Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Chapter III. Of Stones
STONES are either natural, or artificially made by the industry of men. The former are taken out of quarries, and serve to make lime (of which more hereafter) and also to raise walls. Those of which walls are commonly made, are marble and hard stone, also called live stone; or soft, and tender.
Marble and live fone ought to be wrought as soon as they are taken out of the quarry, which then may be done with much more ease than after they have continued some time exposed to the air. But the softer kind must be dug in summer, and placed under 2 proper helter for the space of two years before they are used, that they may more gradually harden, being thus defended from high winds, rain, and frosts (especially when the nature of the stone is not well known, or if it be dug out of a place that never was open’d before) by which means they will be made much sitter to refill the inclemencies of the weather.
The reason for keeping them so long is, that being sorted, those which have received damage, may be placed in the foundations; and the others, which have not been injured, should be used above ground: and thus they will last a long time,
Tuk stones artificially made are commonly called quadretli, or bricks, from their shape. These ought to be made of a chalky, whitish, and soft earth, dug up in autumn, and temper’d in winter, that, in the spring following, it may the more conveniently be work’d up into bricks; always avoiding that earth that is over fat or sandy. But if necessity obliges to make them in the winter or sammer time, they must carefully be cover'd during the former season with dry sand, and in the latter with straw. When made, they require a long time to dry; for which reason a good shelter is the most proper place, to cause the outside and inside to dry or harden equally, which can’t be accomplished in les than two years.
An as bricks are made either larger or smaller, according to the quality of the building, and their intended use; so the antients made them larger for publick and great buildings than for small and private ones; and therefore holes ought to be made here and there through the larger, that they may dry and burn the better.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.