Vitruvius & the Warlords

As perennial best sellers go, the treatise known as Ten Books on Architecture by the Roman writer Vitruvius is not, perhaps, the most predictable. It includes some gripping stories, certainly, many of them military, like the the Carian queen Artemisia’s surprise naval attack on Rhodes aboard the Rhodians’ own ships or the thwarted siege of the same city by the Macedonian general Demetrius Poliorcetes, the proverbial “Sacker of Cities,” whose gigantic war machine, the “City-seizer” (Helepolis), churns to an ignominious halt in a pool of muck created overnight by the mass emptying of Rhodian chamber pots.

These vignettes, however, are little gems inserted to brighten long passages about what kind of wood to use for different parts of a building, the proportions of temples, and the marvels of waterproof concrete, as well as instructions on how to build, among many other wonders and amenities, sundials, aqueducts, water clocks, and catapults. Its storehouse of practical information helped to ensure that Vitruvius’s handbook, written around 25 BCE, was one of the few ancient Greek and Latin works to survive what the fifteenth-century pundit Leon Battista Alberti called the “shipwreck” of the Middle Ages, along with the poetry of Vergil and Ovid, the prose of Cicero, a Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus, the Bible, and some other surprisingly durable texts. Ever since the papal printer Eucharius Silber brought out his edition in Rome in 1486, Ten Books on Architecture has never gone out of print.

One of the chief reasons for the enduring interest in On Architecture, aside from its treasury of practical instructions, is the ambitious educational program that Vitruvius puts forth in the first of his ten books (each of which originated as a single papyrus scroll, closer to the length of a modern chapter than an entire book, just as his chapters are approximately the size of a paragraph). Architects, he argues, can only complete their work properly (in his words, “perfect” it) if they are well informed about every one of the subjects that the art of building brings into play—if not as well informed as a specialist, then at least well enough to make the right decisions. A competent practitioner, therefore, must not only master drawing but also have a good grasp of literature, music, mathematics, and law. (Apparently Roman homeowners delighted in suing their neighbors for offenses like an aggressively dripping gutter.)

Because the practice of architecture requires such a store of knowledge, Vitruvius maintains that it is much more than a craft that depends on purely manual skill: it is a lofty liberal art, a pursuit that engages all the human faculties of imagination and reason no less than grammar, rhetoric, or poetry. His career included inspecting catapults for Julius Caesar and building a basilica at Colonia Julia Fanestris (modern-day Fano, on the Adriatic coast) with some radical innovations, such as gigantic two-story interior columns, that belie his popular reputation as a hidebound conservative. A man of strong, sometimes unpredictable opinions who thanks his parents in the preface to Book VI for having given him a first-rate Roman education, Vitruvius was bilingual in Greek and Latin and well read in Greek and Latin poetry, Cicero’s prose, Greek architectural pamphlets,¹ and recent developments in natural philosophy and technology.

His proposed course of study for young architects continues Cicero’s recent efforts to create a system of Roman learning comparable to that of the Greek-speaking world (a world that notably included Alexandria as well as the eastern Mediterranean), and it participates fully in the contemporary effort, fostered by the emperor Augustus, to transform Rome into a capital of distinctively Latin culture. His ambitiously comprehensive treatise is almost certainly the first of its kind for the ancient Greco-Roman world, recasting architecture not only as a liberal art but also as a natural means to extend the reach of Rome’s expanding empire. Clear and precise, his remarks on education show how the Romans of the early Augustan era tried to define their place in a rapidly changing world—both native Romans and Romans newly absorbed into the Res Publica Romana, for Roman education followed swiftly on the legions to prepare young people in conquered territories for participation in the imperial state.

It seems likely that the connection between education, architecture, and empire inspired the creation of the earliest known manuscript of Vitruvius, copied on parchment in the ninth century, perhaps for Charlemagne, perhaps by the hand of his learned adviser Alcuin of York, almost certainly as part of the Frankish king’s project of resurrecting the glories of ancient Rome in a Christian spirit. It is through this same clever wedge, education, that Vitruvius has driven himself and his treatise into the very heart of the way the contemporary world still thinks about any number of things, from human scale to beauty to liberal education to the best methods of town planning. Whether you have read Vitruvius or not, his influence is still palpable in the fabric of modern urban life, and that is why he has been translated as recently as 2017 into Chinese.

