Andrea Palladio · The First Book
Advertisement (by the translator)
The plates are not reproduced here. This chapter begins on page 21 of the scan of the printed book.
THE works of the famous ANDREA Palladio, published by himself at Venice in the year 1570. have been universally esteemed the best standard of architecture hitherto extant. The original work written in Italian being very scarce, several have attempted to translate the same into English, and to copy his excellent and most accurate wooden prints on copper plates.
In particular, two persons have published what they honour with the title of Palladio’s works: The first, and in all respects the best of the two, was done in the year 1721. by Mr. Leoni; who has thought fit not only to vary from the scale of the originals, but also in many places to alter even the graceful proportions prescribed by this great master, by diminishing some of his measures, enlarging others, and putting in fanciful decorations of his own: and indeed his drawings are likewise very incorrect; which makes this performance, according to his own account in the preface, seem rather to be itself an original, than an improvement on Palladio.
The other work (published in the year 1735.) is done with so little understanding, and so much negligence, that it cannot but give great offence to the judicious, and be of very bad consequence in misleading the unskilful, into whose hands it may happen to fall.
To do justice therefore to Palladio, and to perpetuate his most valuable remains amongst us, are the principal inducements to my undertaking so great and laborious a work; in executing of which, I have strictly kept to his proportions and measures, by exactly tracing all the plates from his originals, and engraved them with my own hands: So that the reader may depend upon having an exact copy of what our author published, without diminution or increase; nor have I taken upon me to alter, much less to correct, any thing that came from the hands of that excellent artist.
From the same motive I have chosen to give a strict and literal translation, that the sense of our author might be delivered from his own words.
Scotland-Yard, June, 1737.
The plates and illustrations of the printed book are not reproduced here. To see them, open a scan of the book: Venice, 1570 (first edition); English translation by Nicholas Dubois, edited by Giacomo Leoni, London, 1721, vol. 1; English translation by Isaac Ware, London, 1738 (the edition of this text).
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). The whole text has then been proofread against the page images, page by page, and the OCR’s misreadings corrected (some 1,200 corrections, among them the italic prefaces, the Latin of Caesar in Book III and the inscriptions), and the corrections in Ware’s own list of errata have been made. 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.