Odds are at some point in time you have heard of, or seen, Leonardo da Vinci’s famed drawing, Vitruvian Man. The drawing depicts a nude man in two superimposed positions, one with legs together and arms straight out and the other with legs spread apart and arms raised. Surrounding the figure, you see both a square and a circle. It is a depiction of the natural proportions of the human body. What you may not have known about this image is that it was directly inspired (and named after) the 1st century Roman Architect, Vitruvius.
While not much is known of Vitruvius’s life outside of his role as an engineer in the Roman army, his impact on architecture is impossible to deny. In roughly 30-20 B.C. (although the time frame is unclear, and sometimes contested) Vitruvius authored De Architectura, the first known book on architectural theory and the only one to survive from the classical antiquity era (8th century – 5th Century BC). De Architecura is a collection of 10 books, spanning Roman town building, the orders of architecture, government buildings, residential buildings and much more. It is from this document that we get the “Vitruvian Triad”, Vitruvius’s assertion that any good structure must have firmitatis, utilitatis and venustatis (stability, utility and beauty), an ideal that is as relatable today as it was in his time.
While manuscripts of De Architectura were collected, translated, studied and referenced during the middle ages it was truly Italian Scholar Poggio Bracciolini’s “rediscovery” of the document in 1416 that is credited with the lasting impact of the document. Bracciolini spent many years searching for, and bringing to light, forgotten documents. It was during these searches that he came across De Architecturaat the abbey library of Saint Gall in Switzerland. This document, along with many others, were then copied and met with great fervor from the Renaissance thinkers of the time and leading directly to the rebirth of classical architecture.
While De Architectura does cover several important and awe-inspiring Roman and Greek inventions and innovations throughout its 10 books, this series of posts will be focusing primarily on books 3 and 4, which outline the different Greek and Roman orders of architecture, which has a large focus on column sizes and designs. The 3 Greek orders include Doric, Ionic and Corinthian and the 2 Roman orders are Tuscan and Composite, these 5 orders encompass what many of us think of when we hear the word “column.” In these books Vitruvius details the importance of proportion and the impact it plays on our perception, and in doing so outlines one of his most famous ideas, that proportion of Architecture should be directly inspired by the proportion of the human body, and that architecture is an imitation of nature. This idea is what led directly to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
While he may not be as well-known as some other ancient thinkers, his writings have undoubtedly had one of the biggest impacts and are still implemented in buildings today. If Frank Lloyd Wright is the father of Architecture, Vitruvius is its great-great-great-great-great-great (you get the idea) Grandfather.
Sources
