Vitruvius writes on architecture

The Roman Vitruvius dedicates his Ten Books on Architecture to the emperor Augustus: on materials, temples, the orders, cities, aqueducts and machines.

It is the only text on architecture to survive from antiquity. When it was rediscovered in the 15th century it became the handbook of the Renaissance.

Vitruvius was not a famous architect in his lifetime. He had served as a military engineer under Julius Caesar and built engines of war, and after the civil wars he received a pension from Augustus, thanks to the emperor’s sister Octavia. The only building he says he designed himself is a basilica in the town of Fano, which no longer survives. He wrote his books around 30–20 BC, when Augustus was consolidating power and launching a large building programme in Rome. The work can be read as an attempt to give the new order an architecture grounded in Greek learning, but also as an ageing engineer’s way of passing on his accumulated experience.

The ten books cover the whole of building. Vitruvius discusses brick, lime, sand and timber, describes the Greek orders, the acoustics of theatres, houses, aqueducts, sundials and hoisting machines. Best known is his idea that good architecture combines three qualities: strength, utility and beauty, in Latin firmitas, utilitas and venustas. He also argues that an architect needs to know geometry, history, music, medicine and law. In the third book he describes how a well-proportioned man with outstretched arms and legs fits into both a circle and a square, and he sees the proportions of the body as the model for those of the temple. The drawings he refers to have been lost.

The text was never entirely forgotten; it was copied in monastic libraries throughout the Middle Ages. But it was the humanists of the 15th century who turned it into a living handbook. Poggio Bracciolini drew attention to a manuscript in the monastery of St Gall in 1416, and the first printed edition appeared in Rome in the 1480s. Since the illustrations were missing, each generation had to interpret the sometimes obscure descriptions anew, and illustrated editions became a genre of their own. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the man in the circle and the square, from around 1490, is the best-known attempt. Vitruvius was read by Alberti, Palladio and all who followed, Swedish architects included, and his three qualities are still quoted in schools of architecture today.