#vitruvius

With regard to astrology, Vitruvius’ interest becomes outwardly visible in his discussion of sundials, instruments through which “the east and the west, the south, the north, and the turning of the heavens” may be discerned. Without such knowledge, he observes, “the rules of sundials cannot be understood in any way.” His decision to close the chapter with a programmatic declaration — “I promise, and I hope, to present them in these volumes with the greatest competence and without hesitation, not only to builders but also to all learned men” — reveals a broader ambition: Vitruvius does not address technicians alone, but outlines a dual vision of architecture, where practical knowledge intertwines with a speculative dimension intended for an educated audience.The rules governing sundials underscore their significance in an era that conceived these instruments as projections of the cosmos upon the earth. The shadow cast by a simple gnomon could define a space in correspondence with the planets and in harmony with the “music of numbers” sustaining the geometry of architectural works. Vitruvius consistently preserves this cosmic dimension, much like the priests of Alexandria, who impressed upon the world a trace of their knowledge — a trace that later became a pillar of our cultural tradition.Ultimately, the interaction between arts and sciences, understood as a synthesis of human expression, finds full justification in Vitruvius’ work, albeit across centuries and not without interpretive challenges. The deciphering of hidden terminologies remains an obstacle to the immediate use of his notions, yet it does not diminish the theoretical scope of a work that, despite its fragmentary nature, preserves a complex vision of architectural practice, where technical knowledge rests upon a symbolic and cosmological substratum.

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

Poetry and spirituality remain, for the architects of the period, ideal horizons systematically removed, as if they belonged to a region of the intellect that normative practice does not dare to cross. Vitruvius, fully aware of the political fragility of his position, chooses to suspend these dimensions, shifting them to the margins of his discourse: not because he ignores their auric potency, but because he opts for a form of knowledge more easily acceptable to patrons and rulers who are little inclined to engage with speculative or ritual domains.Within this framework, medical knowledge is not a disciplinary ornament but a physiological necessity of construction. Climatic conditions, the orientation of places, and the healthfulness of sites become vital parameters. Vitruvius is firm, almost indisputable, when he states that without such knowledge no healthy dwelling can be built. Medicine, therefore, is not a parallel body of knowledge but an internal organ of architecture, one of its corporeal extensions.Similarly, law is treated through a practical, undogmatic approach. The entire treatise is traversed by an encyclopedic tension, a movement that seeks to provide useful and operative competencies while also veiling, with discretion, forms of knowledge perhaps not fully mastered, though clearly present within the author’s cultural horizon. Vitruvius thus constructs a text that is at once a technical manual and an atlas of collateral knowledge, where what cannot be fully articulated is nonetheless allowed to surface—like a symbolic substratum sustaining the visible structure of the treatise ...

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

To arithmetic, Vitruvius assigns the task of calculating expenses and explaining the ratios of measurements: a use far removed from the Pythagorean physicality of number, yet perfectly aligned with the technical dimensions of architectural practice. History, on the other hand, must be known by architects, since “they often draw numerous ornaments in their works, for which they must give an account to those who inquire about them.” Yet Vitruvius’ statements seem to refer not only to ornaments, but to architecture itself. The continuous historical references scattered throughout the treatise reveal a broader conception of the term and of its motivations.The same occurs with philosophy: Vitruvius mentions its use to explain the nature of things, indicating, for example, the conduction of water and its natural impulses, “for which no remedy can be found except by one who knows through philosophy the principles of the nature of things.” Here philosophy is not an abstract knowledge, but a science of causality, a grammar of the world that enables the architect to understand what operates within matter and landscape. From these statements it becomes clear that Vitruvius veils the true meaning of the arts and sciences beneath an apparent practical utility. He includes within the domain of architecture even those disciplines that do not immediately offer a functional or rationalizable outcome: just like history, which at first glance appears ornamental, yet in reality contains an ethical and political admonition for the architect and for those who contemplate his works.Architecture, in his system, is not merely technique: it is memory, judgment, cosmology.

And every art summoned in the treatise—arithmetic, history, philosophy—becomes part of a single operation of reconnection between form, world, and destiny.

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

In Book I, Vitruvius states that “various aids are offered by Geometry to architecture,” since it teaches the use of the straightedge and the compass, instruments through which one can trace with precision the plans, the perpendiculars, the levelings, the parallels; and likewise, through Optics, light is correctly guided into buildings according to the regions of the sky from which it descends. In this initial formulation, Vitruvius appears as a simple operator, a geometer who employs the instruments of measurement to render the project. The reference to the etymology of geometry, rooted in the practices of the Egyptian land‑surveyors who, after the inundations of the Nile, re‑established boundaries and perimeters, confirms this technical, almost ritual dimension of measuring the earth in order to recompose a disrupted order.Yet geometry is not merely an operative apparatus: it is the symbolic matrix through which architecture is bound to the cosmos. The geometric forms of the circle, the square, the triangle, their commensurations and reciprocal ratios, become for Vitruvius ideal schemata, devices capable of linking the human being to the heavens, astrology to the world, the city to its cosmic image.

It is in this sense that he can affirm that “through geometric methods one discovers the arduous questions of symmetries”: geometry is not only a tool of measurement, but a revealer of hidden proportions, of the correspondences between body and temple, between city and universe. It is the science that allows dispositio to become order, symmetria to become organism, eurhythmia to become rhythm incarnated in space.Thus geometry appears as an art of reconnection:

a technique that becomes cosmology,

a measure that becomes vision,

a drawing that becomes rite ...

