The Ten Books on Architecture

PREFACE.

...that the precepts of this excellent Author, whom critics place in the first rank of the great minds of antiquity, were absolutely necessary to guide those who desire to perfect themselves in this Art, by establishing—through the great authority his writings have always held—the true rules of the beautiful and the perfect in Buildings. For Beauty having hardly any other foundation than fancy original: "fantaisie." Perrault suggests that because aesthetic taste is subjective and changeable, formal rules are required to provide a stable definition of "perfection.", which causes things to please according to how they conform to the idea each person has of their perfection, one needs rules that form and rectify this Idea. It is certain that these rules are so necessary in all things that if Nature refuses them to some—as she has done with language, the characters of writing, clothing, and everything that depends on chance, will, and custom—then human institution must provide them, and for that purpose, a certain authority must be agreed upon to take the place of positive reason.

Now, the great authority of Vitruvius Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman architect whose 1st-century BC treatise is the only major work on architecture to survive from antiquity. is not only founded on the veneration held for Antiquity, nor on all the other reasons that lead one to value things through prejudice. It is true that his status as Architect to Julius Caesar and Augustus, and the reputation of the century in which he lived—where it is believed everything attained its ultimate perfection—must lead one to presume much of the merit of his work. But it must be admitted that the great competence with which this excellent man treats an infinity of different subjects, and the judicious care he employed in choosing and collecting them from a great number of Authors whose writings are lost, gives the learned good reason to regard this book as a singular piece and an inestimable treasure.

But unfortunately, this treasure has always been hidden under such a great obscurity of language, and the difficulty of the subjects this book treats has rendered it so impenetrable, that many have judged it altogether useless to Architects. Indeed, most of the things it contains, being as little understood as they are, needed a clearer and more exact explanation than the text which remains to us. For the Author did not strive so much to make it clear as to make it succinct, in the confidence he had that the figures original: "figures." Vitruvius originally included diagrams and illustrations to clarify his technical descriptions, but these did not survive the Middle Ages. he had added would sufficiently explain the matters and supply what appeared to be lacking in the language.

Now, these figures were lost through the negligence of the early Copyists Scribes who transcribed manuscripts by hand; Perrault blames their lack of technical drawing skills for the loss of the essential visual aids. who did not know how to draw and who, moreover, likely did not judge them to be entirely necessary. Because the sight of these figures having instructed them in the very things spoken of in the text, the text seemed intelligible enough to them; just as it always happens that one understands well what is said, however obscurely, when the things themselves are clear. Thus, it was almost impossible for those who subsequently copied the versions where there were no figures not to have made many mistakes, writing things they did not understand at all. And one should also not be surprised that today the most enlightened—who lack not only the figures but, if one may say so, the text itself—have such difficulty finding good sense in many places where the change or transposition of a word, or even just a period or a comma, was capable of entirely corrupting the discourse. This discourse has been all the more subject to irreparable corruption because its subject matter is more prone to it than any other; for in Treatises on Morality or in...