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Updated: June 8, 2025
But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.
Probus now passed me, and said: 'If I should not see you in the Eastern capital, according to my purpose, I trust I shall in Rome. My dwelling is in the Livian way not far from the Pantheon, opposite the well-known house of Vitruvius, still so called; or, at the shop of the learned Publius, I may be seen every morning, and may there be always heard of.
Vitruvius, the greatest authority among the ancients, says that "the Greeks, in inventing these two kinds of columns, imitated in the one the naked simplicity and aspects of a man, and in the other the delicacy and ornaments of a woman, whose ringlets appear in the volutes of the capital."
Vitruvius, after going through the many accomplishments of nature, and the many acquirements of learning, necessary to an architect, proceeds with great gravity to assert that he ought to be well skilled in the civil law, that he may not be cheated in the title of the ground he builds on.
According to Vitruvius, Pisistratus, who flourished about B. C. 555, employed the four Grecian architects, Antistates, Antimachides, Calleschros, and Porinus, to erect this famous temple in the place of one built in the time of Deucalion, which the storms of a thousand years had destroyed.
From what he saw during his visit, Strabo conjectured the Mountain to be an extinct volcano, in which surmise he was destined to be proved partly in the right and partly in the wrong; whilst Vitruvius, the famous architect of the Emperor Augustus, “who found Rome of brick and left it of marble,” as well as Tacitus the historian, shared the same opinion.
What a joyful sense of freedom we have when Vitruvius announces the old opinion of artists that no architect can build any house well who does not know something of anatomy.
The senate, being consulted with respect to Vitruvius and the Privernians, sent directions, that the consul Plautius should demolish the walls of Privernum, and, leaving a strong garrison there, come home to enjoy the honour of a triumph; at the same time ordering that Vitruvius should be kept in prison, until the return of the consul, and that he should then be beaten with rods, and put to death.
Another, Hans Fredeman, the famous trick painter who painted some columns on the frame of a drawing-room door so cleverly that Charles V. turned round to look as soon as he had entered, and thought that the walls had suddenly closed behind him by enchantment, this Hans Fredeman, who painted palisades that made people turn back, doors which people attempted to open, owed his fortune to a book on architecture by Vitruvius which he obtained by chance from a carpenter.
The latter supposition receives some confirmation from Vitruvius, a Roman writer on architecture of the age of Augustus, and seems to some modern writers to be demanded by aesthetic considerations. On the other hand, the evidence of the Olympia buildings points the other way. Perhaps the actual practice varied.
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