In All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes, Indra Kagis McEwen, a Canadian architect and historian, brings out a more chilling aspect of Vitruvius and his millennial tradition: his fatal attractiveness to despots. The “princes” of her title are the princes of whom Machiavelli wrote: strongmen who seized and maintained one-man rule over medieval and early modern Italian city-states by force of arms and charisma. Augustus served these princes as an inspiring model because his trajectory so closely resembled their own—except, of course, for its colossal scale. Like the Italian lords who revered him, the future Imperator rose to his august heights by doing whatever would ensure his own survival, eventually completing a process that Machiavelli attributes to Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar: supplanting the ancient Roman Republic with one-man rule.

Part of the story, of course, is the alacrity with which the Roman Republic and its institutions, after decades of turmoil, submitted to the young renegade in ever-increasing thrall to his inescapable authority. The Latin word auctoritas rooted authority in personal magnetism as well as brute power, and Augustus embodied it as no one else; his first portraits show a skinny, scowling youth with protuberant ears and a pencil neck, but in his later imagery only the hint of a wrinkle crosses his otherwise placid brow to show that the godlike commander, ears pulled in and angular features softened, still cares for his people. Vitruvius uses this same weighty term, auctoritas, to describe the commanding impression made by a successful building, an effect almost always achieved, he notes, by the deft deviation from pure principle to accommodate the challenges posed by a particular site. Architecture, like statecraft, is an art that thrives on adaptation and the judicious use of fiction.

McEwen has written acutely about Vitruvius and auctoritas in her earlier study Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (2003), in which she shows how the word’s connection with “increase” (as in “augment”) supports the role that architecture assumed in communicating and consolidating the Roman Empire’s territorial expansion under Augustus, whose honorific name (“the divinely fortunate”), awarded by the Senate in 27 BCE, was itself an etymological relative of “augmentation” and auctoritas. All the King’s Horses concentrates on Vitruvius’s own auctoritas as what she aptly calls a “Renaissance celebrity” in the Italy that spawned Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia. Her title, with its overtones of Humpty Dumpty, suggests an intent to shatter something fragile, and on the first page she identifies the designated victim:

Key among the reasons for Vitruvius’s appeal in my view, and generally unacknowledged, is his relevance to the politics of what I have called an age of princes, the period between the mid fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries when ambitious signori throughout Italy were establishing control of cities that had governed themselves as free independent communes for, in most cases, the two hundred years and more preceding their takeover. Vitruvius’s participation in the fulfillment of that autocratic agenda is the focus of this book.

What comes crashing to the ground in All the King’s Horses, then, is our overwhelming sense, when we stand in ineffably gracious places like the Ducal Palace of Urbino or the gemlike Tuscan hamlet of Pienza, that the Italian Renaissance must have been an age in which the body politic aimed as resolutely at bettering the common good as the arts aimed at the attainment of ideal beauty, and somehow this beauty was always meant to set us free. The classically inspired architecture of the fifteenth century can certainly be seen as embodying an idea of human scale and individual worth, often brought into connection with works like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man or Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man.” That harmonious figure (which may be a self-portrait) fits, with a little judicious fudging, into both a perfect circle and a perfect square, just as Vitruvius claims for the homo bene figuratus, the “well-formed human” who anchors his discussion of architectural proportion in book 3.

Firm belief in the necessary connections among human dignity, classical architecture, and democratic institutions certainly underpins much of eighteenth-century public building in places such as Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia, but the first post-antique experiments with republican government on the Italian peninsula emerged in the late Middle Ages, and thus the great works of architecture commissioned by such Italian free communes as Pisa, Venice, Padua, Rome, and Siena proclaimed that freedom according to an earlier, Gothic canon of beauty. By the fifteenth century these relatively small republican communes, as well as the Papal State, were struggling against intolerable pressure by the great powers of the era, Spain and France, which had begun to coalesce into what would soon become Europe’s predominant form of political organization: the nation-state ruled by hereditary monarchs.

In essence, then, the art, music, literature, and natural philosophy of the Italian Renaissance proclaimed the triumph of order, proportion, and human dignity at the same time as the free communes fell to militant popes and greedy warlords. The classical revival, born amid the violence of armies, made its own conquest through its irresistible new visions of beauty, but the majesty of works like Leonardo’s immense clay model for an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza in Milan was no match for the Burgundian bowmen who used it for target practice, and the same revived classical imagery that captivated first Europe and then the globe was also used to adorn Italian weapons, suits of armor, cannons, and instruments of torture.

