Vitruvius (ca. 80 b.c.–ca. 25 b.c.)

Roman architect, engineer, and author whose treatise On Architecture —written as a guidebook for Roman builders—was widely influential during the Renaissance. Vitruvius was born in the town of Formiae as Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. He may have served in the Roman army of Julius Caesar, working to design fortifications and siege engines in Spain and Gaul (modern France). He flourished during the time of the emperor Augustus, his patron, and to whom he dedicated his work. Historians know of only one building designed by him: a basilica in the town of Fano, which has disappeared completely.

On Architecture was one of the classical works to survive the Middle Ages through the manuscript copying carried out in isolated monasteries, where the ancient works were preserved from the violence and chaos of the time. One of these manuscript copies was discovered in 1414 by the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini at the abbey of Saint Gallen in Switzerland. The new technology of printing allowed the book to find a wider audience in southern Europe. The first printed edition was brought out in Rome by Fra Giovanni Sulpitius in 1486; an illustrated edition appeared in 1511, and translations in Italian were first published in 1521. Vitruvius was translated into German, French, English, and Spanish by the end of the sixteenth century.

Vitruvius admired the classical architecture of Greece and saw his own time as a decadent period in which architects were forgetting the Greek tradition of harmony and proportion. Written in about 40 b.c., On Architecture is divided into ten books and covers the design of buildings and landscapes, engineering, town planning, and the proportions of the human body. Vitruvius held the qualities of strength, utility, and beauty to be necessary in all structures, which took their ideal proportions from that of the body. As the only architectural book to survive the fall of the Roman Empire, On Architecture became the most important source of information for Renaissance architects looking to revive classical forms in their churches, palaces, public buildings, monuments, and design of public spaces. Leon Battista Alberti based his important work on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria, largely on the work of Vitruvius.

See Also: Alberti, Leon Battista; architecture; Bracciolini, Poggio