De architectura

• 1. Introduction

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  De architectura is the only architectural treatise to survive from the ancient world. Written by the Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius and dedicated to the emperor Caesar Augustus, it is a book that shaped centuries of building practice without its author ever knowing how far his words would travel. Vitruvius composed it as a practical guide for building projects, probably between 30 and 20 BC. He could not have anticipated that medieval monks would copy it, that Renaissance architects would treat it as revelation, or that Leonardo da Vinci would use one of its passages to draw the most famous human figure in Western art. What did Vitruvius actually say? Why did it take fifteen centuries for anyone to pay close attention? And how did a work almost lost to history end up shaping the skylines of modern cities?

• 2. What Vitruvius Wrote

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  Vitruvius structured his work across ten books, and the sheer range of subjects he addressed reflects the Roman understanding of what an architect needed to know. He expected architects to understand mathematics, astronomy, meteorology, and medicine. In one book he advises architects working with bricks to study pre-Socratic theories of matter, so they could understand how materials behave. Another book connects the abstract geometry of Plato to the practical daily work of the surveyor. Astrology gets a chapter alongside astronomy, the former for organizing human life and the latter for understanding sundials. He drew on named authorities throughout: Ctesibius of Alexandria and Archimedes for their inventions, Aristoxenus, who was Aristotle's apprentice, for music, Agatharchus for theatre, and Varro for architecture. The work covers aqueducts, baths, harbours, war machines, measuring devices, city planning, and military camps. And yet, because Vitruvius was writing early in the Roman architectural revolution, his ten books give little information on the cross vaulting, domes, and concrete construction that would come to define Imperial Rome. He captured a moment just before some of the most significant innovations in ancient engineering took hold.

  The most quoted passage from De architectura is not quite what Vitruvius wrote. The line "Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight" comes from Sir Henry Wotton's English rendering of 1624. It accurately translates the Latin passage at Book I, section iii.2, but the word "commodity" has drifted in meaning since then. In modern English the idea reads as: the ideal building must be sturdy, useful, and beautiful. These three qualities, utility, strength, and beauty, form the triad most associated with Vitruvius. The aesthetic principles that shaped later architectural writers actually appear in Book III, and they derive in part from Latin rhetoric, drawing on Cicero and Varro. Terms for order, arrangement, proportion, and fitness for intended purposes entered the vocabulary of architectural theory through De architectura and have remained there.

• 3. Machines and Engineering

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  Ctesibius receives credit in De architectura for inventing the force pump, and Vitruvius described its construction in some detail: built from bronze, fitted with valves to form a head of water above the machine, and operated by moving a lever up and down. Hero of Alexandria later described the same device in his Pneumatica. Two surviving examples have been found, one at Calleva Atrebatum, the Roman settlement at Silchester in England, and another now on display at the British Museum, both made in bronze as Vitruvius specified. Vitruvius also described Ctesibius's automatons, devices designed not for utility but purely for amusement.

  Vitruvius described the Archimedes' screw in Chapter 10, though he did not name Archimedes in that passage. It was used to raise water for irrigation and to drain mines. He also described the endless chain of buckets and the reverse overshot water-wheel. Physical remains of these water-lifting wheels have turned up in old mines: at Rio Tinto in Spain and at Dolaucothi in west Wales. One wheel from Rio Tinto is now held in the British Museum, and one from Dolaucothi is at the National Museum of Wales. The mines were rediscovered when modern mining operations reopened the sites. A sequence of sixteen such wheels could raise water at least 96 feet above the water table, with each wheel worked by a miner treading cleats on the outer rim. Their presence in mines implies these machines were capable of a much wider range of power applications: not just lifting water, but sawing timber, crushing ores, and fulling cloth.

  On central heating, Vitruvius outlined the hypocaust system at length, the design in which hot air from a fire channelled under floors and inside walls to warm public baths and villas. He gave explicit instructions for fuel efficiency, noting that the caldarium should sit next to the tepidarium, which in turn should sit next to the frigidarium. He described a bronze disc set into the roof under a circular aperture, raised or lowered by a pulley to regulate ventilation in the hot rooms. The Baths of Diocletian and the Baths of Caracalla, those vast thermae of later centuries, likely relied on dewatering devices of the kind Vitruvius described to lift water to header tanks at their tops.

