The only complete treatise on architecture to survive from antiquity. Dedicated to Augustus, it covers everything an architect of the Roman world had to know, from the education of the architect and the siting of cities to temples, the orders, theatres, baths, houses, water, sundials and war machines.
Marcus Vitruvius Pollio served as a military engineer under Julius Caesar and wrote his ten books when he was an old man, in the first years of Augustus’s reign. He was not a famous architect (the only building he tells us he designed, a basilica at Fano, has vanished), but because his book is the only one of its kind to survive, it became the foundation of every later theory of architecture in the West.
His most quoted idea is the triad of firmitas, utilitas, venustas: a building must be sound, useful and beautiful. His most influential pages are those on proportion (Book III), where he derives the proportions of temples from the proportions of the human body, and on the orders (Books III–IV), where he gives the heights, spacings and mouldings of the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan columns in terms of a single module.
The manuscripts lost their illustrations in the Middle Ages. When Renaissance architects rediscovered the text (Poggio Bracciolini found a copy at St Gall in 1416), they had to reconstruct the figures from the words, and the argument about what Vitruvius really meant produced the great illustrated treatises of Alberti, Serlio, Vignola and Palladio.
The book, part by part
I Book I: The architect, the city
The education of the architect, who must know drawing, geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law and astronomy. The six principles of architecture (order, arrangement, eurythmy, symmetry, propriety, economy) and the triad of durability, convenience and beauty. The healthy siting of cities, the walls, the eight winds and the laying out of streets to shelter them.
Rules: Firmness, commodity and delight · The six principles of design · Streets turned away from the winds
II Book II: Materials
The origin of building in the primitive hut and the discovery of fire; brick, sand, lime, pozzolana, stone; the methods of building walls (opus reticulatum, incertum, Greek masonry); timber and the seasons for felling it.
III Book III: Temples and symmetry
Symmetry derived from the proportions of the human body: the famous “Vitruvian man” who fits a circle and a square. The classes of temples by the arrangement of their columns, the five intercolumniations, the diminution of columns, and the proportions of the Ionic order.
Rules: The five intercolumniations · Diminution: the taller the column, the less it tapers · Twice as many intercolumniations on the flanks · The height of the pediment
IV Book IV: The orders
The origins of the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders and the story of Callimachus and the acanthus basket. The proportions of Doric temples in modules, the cella and pronaos, the orientation of temples, doorways, the Tuscan temple and circular temples.
Rules: The Doric module · The Corinthian capital · The Tuscan column
V Book V: Public buildings
The forum and basilica, the treasury, prison and senate house; the theatre, its harmonics and its plan drawn from four equilateral triangles inscribed in a circle; baths, palaestra and harbours.
VI Book VI: Private houses
How climate shapes houses in different lands; the proportions of the Roman atrium, the peristyle, dining rooms and libraries; the Greek house; foundations and substructures.
VII Book VII: Finishes
Floors, stucco, wall painting (and a complaint about the fantastical fashion of his day), pigments and colours.
VIII Book VIII: Water
Finding water, its properties, levelling instruments and aqueducts, wells and cisterns.
IX Book IX: Astronomy and sundials
The zodiac, planets and the analemma used to lay out sundials; water clocks. Includes the story of Archimedes and the crown.
X Book X: Machines
Hoisting machines, water wheels and pumps, the water organ, the hodometer, catapults, ballistae and siege engines.