Ten Books on Architecture (De Architectura)

Mercurialis, therefore, ought to have dealt more gently with this writer, rather than imitating the corrupt and unjust dispositions of certain men who not only fail to praise those from whom they profit—as if to acknowledge a benefit—but rather pick at, disapprove of, and pursue them with curses. Thus, that book was held in the hands of learned men in that earlier age, and not without praise for its author; in the later age, however, when the finest arts lay buried in neglect and squalor, it also lay idle, destined to perish, had not certain most learned and scholarly men rescued it from darkness and oblivion. The first, or nearly so, to lay pious hands upon it was Iocundus Veronensis Fra Giocondo of Verona, a priest and also an architect of no small reputation in his own time. Guilielmus Budaeus Guillaume Budé used him as a master in reading this author, a fact he left recorded in more detail in his Annotations on the Pandects, where he discusses the fuggrundatione eaves/overhangs. For, having cited a passage from Vitruvius there, he continues:

These words are read most erroneously in printed books, as is almost that entire treatise on architecture consisting of ten books: wherefore it is read by very few, being otherwise also very difficult to understand, and—as the tragic poet Euripides said of the book of Heraclitus, surnamed the Obscure—it requires a Delian swimmer meaning a profound interpreter who can master the "depths" of the text. For in that obscurity of things and words, the intellect is not insignificantly overwhelmed, just as a swimmer is submerged when swallowed by a turbulent strait.

So says he, and he soon adds:

For us, however, it happened during that reading that we obtained an excellent teacher, the priest Iocundus, then royal architect, a man most expert in antiquity, who provided things to be understood not only through words but also through drawing: at which time, with his most kindly assistance, we amended our Vitruvius and several other ancient writers.

Thus far the distinguished man, praiseworthy for the virtue of a grateful spirit. Furthermore, we do not deny that Iocundus accomplished something in illustrating this author, yet it was little, which is easily gathered even from his editions, one of which he dedicated to Iuliano Medices Giuliano de' Medici, printed in Florence. Around the same time, Caesar Caesarianus Cesare Cesariano of Milan undertook the same province; an architect by way of a painter, and, as he himself affirms, a student of our Bramante: indeed here, not very happily, as