Brill’s companion to the reception of Vitruvius

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

Vitruvius is to architects as Hippocrates is to medical doctors. Yet the Roman author of De architectura, the only work on architecture to have survived from classical antiquity, and father as such of the architectural profession has not always received academic attention commensurate with his standing among architects.  The publication of Brill’s companion to the reception of Vitruvius is a significant corrective and much-anticipated cause for celebration.

The resurgence of Vitruvius studies in mainstream English-speaking academic circles is a relatively recent phenomenon, of which the publication 25 years ago of Ingrid D. Rowland’s English translation of De architectura can be considered a signal event.[1] Rowland has enlisted the collaboration of Sinclair W. Bell to edit this 27^th volume in the series Brill’s companions to classical reception. With its 26 chapters and 25 different authors, it is not surprising that this volume of over 700 pages has been more than ten years in preparation. Its successful completion is a credit to the scholarship, skill and persistence of its editors.

Following an encomiastic preface by Paolo Clini, founder in 2010 of the Centro di studi Vitruviani, and a brief introduction by the editors, the book unfolds in five parts of varying length: Transmission, Translation, Reception, Practice and Vitruvian Topics. Rowland leads with “Vitruvius from Manuscript to Print.” Her history of the book qua book begins with literacy and literary culture in Vitruvius’s own day and the ten papyrus scrolls (volumina) that constituted the ten “books” of De architectura when it was written for Augustus Caesar, probably in the early 20s BCE. Guaranteed survival, like most ancient texts, by the diligence of scribes who copied it onto parchment in medieval scriptoria, the work never entirely disappeared from view, with evidence of readership during the Middle Ages mainly in northern Europe. After his work was brought back to light in Italy by humanist manuscript hunters such as Petrarch, Vitruvius rocketed to stardom in the Renaissance. Since publication of Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli’s first edition at Rome in 1486, De architectura has never been out of print.[2]

So outlined, Vitruvius’s trajectory is deceptively straightforward and not unlike others in the annals of transmission. But De architectura is a technical treatise whose specialized terminology, much of it Greek, mystified medieval copyists, resulting in more-than-usually faulty transcriptions.  Alberti’s exasperation is legendary.[3] Furthermore, except for the (at most) ten now lost explanatory figures Vitruvius refers to in his text, the work was not illustrated, so there were no images to enlighten befuddled readers.

An accurate, readable text, translations, and illustrations were needed. Several contributors to this volume remark on Vitruvius’s literary ambitions, but for its Renaissance readers, De architectura was more than a literary text whose accuracy would have been limited to a matter of scholarly or humanistic concern. For them, the treatise was a unique guide from an impeccable Roman source for building as the Romans built. The Renaissance project of revival and the work’s immediate relevance to the real built world gave it nothing less than the potential of a vademecum for tangible recovery of the grandeur that was Rome. Thus, it was critical to know not only what precisely its author was trying to say but also how what he had to say reflected, or not, the evidence of monumental ruins that everywhere testified to that vanished grandeur. What, above all, were the rules?

Among the chapters that address such issues, is Francesco P. Teodoro’s “Raphael and Fabio Calvo,” a close reading of three manuscripts containing the so far unpublished, first complete translation of De architectura of ca. 1519, along with Raphael’s autograph commentary, and the letter he and Baldassare Castiglione addressed to Pope Leo X, pitching a project for the rebuilding of imperial Rome, for which an accurate Vitruvius translation was essential.[4]

The first Italian translation to appear in print (Como, 1521) is the topic of Alessandro Rovetta and Jessica Gritti’s chapter “On the Vitruvius of Cesare Cesariano.” Their insight that the Milanese translator’s lavishly illustrated folio was deliberately crafted as a Milanese Vitruvius, whereby Milan in turn acquired the burnish of being a Vitruvian city, is anchored in evidence that extends far beyond Cesariano’s well-known presentation of the plan, elevation and section of Milan cathedral to illustrate Vitruvius’s terms ichnographia, orthographia and scaenographia. It is a beguiling subversion of expectations to find yourself cornered into thinking of Milan’s great gothic church as a Vitruvian monument.

