Ten Books on Architecture

TO THE BENEVOLENT READER.

We have no one among the Ancients, besides VITRUVIUS, who wrote expressly on ARCHITECTURE, a discipline truly most noble and most necessary in human life; he embraced its precepts in ten books by a certain peculiar and convenient method; which, as it appears, he had for the greatest part drawn from the monuments of other writers, especially the Greeks (wherefore his phrasing in many places is Grecized), and partly from his own observation and practice. Although it must be believed that this discipline was most cultivated in the age in which he wrote—as the remains of Temples, Buildings, Bridges, Arches, and Sepulchers, from which models precepts are derived today, also testify—nevertheless, as in other Arts and Sciences, the judgment and industry of the most expert Architects have added much in previous centuries and in our own as well, who yet most willingly acknowledge this VITRUVIUS as their master. For this reason, requested by Friends, I have attempted to produce a new and accurate edition of it; in which, since most learned men judged it so, I have followed the most accurate edition of Guillaume Philander, yet in such a way that I have added certain readings from old Manuscripts, not indeed in the Text itself, but to the margin, so that it might be whole for each to follow what he most approved. I have also added the notes and observations of Philander himself, yet in such a way that I have also intermixed the notes, corrections, and observations of other most learned men. At the front, moreover, I have placed a most learned and useful compendium of this discipline, prepared by the Illustrious Man, Mr. Wotton the Englishman. I have appended to Vitruvius himself and Philander’s Notes, the notes of the most learned Man, Marcus Meibomius, on certain places of Vitruvius which concern Music, as also those of the most learned Man, Nicolaus Goldmannus, on the restored Ionic Volute of Vitruvius: subsequently a Lexicon of terms of Vitru-