. They cover everything from building materials, temples and the orders to theatres, baths, aqueducts, sundials and machines. He demands that a building should have firmitas, utilitas and venustas, that is, firmness, commodity and delight. He also describes how the proportions of buildings should follow those of the human body, an idea that much later inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of Vitruvian Man.

In the Middle Ages Vitruvius was little read, but when the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript in the monastery of St Gall in 1414, the text became the Renaissance’s most important source on ancient architecture. Alberti, Palladio and many others built on his work, and the book was printed in countless editions and translations from the 1480s onwards. His triad of firmness, commodity and delight is still used when architecture is discussed and taught. In Sweden, Vitruvius and the orders were a fundamental part of training at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from the 18th century, and in architects’ libraries, from Tessin the Younger onwards, his books were among the cornerstones. He is the ancient architect whose name is most widely known.