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

Hercules, engraving by Giorgio Ghisi (1520 — 15 December 1582) after Giovanni Battista Bertani, 1558. Title: Gli oscuri et dificili passi dell'opera ionica di Vitruvio. Di latino volgare et alla chiara inteligentia tradotti. (The dark and difficult passages of Vitruvian's Ionic work. From Latin vulgar and to the clear intelligentia translated.) Description: Book ; Ornament and architecture; Books ; Date: 1558 ; Medium: Printed book with woodcut illustrations and engraved frontispiece ; Dimensions: 15 1/2 x 10 1/4 x 11/16 in. (39.4 x 26.1 x 1.7 cm) ; Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art ; Current location: Drawings and Prints ; Accession number: 38.27 ; Credit line: Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1938.

Perspective as Pre‑Vision: Vitruvius, the Basilica of Fano, and the Thought of Space

Ancient perspective cannot be understood as an evolutionary line culminating in the Renaissance, but rather as a symbolic form: a way of articulating the relationship between vision and space that the ancients developed according to logics different from the mathematical ones of Alberti and Piero della Francesca. In this framework, the absence of a geometric treatment in the De architectura does not imply an absence of perspectival thought; instead, it indicates an operative mode of conceiving figuration, understood as a tension between plane and depth, between image and construction. Vitruvius’ mention of “figurations on a flat plane that now seem to recede, now to project” and his reference to Agatharchus attest to the existence of a scenographic tradition that must have been familiar to Roman architects. For Vitruvius, perspective is not a system: it is a device of pre‑vision, a graphic act that anticipates space before it is built.

The discovery of the Basilica of Fano in 2026, the only work for which Vitruvius explicitly claims authorship, now provides material confirmation of this conception. The columns unearthed, corresponding to the proportions described in Book V, show that Vitruviian theory was not an abstract exercise but a constructive thought rooted in practice. The building, which for two thousand years existed only as a theoretical body, now reemerges as evidence of an original relationship between mental image, graphic sign, and real space. This relationship between vision, drawing, and construction continues to challenge contemporary reflection, from phenomenology to parametric design, showing that Vitruvian figuration does not belong solely to the past but still constitutes an operative horizon for understanding how architecture thinks and produces space.

Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Notes from a Future Past

Filippo Lo Presti, 2026

The architect, according to Vitruvius, must “possess drawing, so as to present through figures the appearance he wishes to give to his works”; and yet, for us contemporaries, this prescription remains partly opaque. Both the drawings that accompanied the De architectura and the remains of the Basilica of Fano, Vitruvius’ only certainly attributable work, and thus the sole possible material evidence of his graphic practice, have in fact been lost. Of particular interest, in this regard, is the proem of Book VII, where an explicit mention of perspective appears or rather, in Vitruvius’ words, of “figurations on a flat plane that now seem to recede, now to project.” The reference to Agatharchus, who in Athens painted the theatrical scene “while Aeschylus was directing the performance of one of his tragedies,” has often been judged by scholars too vague to constitute reliable testimony. It has thus been supposed that the ancients did not possess a true notion of perspective. But doubting the report is equally problematic: in the fifth century BCE, in fact, an initial awareness of perspective emerges, received by philosophers and artists, even though mathematical science had not yet formalized its principles. No explicit mention of perspectival scenography is found in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, or Aristophanes; nevertheless, one cannot exclude that Agatharchus’ attempt, perhaps isolated or experimental, found some continuation in Italic contexts. Up to Vitruvius’ time, Roman theatres did not have a fixed architectural stage: the need for a painted scenography was therefore even more essential than in the theatres of the Hellenic world, where architectural backdrops had progressively taken shape.Within this framework, Vitruvius’ citation should not be interpreted as a mere anecdote, but as an indication of the continuity of a graphic and scenographic tradition which, though not systematized, must have been known to Roman architects. It confirms that drawing, for Vitruvius, was not a simple illustrative tool, but a technical‑intellectual device capable of anticipating, through figures, the construction of space: a kind of pre‑vision, an act of projection.

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989

According to Vitruvius, the architect must possess knowledge of letters, for only through writing can concepts be firmly fixed in memory. He himself admits that he intends to present the sections of his treatise “as best he could,” adopting an almost encyclopedic form despite a language that is at times awkward. When he addresses the subject of architecture, the discipline he knew most intimately, he speaks as a builder rather than as an artist, with the concrete outlook of someone who has direct experience of the construction site.The sixteenth‑century translator Daniele Barbaro captures this peculiarity well, noting: “Architecture is a Greek name composed of two words, the first meaning principal or chief, the second meaning craftsman or artificer; and whoever wished to express the force of this name in the vernacular would say capo maestra.” Not capomastro, therefore, but capo maestra, an expression that here may be understood as the head of the guild, the one who guides and coordinates the work of the craftsmen.We know little about Vitruvius’ education and erudition, except for what he himself hints at in his writing. It is nonetheless likely that he was a learned mason, a “finished craftsman” who, in his youth, had the privilege of listening to Cicero and encountering the thought of philosophers such as Thales, Heraclitus, Democritus, Pythagoras and Plato, figures who, though not architects, helped shape the body of knowledge considered essential for anyone wishing to devote themselves to the art of building.

Design of New Words

The Ideal Vitruvian Schemes

Filippo Lo Presti 1989