But this should come as no surprise, for it is a truism of reception studies that reception is in the eye of the beholder; or, as Rowland puts it, “reading Vitruvius depends significantly on the mind of the reader” (p. 28). Thus, according to Wim Verbaal (“The Medieval Vitruvius”), Einhard and Alcuin, nineth-century scholars in the court of Charlemagne at Aachen, both found as least as much spiritual guidance in De architectura as they did technical advice. Martin McLaughlin’s chapter on Leon Battista Alberti’s fraught relationship with his ancient Roman predecessor (“Alberti and Vitruvius”) unveils a self-portrait of the Florentine polymath himself in his De re aedificatoria libri decem, the first architectural treatise of the Renaissance, written between 1450 and 1470: “Even when writing about architecture, Alberti is writing about himself” (p. 181).  In “Vitruvius and Guarino Guarini,” Susan Klaiber invokes the writings of that most baroque of 17^th-century architects to reveal a sympathetic reader of Vitruvius who, far from being the anti-classicist of received opinion, found in the ancient text an authoritative point of departure for his own work.

Adapting Vitruvius to cultural expectations reached a new level in England, as Vaughan Hart tells it in “Making Vitruvius Speak English.” While relatively straightforward Vitruvius-derived rule books such as those of Serlio, Vignola and Claude Perrault were quick to find English translators, De architectura itself remained untranslated until 1791, a delay that seems traceable in large part to moral squeamishness. Not only was the text obscure; for Britons, Vitruvius was—or had become—complicated, excessive, ambiguous, continental and tainted furthermore by Roman associations with a whiff of popery. Even the architectural orders underwent censorious moral scrutiny, with the ornate Corinthian reviled as a lascivious whore, and the spare, unfussy Tuscan upheld as a model of wholesome manliness.[5] Britons were to aim for recovery of Vitruvius’s true “Antique Simplicity,” Colen Campbell instructed readers in his three-volume Vitruvius Britannicus (1715), an objective he saw perfected in the (spare, unfussy) classicism of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), the architect he elected to stand as his model Vitruvius Britannicus.

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), who was Inigo Jones’s master, was not above tailoring Vitruvius to personal preferences either, as we learn in “Vitruvius and Palladio,” one of two chapters by Francesco Marcorin. Marcorin’s other chapter, “Vitruvius and the Sangallos,” is about a family of architects who dominated architectural practice at Rome in the first half of the 16^th-century. Where the Sangallos worked tirelessly to determine what exactly Vitruvius’s methods were, and applied them as faithfully as they were able, Palladio repeatedly invoked Vitruvian authority for methods that were for the most part entirely his own. Clear and easy to follow, his immensely popular Quattro libri dell’architectura (1570) with its wealth of woodcut illustrations making them accessible even to amateurs like Thomas Jefferson, Palladio’s “Vitruvian” methods were far more widely adopted than any other architect’s of the time—or indeed of any time—as the historical record attests.

The Sangallos were hardly alone in their fixation with parsing Vitruvian rules and resolving their distressing mismatch with the evidence of surviving ruins. Claudio Tolomei, a collaborator of Antonio da Sangallo, but a philologist not a practitioner, founded the so-called Academia de lo Studio de l’Architettura whose vast publication program, never realized, was meant to settle such matters once and for all.[6] But if, as Lynne C. Lancaster argues (“Vitruvius and Ancient Construction Method”), with only 20% of the ten books devoted to construction methods, advice on such matters could not have been Vitruvius’s primary concern. And if, on the contrary, De architectura was intended as a work of literature, the entire problem dissolves into something of a non-issue.  As indeed it does when, in David Karmon’s “Vitruvius and the Early Modern Worksite,” we learn that construction workers’ free adaptation of Vitruvius’s methods testifies to their use as guidelines, rather than inflexible prescriptions, which the realities of onsite conditions invariably compromised in any case.

