BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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Transcribed version of the text

French

The De architectura of Vitruvius was published in Venice in 1511 by Giovanni da Tridentino, also known as Tacuino. This very fine folio edition established by Fra Giovanni Giocondo (c.1435-1515) marked a milestone, for the text the man from Verona put forward was considerably modified compared with those of the first three editions (Rome c. 1486, Venice 1495 and Florence 1496). It included one hundred thirty-six woodcuts, since the illustrations of the original treatise were lost. At the twilight of his life, Giocondo, a renowned engineer, familiar with the technical and scientific texts of the Ancients, but all the same a competent philologue and informed epigraphist, and what is more an excellent connoisseur of ruins, brought his multiple abilities to making an incomplete and not easily accessible text easier to understand. The humanist-architect wanted to render the Vitruvian text readable, that is to say comprehensible and therefore usable by scholars as well as by artisans. To this end he added a valuable lexicon at the end of the work.
Giocondo’s meticulous corrections have often been retained by modern editors. The illustrations of books III and IV devoted to temples and their decorations, that is to say columns and their entablatures, like those of book VI on the house, constituted a precious commentary of the text which would influence Vitruvian studies for the long term. For example, the plate of folio 37 circulated the motif of the bucrane in the Doric frieze, whose decoration Vitruvius had not described. Always concerned with rendering the De architectura more accessible, Fra Giocondo completed the Vitruvian instructions in proposing an entablature model identical to that of the theatre of Verona, with which he was well acquainted, in which the triglyphs alternate with metopes embellished with bucranes and patera, not described by the Roman architect and rarely used in the antique monuments of Rome with the exception of the Æmilia basilica, destroyed at the beginning of the 16^th century. The Veronian’s model would be followed by almost all of the theoreticians of the Cinquecento; one finds it again in the Medidas del Romano of Diego de Sangredo (Toledo, 1526), as in the series of plates engraved by Agostino Veneziano published by Serlio in Venice in 1528 and in his Regole generali (1537). It was then sanctioned by Philandrier in 1544, Vignola in 1562 and Palladio in 1570.
The Vitruvius of 1511 was re-edited in an octavo volume in Florence, with a few variations, by Filippo Giunta in 1513 and in 1522 by his heirs. These three editions were widely circulated and fell in the hands of architects like Antonio da Sangallo as well as humanists like Guillaume Philandrier. The Vitruvius edition published in Lyon by the Gabianos in 1523 drew its inspiration directly from them, in copying a certain number of illustrations, for example.

Frédérique Lemerle (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours– 2006)

Critical bibliography

L. A. Ciapponi, "Fra Giocondo da Verona and his Edition of Vitruvius", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 47, 1984, pp. 72-90.

Vitruvius, De architectura, under the direction of P. Gros, translation and commentary by A. Corso and E. Romano, Torino, Einaudi, 1997, 2 vols.

F. Lemerle, Les Annotations de Guillaume Philandrier sur le De architectura de Vitruve, Books I to IV, Introduction, translation and commentary, Paris, Picard, 2000, pp. 25-27.

F. Lemerle, "Le bucrane dans la frise dorique à la Renaissance: un motif véronais", Annali di architettura, 8, 1996, pp. 85-92.

P. N. Pagliara, "Vitruvio, da testo a canone", Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3, Turin, Einaudi, 1986, pp. 33-37.

P. N. Pagliara, "Le De architectura de Vitruve édité par Fra Giocondo, à Venise en 1511", S. Deswarte-Rosa (ed.), Sebastiano Serlio à Lyon. Architecture et imprimerie, Lyon, Mémoire Active, 2004, pp. 348-354.