• 4. A Near-Lost Manuscript

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  Vitruvius's work survived the early medieval centuries largely because of the palace scriptorium of Charlemagne. The copying of classical manuscripts that took place there is known as the Carolingian Renaissance. The oldest surviving copy, known as the London Vitruvius and held at the British Library as Harley 2767, was written in Germany between about 800 and 825, probably at the Abbey of Saint Pantaleon in Cologne. It contains only one of the original illustrations: a crudely drawn octagonal wind rose sketched in the margin. Charlemagne's historian, Bishop Einhard, asked the visiting English churchman Alcuin to explain some of the technical terms in the text, showing that the work was not just copied but actually read at court.

  By the 13th century De architectura had attracted notable readers, including Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In 1244 the Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais made extensive references to it in his compendium of all medieval knowledge, the Speculum Maius. Niccolò Acciaioli bequeathed a copy to the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. Despite this, the 92 medieval manuscript copies now held in public collections appear to have received little scholarly attention during the Middle Ages, possibly because many of Vitruvius's specialized Latin terms had become obscure, and most of the original illustrations were gone.

  In 1416 the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a copy in the abbey library of Saint Gall in Switzerland and brought it to the attention of Renaissance thinkers at a moment when appetite for classical knowledge was reviving. That discovery set the stage for what De architectura would become in the centuries to follow.

• 5. Print and the Spread of Vitruvius

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  Fra Giovanni Sulpitius of Verona published the first printed edition in 1486, with a second edition appearing in 1495 or 1496, but neither contained illustrations. The Dominican friar Fra Giovanni Giocondo produced the first illustrated version, with woodcuts, in Venice in 1511. That edition was distinguished by both thorough philosophical content and superb illustrations. Italian translations were circulating by the 1520s. The first to appear in print was a translation with new illustrations by Cesare Cesariano, a Milanese friend of the architect Bramante, published in Como in 1521.

  Translation into other European languages followed quickly. The first French version appeared in 1547, the first German in 1548, and the first Spanish translation in 1582, produced by Miguel de Urrea and Juan Gracian. The most authoritative and influential French edition was published in 1673 by Claude Perrault, commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1664. English readers had a longer wait. John Shute drew on the text as early as 1563 for his book The First and Chief Grounds of Architecture. Wotton's 1624 work The Elements of Architecture adapted De architectura heavily, and a 1692 translation was much abridged. A full translation of the first five volumes did not appear in English until 1771, and the complete work not until 1791. The 1914 translation by Morris H. Morgan, a professor of Classical Philology at Harvard University, is available through Project Gutenberg.

• 6. Renaissance and Legacy

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  Brunelleschi, Niccoli, and Leon Battista Alberti each found in De architectura a justification for elevating architecture to a scientific discipline and for the skills of the artisan. Vitruvius's human proportions, laid out in the first chapter of Book III, which he titled On Symmetry: In Temples And In The Human Body, gave Leonardo da Vinci the principles behind the Vitruvian Man, now one of the most recognized drawings in history. Palladio, the 16th-century architect, considered Vitruvius his master and guide and made drawings based on the work before developing his own architectural principles.

  Inigo Jones of England and Salomon de Caus of France were among the first architects to re-examine and apply what Vitruvius regarded as foundational: arts and sciences grounded in number and proportion. The stereographic projection used to construct astrolabes appears in De architectura in its description of an anaphoric clock in Alexandria, presumed to be a clepsydra or water clock. The clock displayed a rotating star field behind a wire frame marking the hours; similar mechanisms dating from the 1st to 3rd centuries have been found in Salzburg and northeastern France. Vitruvius also related the story of Archimedes and the golden crown: when Archimedes realized the crown's volume could be measured by water displacement, he ran into the street crying "Eureka!" and was then able to compare the crown's density with that of pure gold, proving it had been alloyed with silver and that the king had been defrauded. That story, recorded in the only architectural treatise to survive antiquity, has been retold ever since.