Rabun Taylor weighs in on the question of rules with “Archaeological Perspectives on Vitruvius,” writing that archaeologists have consistently mistaken Vitruvius’s prescriptive voice for a descriptive one, failing to recognize that what De architectura presents is a theory of design, not a mirror of practice. With the right shift in perspective, he concludes, archaeological discoveries in the future may well “do more to shed light on Vitruvius than vice versa” (p. 408).

Part 5, Vitruvian Topics, includes an enlightening investigation by Robert Goodman of the acoustical properties of echeia, the sounding vessels Vitruvius writes about in his chapter on theatres (5.3), as well as a discussion by Thomas Noble Howe of what is meant by scamilli impares, the “unequal little benches,” that have famously confounded readers for centuries, and which Vitruvius says were the means for achieving the desired upward curvature of a temple stylobate.[7]  A 50-page essay by Antonio Becchi presents a detailed commentary on each of the 28 edifying historical anecdotes, many of them unique to Vitruvius, that appear throughout De architectura in evidence of the work’s didactic purpose and the literary aspirations of its author.  

Francesca Fiorani’s “The invention of the Vitruvian Man,” once again foregrounds the issue of reception and the eye of the beholder. It is obvious that Fiorani’s endorsement of the gender-neutral identity assigned to Vitruvius’s homo bene figuratus, alleged source of Leonardo’s famous drawing, is the product of a cultural matrix endemic to the present day, whatever credence is allowed to the debatable claim that gender neutrality was Vitruvius’s original intention. The argument is that had he meant “well-shaped man” (male person) he would have written vir and not homo (human person, equivalent to the German mensch) for the perfectly proportioned figure discussed in Book 3, chapter 1.

The proposition is provocative and defensible, if unlikely, given (in addition to other evidence) the examples of Vitruvius’s usage elsewhere in his treatise which leaves little doubt that when he writes homo he means man-as-in-male.[8] Entirely indefensible, on the other hand, is Fiorani’s speculation concerning a drawing she imagines Vitruvius must have made of the figure, a drawing for whose existence there is not a shred of evidence.[9] Moreover, in evident disregard for  what Vitruvius actually wrote, her account of this imaginary drawing reads much like a description of what Leonardo da Vinci would draw over a millennium and half later—except for the genitals, of course, the maleness of Vitruvius’s homo bene figuratus, according to the author, being a Renaissance invention.[10] In view of that argument, Fiorani’s omission of the priapic Vitruvian Man from Cesare Cesariano’s translation of 1521 is a curious oversight.

Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man does of course appear, however, along with several other versions of the figure. One of them, a multi-media, post-colonial revision of the Leonardo drawing by Native American artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (1992) is reproduced on the cover of the book as a kind of end point to its account of Vitruvius reception. These well-shaped (wo)men are among the over 130 illustrations featured in the volume: photographs, explanatory figures, archival drawings and, most especially, images taken from various manuscripts and editions of De architectura or from treatises, such as Palladio’s, the work inspired. Many appear in colour. Most are well-chosen, well-reproduced and helpful.

Rowland and Bell’s Brill’s companion to the reception of Vitruvius is obviously not last word on the topic, nor was it intended to be.[11]  Yet as the author of two monographs on Vitruvius, both concerned with the politics of De architectura—the first, in the context of its writing during what Sir Ronald Syme called the Roman revolution;  the second, in the analogous circumstances that underwrote its enthusiastic reception in the early Italian Renaissance—I cannot help remarking on the lack of attention in this book to political contexts that shaped both what Vitruvius wrote and how it was read.[12] Architecture is nothing if not a political act. That said, anyone interested in learning about Vitruvius, or any scholar seeking a single volume of essays by reputable authorities on an impressive range of Vitruvian topics would be wrong not to begin with this unique collection.

