Vitruvius' De architectura, the only extant work from Antiquity dedicated to Architecture, has had a rich and diverse reception history. The present volume aims to highlight the different aspects of this history, showing how Vitruvius' work was systematically and continuously misunderstood to justify innovation. Its comprehensive and in-depth analyses make this book a reference work in the field of Vitruvian scholarship.
As the first comprehensive encyclopedic survey of Western architectural theory from Vitruvius to the present, this book is an essential resource for architects, students, teachers, historians, and theorists. Using only original sources, Kruft has undertaken the monumental task of researching, organizing, and analyzing the significant statements put forth by architectural theorists over the last two thousand years. The result is a text that is authoritative and complete, easy to read without being reductive.
Vitruvius' De architectura is the only extant classical text on architecture, and its impact on Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci is well-known. But what was the text's purpose in its own time (ca. 20s BCE)? In this book, Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols reveals how Vitruvius pitched the Greek discipline of architecture to his Roman readers, most of whom were undoubtedly laymen. The inaccuracy of Vitruvius' architectural rules, when compared with surviving ancient buildings, has knocked Vitruvius off his pedestal. Nichols argues that the author never intended to provide an accurate view of contemporary buildings. Instead, Vitruvius crafted his authorial persona and remarks on architecture to appeal to elites (and would-be elites) eager to secure their positions within an expanding empire. In this major new analysis of De architectura from archaeological and literary perspectives, Vitruvius emerges as a knowing critic of a social landscape in which the house made the man.
Professionalism is political. This book offers a new assessment of the Roman architect Vitruvius and his treatise, On Architecture, dedicated to Augustus in the 20s BCE. Once reviled by scholars, Vitruvius emerges as an imperial expert par excellence when read alongside literary coevals through an intertextual lens. No building of Vitruvius' name survives from antiquity, but his treatise remains a formidable literary construction that partakes of Rome's vibrant textual culture. The book explores Vitruvius' portrait of the ideal architect as an imposing "Vitruvian man" at the dawn of Augustus' empire. In direct dialogue with his republican model, Cicero's ideal orator, the architect embodies a distinctly imperial civic ethos in which technically skilled partisans supersede old elites as guarantors of Augustan authority. Vitruvius promises to shape not only the emperor's legacy with architecture, but also the notion of a Roman citizen through his ideal architect.
As a master of his discipline, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius has been read widely for centuries. This collection of essays by an international team of experts investigates his influence and reception in ideas, artistic forms, and building practices from antiquity to modern day. The stories of influence told in these pages suggest that it is the unbridgeable gulf between the Vitruvian text and surviving monuments that makes reading the Ten Books so endlessly compelling. The contributors to this volume offer their own, original readings, which are organized into the five sections: transmission; translation; reception; practice; and Vitruvian topics.
A historical study of Vitruvius's De architectura, showing that his purpose in writing "the whole body of architecture" was shaped by the imperial Roman project of world domination. Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time. Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose rise to power inspired its composition near the end of the first century B.C. McEwen argues that the imperial project of world dominion shaped Vitruvius's purpose in writing what he calls "the whole body of architecture." Specifically, Vitruvius's aim was to present his discipline as the means for making the emperor's body congruent with the imagined body of the world he would rule. Each of the book's four chapters treats a different Vitruvian "body." Chapter 1, "The Angelic Body," deals with the book as a book, in terms of contemporary events and thought, particularly Stoicism and Stoic theories of language. Chapter 2, "The Herculean Body," addresses the book's and its author's relation to Augustus, whose double Vitruvius means the architect to be. Chapter 3, "The Body Beautiful," discusses the relation of proportion and geometry to architectural beauty and the role of beauty in forging the new world order. Finally, Chapter 4, "The Body of the King," explores the nature and unprecedented extent of Augustan building programs. Included is an examination of the famous statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, sculpted soon after the appearance of De architectura.
During the sixteenth century Antwerp was at the forefront of the Renaissance north of the Alps. Not only a new architectural style flourished in the Antwerp metropolis, but at the end of the sixteenth century sciences such as mathematics, optics, geometry and perspective became more and more important. They helped to redefine architecture and the other fine arts on a more scientific base. Their introduction in the arts at the beginning of the seventeenth century lead to new experiences, applications and even innovations in architecture. The Jesuit Order played a very crucial rule in this process. The realization of their new church in the centre of the city of Antwerp became one of the first attempts to bring together the applications of all those new ideas in one total project. Paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and sculptures by Hieronymus Duquenoy, Artus Quellinus etc. were participating in one of the first Early Baroque architectural realizations in the Low Countries. The Jesuit Church of Antwerp, actually the St Carolus Borromeus Church, was designed by Francois d'Aguilon, a scientist and architect of the Jesuit Order. His publication Opticorum Libri sex on optics and on the reflection of light was edited by the Officina Plantiniana in 1613, the same year he started his project for the church. This scientific and theoretical work helps us to understand the new experiences with light and space he experimented with. It is the aim of this publication to bring together researchers to confront the results of their studies about the interpretation of the facade of this Counter-Reformation church, the phenomenon of diffuse light created by reflection and refraction on marble statues, pillars and multiple ornaments, the combination of linear and parallel perspective applications, the sacral and social use of space, the signification of the facade and towers as parts of a perspective scene in the city landscape and the relationship of Rubens's paintings with the Baroque interior. Special attention is also devoted to the School of Mathematics, installed in Antwerp by the Jesuits at that time. The central question will be whether we can conclude that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the innovative sense of creating a new architecture, so typical for the sixteenth century in Antwerp, still persisted in this city during the early seventeenth century, and even lead to a new interpretation of architectural space in European context."
This book brings to light central topics that are neglected in current histories and theories of architecture and urbanism. These include the role of imitation in earlier centuries and its potential role in present practice; the necessary relationship between architecture, urbanism and the rural districts; and their counterpart in the civil order that builds and uses what is built. The narrative traces two models for the practice of architecture. One follows the ancient model in which the architect renders his service to serve the interests of others; it survives and is dominant in modernism. The other, first formulated in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti, has the architect use his talent in coordination with others to contribute to the common good of a republican civil order that seeks to protect its own liberty and that of its citizens. Palladio practiced this way, and so did Thomas Jefferson when he founded a uniquely American architecture, the counterpart to the nation’s founding. This narrative gives particular emphasis to the contrasting developments in architecture on the opposite sides of the English Channel. The book presents the value for clients and architects today and in the future of drawing on history and tradition. It stresses the importance, indeed, the urgency, of restoring traditional practices so that we can build just, beautiful, and sustainable cities and rural districts that will once again assist citizens in living not only abundantly but also well as they pursue their happiness.
