De Architectura
De Architectura
Good architecture rests on three inseparable qualities, structural durability, functional convenience, and visual beauty, and a properly trained architect needs broad education across many fields, not just building craft, to achieve all three together.
- firmness, utility, and beauty as architecture's three requirements
- architect's education defined as broad and interdisciplinary
- only complete surviving architectural treatise from antiquity
- direct source for Leonardo's Vitruvian Man and Renaissance architectural theory
The only complete architectural treatise to survive from classical antiquity, dedicated to Augustus and covering city planning, building materials, temple design and the classical orders, private houses, water supply, and mechanical devices across ten books, drawing on Vitruvius's own experience as a military engineer under Caesar as well as earlier lost Greek architectural writers. Vitruvius insists an architect needs training in drawing, geometry, history, philosophy, music, medicine, law, and astronomy, an ideal of broad education that Renaissance readers, when the manuscript resurfaced and was printed in the fifteenth century, took as license to make architecture a liberal art rather than mere craft. The treatise's proportional theory of the human body inscribed in circle and square directly inspired Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
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