Authors and Titles

Preface: Vitruvius, Unwitting Hero of Our Times (Paolo Clini)

Introduction (Ingrid D. Rowland and Sinclair W. Bell)

Part 1 Transmission

1. Vitruvius from Manuscript to Print (Ingrid Rowland)

Part 2 Translation

2. Raphael and Fabio Calvo (Francesco P. Di Teodoro)
3. On the Vitruvius of Cesare Cesariano (Alessandro Rovetta and Jessica Gritti)
4. Who Was Vitruvius? a Renaissance Debate (Paul Davies and David Hemsoll)

Part 3 Reception

5. The Medieval Vitruvius (Wim Verbaal)
6. Alberti and Vitruvius: Reception and Rejection of the Model in De re aedificatoria (Martin McLaughlin)
7. Verona and Vitruvius (Paul Davies and David Hemsoll)
8. Vitruvius in Bramante’s Rome: Recovery, Interpretation, and Use of the Ancient Text (Ann C. Huppert)
9. Vitruvius’ Educational Program in Antiquity and the Renaissance (Daniel E. Harris-McCoy)
10. Sangallo, Tolomei, and the Program of the Accademia de lo Studio de l’Architettura on Vitruvius and Ancient Architecture (Bernd Kulawik)
11. Vitruvius and Guarino Guarini (Susan Klaiber)
12. Hermosura and Belleza in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Editions of Vitruvius (Victor Deupi)
13. Making Vitruvius Speak English: Vitruvius and English Architecture up to Vitruvius Britannicus (Vaughan Hart)
14. Vitruvius in the German-Speaking World (Werner Oechslin)

Part 4 Practice

15. Archaeological Perspectives on Vitruvius (Rabun Taylor)
16. Vitruvius and Ancient Construction Method (Lynne C. Lancaster)
17. How the opus francigenum Became the “Gothic” Style (Michel Paoli)
18. Vitruvius and the Early Modern Worksite (David Karmon)
19. Vitruvius and the Sangallos (Francesco Marcorin)
20. Vitruvius and Palladio (Francesco Marcorin)
21. Vitruvius and the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns (Thomas Noble Howe)

Part 5 Vitruvian Topics

22. Echeia (Robert Godman)
23. Scamilli Impares (Thomas Noble Howe
24. Vitruvius’ Science of Machines: Tradition or Innovation? (Giovanni Di Pasquale)
25. Vitruvius’ Historiae and the Love of Learning (Antonio Becchi)
26. The Invention of the Vitruvian Man: Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci, and Beyond (Francesca Fiorani)

Notes

[1]Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, Ingrid D. Rowland, trans., commentary and illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[2] In Vitruvius without Text: The Biography of a Book, (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2022), André Tavares catalogues over 250 editions published between 1486 and 2016: approximately one every two years, on average.

[3] “ . . . his speech is such that the Latins might think that he wanted to appear Greek, while the Greeks would think that he babbled in Latin. . . . so that as far as we are concerned he might just as well not have written at all, rather than write something that we cannot understand.” Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Joseph Rykwert et al, trans. (Cambridge, Ma. and London: MIT Press, 1988), p. 154 (6.1).

[4] Di Teodoro’s publication of the Raphael/Calvo manuscripts is forthcoming.

[5] According to Sir Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture (1624), cited Hart pp. 330-331.

[6] Discussed in Ann C. Huppert’s chapter, “Vitruvius in Bramante’s Rome” and also Bernd Kulawik’s “Sangallo, Toromei and program of the Academia de lo Studio de l’Architettura. There is an appreciable amount of overlap between a number of the contributions.

[7] Vitruvius 3.4.5, where he refers to a no longer extant explanatory drawing.

[8] Pierre Gros, Conclusion, Arethusa 49.2 (Spring 2016), pp. 363-364.

[9] For a detailed account of the (at most ten) now lost illustrations, Philippe Fleury, Introduction, Vitruve. De l’architecture. Livre 1, Philippe Fleury ed. and trans. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990) pp. LXII-LXVIII.

[10] I.K. McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2003) pp. 156-183, especially p. 156.

[11] For example, the final issue of the classics journal Ramus (52.2) was entirely devoted to Vitruvius’s homo bene figuratus.

[12] McEwen 2003; I.K. McEwen, All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes (Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 2023).