Architecture · Classical & Renaissance
c. 80–70 BC – after c. 15 BC · Roman
Roman architecture; the classical canon
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman architect and military engineer whose ten-book treatise De architectura is the only work on architecture to survive complete from antiquity. Dedicated to the emperor Augustus, it covers town planning, materials, temples, houses, water supply, machines and the proportions of the human body. Rediscovered in the fifteenth century, it became the rulebook of Renaissance and Neoclassical architecture.
Ten books on building, dedicated to an emperor — the only architectural treatise to come down whole from the ancient world (c. 30–15 BC)
Rome
De architectura, rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini at the abbey of St Gall in 1414 and printed in the 1480s.
A Renaissance pen drawing of a naked man with arms and legs doubled, fitted at once into a circle and a square (c. 1490)
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, drawn to illustrate this writer's account of human proportion in Book III.
A basilica on the Adriatic at the town of Fanum Fortunae — the one building its author claims as his own (c. 27 BC)
Fano, Marche, Italy
The basilica at Fano, described in Book V; no trace of it survives.
The story of an acanthus plant growing up around a basket left on a girl's grave, told as the origin of a capital (c. 30–15 BC)
Book IV of the treatise
The origin myth of the Corinthian capital, credited to the sculptor Callimachus.