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Updated: June 8, 2025
REFERENCES. Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art; Muller's Remains of Ancient Art; A. J. Guattani, Antiq. de la Grande Grece; Mazois, Antiq. de Pomp.; Sir W. Gill, Pompeiana; Donaldson's Antiquities of Athens; Vitruvius, Stuart, Chandler, Clarke, Dodwell, Cleghorn, De Quincey. These are some of the innumerable authorities on Architecture among the ancients.
Vitruvius relates that the architect Dinocrates proposed to Alexander the Great to carve Mount Athos in such a way as to give it the shape of a man, whose one hand should support an entire city, and whose other should carry a cup which received all the waters from the mountain, and from which they overflowed into the sea.
The statements given by Homer, Aristotle, and Vitruvius represent six feet as a high standard for full-grown men; and the irrefutable evidence of the ancient doorways, bedsteads, and tombs proves the average size of the race to have certainly not diminished in modern days.
There, loosed from every tie which had hitherto restrained him, and having little to hope or to fear from courts and churches, he began his long war against all that, whether for good or evil, had authority over man; for what Burke said of the Constituent Assembly was eminently true of this its great forerunner: Voltaire could not build; he could only pull down; he was the very Vitruvius of ruin.
His style is affectedly terse, and so much so as to be frequently obscure. The contents of his book are very briefly as follows: " II. On the proper materials to be used in building, preceded, like several of Pliny's books, by a quasi-philosophical digression on the origin and early history of man the progress of art Vitruvius gives his views on the nature of matter.
Now he had become such that he was held to be the most excellent of the modern architects in the city of Florence, seeing that he had good judgment in choosing sites, and showed that he had an intellect more lofty than that of many others who were engaged in that profession; for it was evident from his works how good an imitator he was of antiquities, and how closely he had observed the rules of Vitruvius and the works of Filippo di Ser Brunellesco.
The practice of stripping living trees of their bark some years before they are felled, is as old as the time of Vitruvius, but is much less followed than it deserves, partly because the timber of trees so treated inclines to crack and split, and partly because it becomes so hard as to be wrought with considerable difficulty.
About the same time a palace had been built for Cardinal Silvio Passerini of Cortona, half a mile beyond the city, by Benedetto Caporali, a painter of Perugia, who, delighting in architecture, had written a commentary on Vitruvius a short time before; and the said Cardinal determined to have almost the whole of it painted.
Alberti's Treatise on the Art of Building is a sufficient proof of their study of Vitruvius, and we know that Fabio Calvi translated that writer into Italian for Raphael. In the later Renaissance this study passed into purism. It must be confessed that this grandiose and picturesque structure is but a shell to mask an earlier Gothic edifice. Compare Vol.
In the reprint of Cesariano's "Comments on Vitruvius," by G. B. Caporali. The passage is quoted in Vermiglioli's "Memorie di Pintorricchio" , pp. 5 and 6. Vasari, iv. 329.
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