Thus, as McEwen argues with fearsome cogency, Renaissance readers of Vitruvius not only regarded him as an ardent imperialist rather than a nostalgic republican, but also shared his enthusiasm both for the figure of Augustus and for Augustus’s imperial urge to expand territory by conquest and to cultivate the arts in a patriotic vein. Citizen Vitruvius, through his wise words on liberal education and the cosmic origins of proportion, provided the rulers of Italy’s city-states and the pope himself with guidance on how to turn their realms, in image if not in reality, into miniature modern versions of ancient imperium sine fine—Vergil’s phrase, forged to flatter Rome’s first emperor, for empire without end. All the King’s Horses provides architectural history with the equivalent of The Prince.

The link between Italian warlords and Vitruvius is not direct; All the King’s Horses details the complex, fascinating chain of relationships that made such a connection possible in the first place. Reading Vitruvius in the fifteenth century lay beyond the reach of anyone but a professional scholar. The signori knew implicitly that his treatise was important, because the great fourteenth-century poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca, whose verse they did read and cherish, had told them so. Copies of Petrarca’s marginal notes to the text of Vitruvius survive in a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript, now preserved in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (the flyleaf of which also includes a recipe for curing hemorrhoids with a poultice of white beans and lavender water). One of these jottings declares, “He apologizes for his style. Needlessly.” It is a high compliment from this most sensitive of readers.

Petrarca had an unusually deep grasp of Latin, but even for him some parts of Vitruvius could have made no sense. No other Roman author wrote so extensively—or at all—on the nuts and bolts of building or architectural theory; many of the text’s architectural terms and words for manual activities could only be understood through educated guesswork. (Calcare, for example, can mean both “trample,” as in other Latin texts, and “throw in quicklime,” only in Vitruvius.) The ten original papyrus scrolls had contained Greek words written in Greek as well as three complete Greek poems, and they were illustrated with at least eleven images that are entirely absent from the earliest surviving manuscripts. Most medieval Latin texts, moreover, were copied by scribes who knew no Greek, so in most of the Vitruvius manuscripts produced before 1500, the Greek words and the three Greek poems have been transformed into nonsense, in a script that looks vaguely Cyrillic. It took a champion of a reader to overcome such obstacles.

In the mid-fifteenth century the best-informed among these heroic readers was surely the brilliant, prickly Tuscan Leon Battista Alberti, whose flair for writing in fluent Latin and Tuscan vernacular on a multitude of timely subjects had landed him a post in the Curia under the scholarly Pope Nicholas V. Frustration with Vitruvius and his indecipherable manuscripts, coupled with vaulting ambition, led Alberti to write his own version of the Ten Books on Architecture around 1450, De Re Aedificatoria (On the Art of Building). It was not a stance of rapt admiration. First of all, Alberti did not share Petrarca’s approval of the ancient writer’s literary style:

I’ve certainly lamented the fact that so many, and such excellent works of the ancient authors have succumbed to the injuries of times and people, so that we scarcely have a single survivor of that shipwreck: Vitruvius, a writer learned beyond doubt, but so affected by time, and so mangled, that many things are missing in many places, and in many you’d want [him to have written] more. Furthermore, he set them down in a rough state. For he spoke in such a way that the Latins would have perceived him as Greek, and the Greeks would have guessed that he was speaking Latin. The work, speaking for itself, will testify that it was written in neither Latin or Greek, so he might as well never have written for us at all, because he wrote in a way that we don’t understand.

Like his ancient predecessor, Alberti knew that expertise on architecture afforded an excellent entrée into the corridors of power. Vitruvius himself declared as much in the preface to book 1. In McEwen’s pitch-perfect translation:

When I realized that you had care not only for the common life of all men…but also for the fitness of public buildings—so that even as through you [Rome] was increased [augmented!] with provinces, so public buildings were to provide eminent guarantees for the majesty of empire—I decided not to hesitate and took the first opportunity to set out for you my writings on these matters…. It is because I noticed how much you have built and are now building, both public and private buildings in keeping with the greatness of your achievements so that these might be transmitted to the memory of posterity.

