PREFACE.

IT will not be necessary for me (as it is for the majority of writers) to commend the subject upon which I have undertaken to treat. For Architecture cannot lack advocates as long as there shall be noble men and noble minds; wherefore, in this preface, I shall rather declare by whom I have profited, since I am merely a collector and arranger of the materials of others, for my own convenience. Our principal master is VITRUVIUS, and so I shall most frequently name him; to whom, indeed, this good fortune fell, that he wrote when the Roman Empire had nearly reached its zenith, or at least when Augustus (who favored his studies) had it in mind (if I am not mistaken) to circumscribe the Monarchy within its own limits. This, I say, was his good fortune; for in times that are still undergoing growth, the arts are, for the most part, overwhelmed by practice. Yet, on the other hand, he was in truth more unfortunate in that he expresses himself so poorly, especially writing, as he did, in an age most fertile in excellent authors. Through this obscurity, by a strange misfortune, it happened that although his own fellow citizens followed him most excellently in their works, nevertheless, after letters were revived and polished anew (which the calamities and tumults of the Middle Ages had confounded and turned into barbarism), he was better, or at least first, understood by foreigners. For the Italians, who were the first to turn their hands to him—those who were good grammarians appear to have been unskilled in mathematics, and those who were good mathematicians, ignorant of grammar—until both were sufficiently conjoined in Leon Battista Alberti the Florentine, whom I judge to be the first learned architect beyond the Alps; he, however, busied himself more with professing himself an author than with illuminating his master. Wherefore, among his commentators (in my opinion), one must attribute the first praise to Philandrus among the French, and to Walther Rivius among the Germans; who, besides his notes, gave to the public a most elaborate translation, such as does not easily exist in any other vernacular tongue of the whole world; although he laments several times in that work the lack of technical terms of the Art, as do I in my own; for if the Saxon tongue, the mother of our own, has complained, by the same right, in my judgment, its daughter must also: for languages, for the most part, suffer their natural poverty in the vocabulary of arts and sciences, even though they abound in phrases and similar flourishes. As for the more recent writers, who have written from mere practice, I shall give them what is theirs where the occasion arises. But now, after this brief critique of others, I would indeed like to satisfy one or two objections which seem to weigh more heavily upon myself: for it will be said that I am treating an Art, which