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Eternal Architecture

In ancient Rome, Vitruvius kept alive the classical ideal

By Thomas Gordon Smith

Around 25 B.C. the Roman architect Vitruvius wrote this dedication to the emperor Augustus: I have drawn up definite rules so that by observing them you might understand what previous works were like and what future works will be like … In the following volumes I have disclosed all the principles of the discipline.1 Thus Vitruvius began his ten-volume De Architectura, the most extensive treatise on architecture written in antiquity. Vitruvius wrote his masterpiece out of a sense of urgency. The turmoil of the late republic had left its mark on Roman architecture, which Vitruvius believed had drifted away […]

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Footnotes

1.

It is not known whether Vitruvius visited any of these temples on his military campaigns. But their designs were based on rational principles that could be conveyed through the treatises Vitruvius read. Moreover, some of these buildings were as well known then as the Eiffel Tower is today.

2.

This refinement was ignored by Andrea Palladio when he drew on Vitruvius’s principles to create some of the greatest villas of northern Italy.

Endnotes

1.

Vitruvius, Book I, preface 3, from Vitruvius on Architecture, ed. Thomas Gordon Smith (New York: Monacelli Press, forthcoming). All further quotations from Vitruvius are from this edition.

2.

Andrea Palladio, The Four Books of Andrea Palladio’s Architecture (English translation, 1738; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1995).

3.

Gianfilippo Carettoni, Das Haus des Augustus auf dem Palatin (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1983), p. 34.

4.

Vitruvius, Book III, preface 3: and Book VI, preface 4–6.

5.

Vitruvius, Book I, 1.2.

6.

Vitruvius, Book I, preface 2.

7.

Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), p. 63.

8.

Vitruvius, Book VII, preface 12–14.

9.

Lucilla Burn, The British Museum Book of Greek and Roman Art (London: British Museum, 1991), p. 129.

10.

Peter A. Clayton and Martin J. Price, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 78.

11.

Vitruvius, Book III, 3.9.

12.

Carole Krinsky, “Seventy-Eight Vitruvius Manuscripts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institute 30 (1967), pp. 36–70.

13.

Lothar Haselberger, “The Construction Plans for the Temple of Apollo at Didyma,” in Scientific American 253: 6 (December, 1985), pp. 126–132.

14.

Robert Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 50.

15.

William Howard Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello (New York: Abbeville, 1983), p. 55.