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Of the classic authority of Roman Architecture almost nothing is known. His date has been placed under Augustus and under Titus, and the latter supposition has caused him to be misplaced after Columella. But the Emperor to whom he dedicated his treatise is clearly Augustus, and he seems to have written it a little before the Christian era. He was probably born about 76 B.C., a native of Latium, of respectable origin, and received a sound education. He wrote on military engineering, and was appointed by Augustus to a permanent office as surveyor of engines. He did little in the practice of his profession as architect, in which apparently he had little success. But he devoted the latter half of his life to a systematic treatise de Architectura, in which he discussed, with great precision and detail, both the theory and practice of the architect's art. In it he cites and comments on many Greek writers, and treats his own work as a systematic compendium of previous knowledge.
He begins by discussing the education of the architect, the various branches of science which are applied in the art, and the proper distribution of a well-arranged city. He then discusses the proper materials for building, and the methods of working them. He classifies buildings according to the arrangement of the columns, and the various orders. He describes in minute detail the proper proportions and plan of public and of private buildings, the theory of ornamentation, and the materials in use. He then treats of Hydrostatics, of practical astronomy, and mechanics. His science is very much inferior to his practical knowledge of his own art. The work as a whole is the foundation of almost all we know about ancient art, and has had immense popularity and a permanent influence on the practice of architecture. It is characteristic of the Roman genius for social organization, that in spite of the immeasurable superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, both in artistic ingenuity and in exact science, the development of Architecture to meet the growing needs of civilization came from Rome and not from Greece. And it is to a Roman and not to a Greek that we owe all our real knowledge of ancient buildings, and from Vitruvius has been derived the whole of the constructive art which in modern Europe is known as Classical Architecture. Bramante, Michelangelo, Palladio, and other founders of Renaissance architecture were careful students of Vitruvius.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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