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So, before I say anything about architecture, I will state how a well-formed man should be made, and then about a woman, a child and a horse. Therefore, hear first of all what Vitruvius says about the human figure, which he learnt from the greatest masters, painters and founders, who were highly famed. They said that the human figure is as follows.
Vitruvius, in the chapter on music inserted in his treatise on architecture, complains that "the science of music, in itself obscure, is particularly so to such as understand not the Greek language." This observation shows the low state of music at Rome at that time; indeed Vitruvius is said to be the first who has treated of music in the Latin tongue.
By comparing the present remains with the precepts of Vitruvius, the several parts of the building, the baths, bed-chamber, the atrium, the basilica, and the Cyzicene, Corinthian, and Egyptian halls have been described with some degree of precision, or at least of probability.
Vitruvius, the greatest authority among the ancients in architecture, says that, "the Greeks, in inventing these two kinds of columns, imitated in the one the naked simplicity and dignity of a man, and in the other, the delicacy and ornaments of a woman; the base of the Ionic was the imitation of sandals, and the volutes of ringlets."
The speculative and therefore inoffensive topics of natural science were neither encouraged nor neglected by Augustus; Vitruvius, the architect, having showed some capacity for engineering, was kindly received by him, but his treatise, admirable as it is, does not seem to have secured him any special favour.
Previous to our description of this house, it may be as well to convey to the reader a general notion of the houses of Pompeii, which he will find to resemble strongly the plans of Vitruvius; but with all those differences in detail, of caprice and taste, which being natural to mankind, have always puzzled antiquaries.
VITRUVIUS pours forth a grateful prayer to the memory of his parents, who had instilled into his soul a love for literary and philosophical subjects; and it is an amiable trait in PLUTARCH to have introduced his father in the Symposiacs, as an elegant critic and moralist, and his brother Lamprias, whose sweetness of disposition, inclining to cheerful raillery, the Sage of Cheronæa has immortalised.
There are thus, to sum up the points to which we have alluded, three sorts of scars now disfiguring Gothic architecture; wrinkles and warts upon the epidermis these are the work of time; wounds, brutal injuries, bruises, and fractures these are the work of revolution, from Luther to Mirabeau; mutilations, amputations, dislocations of the frame, "restorations," these are the Greek, Roman barbaric work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignole.
The same year a war broke out with the people of Privernum; in which the people of Fundi were their supporters, their leader also being a Fundanian, Vitruvius Vaccus; a man of distinction not only at home, but in Rome also. He had a house on the Palatine hill, which, after the building was razed and the ground thrown open, was called the Vacciprata.
So that, if ever curious building did flourish in England, it is in these our years wherein our workmen excel and are in manner comparable in skill with old Vitruvius, Leo Baptista, and Serlo.
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