As with Augustus, she notes, grand building projects provided fifteenth-century lords, many of whom had come to power by unscrupulous means, with an instant form of legitimacy. With astonishing frequency, their consultant on these massive works turns out to have been none other than Alberti, who moved from the Rome of Nicholas V to the Pienza of Nicholas’s successor Pius II, then on to the princely states of Urbino, Rimini, and Mantua and their lords Federico da Montefeltro, Sigismondo Malatesta, and Ludovico Gonzaga, acting as a consultant to their projects and often serving as architect himself. As with nearly all his other endeavors, Alberti succeeded magnificently as a designer of buildings, and McEwen guides us with a sure hand through the genesis of some of the outstanding landmarks of fifteenth-century Italy, several, like Pienza and Urbino’s Ducal Palace, now designated as UNESCO heritage sites.

Aside from Pius, who had been an important papal diplomat and the author of a still-beguiling romance novel, The Tale of Two Lovers, before he became pope, Alberti’s other princely patrons rose to prominence as condottieri—mercenary captains. The Gonzaga of Mantua and Sigismondo Malatesta fought on behalf of the pope, at least until Pius II, in an extraordinary edict, condemned Sigismondo to Hell while he was still alive; Federico da Montefeltro served Lorenzo de’ Medici, and the targets of their brutal campaigns were normally neighboring Italian city-states. All these lords recognized that a magnificent appearance was essential to asserting authority in the city and on the battlefield: their armor glittered, their interminable, opulent parades cast fistfuls of coins to the onlookers, and their courts basked in luxury—amid vicious intrigue.

The princely court, from the days of Akhenaten and King David down to the present, has always been one of human society’s most pernicious formations. Alberti helped Renaissance Italy’s hothouse courts to concoct a vision of their warring states as guided by the conscious resurrection of ancient Roman virtues (no longer the republican virtues heralded by Cicero but virtues adapted to the conditions of empire). To proclaim their sense of this virtus rediviva, the courts of the popes and lords of the fifteenth century invented an entire style of art, music, architecture, and behavior that infused their actions with the gravitas of antiquity. The crowning image of ancient auctoritas, McEwen contends, lives again in one of the triumphant achievements of Renaissance bronze work: the equestrian statue, an ancient form revived, at tremendous expense, in the Renaissance. The legacy of that reinvention has shaped the appearance of public squares ever since, especially in the nineteenth century, when horses were still essential companions of daily life.

The version of Vitruvius that Alberti transmitted to his patrons was a Vitruvius revised according to his own biases. His religion was Roman Catholicism, a theocratic system that emanated from a single God and barred women from the priesthood. The ancient Roman deities, male and female, were a more riotous lot, and priestesses enjoyed their own auctoritas. Classical architecture since the Renaissance has borne the stamp of Alberti’s, and his era’s, systematic misogyny, a misogyny that does not exist in the Ten Books—Vitruvius openly criticizes two of Augustus’s most recent monuments, the Temple of Venus the Ancestress in the Forum of Caesar and the Temple of Divine Julius Caesar in the Roman Forum, as “defective” because the columns are spaced too closely to allow two matrons to pass between them comfortably arm in arm.

As for that homo bene figuratus Leonardo instinctively drew as the Vitruvian man, Vitruvius carefully uses the neutral word homo—“human being” rather than “man.” A central aspect of his thinking is that women, likewise children of the cosmos, must be as perfectly proportioned as men. He may have dedicated his treatise explicitly to Augustus, but it is implicitly dedicated to the Imperator’s sister Octavia, who is also mentioned in the preface to book 1 and seems to have been his most solicitous sponsor. Neither Federico da Montefeltro nor Sigismondo Malatesta seems to have shared Alberti’s aversion to women; their wives, Battista Sforza and Isotta degli Atti, governed for them in their absence and are duly celebrated as consequential persons in their own right.²

All the King’s Horses may depict these Renaissance princes as thoroughgoing rogues (though I confess an enduring fascination with the dashing Sigismondo, the most brilliantly avant-garde of them all), but at the same time McEwen’s book, with its lavish color illustrations, demonstrates, again and again, that Italy’s princes, guided by Vitruvius as filtered through Alberti, spent their disproportionate gains on some supremely elegant works of architecture—works that paradoxically lend their forms perfectly today to more egalitarian political ideals, as conference centers, museums, and public squares. So, too, the marble ornaments that survive from Augustan projects like the Temple of Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger) in the Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum rank among the most beautiful architectural detailing ever created, no matter what purpose, noble or nefarious, they once served: column capitals in the shape of the divine horse Pegasus, intertwined acanthus tendrils on Corinthian capitals to symbolize the deathless bond between the twin deities Castor and Pollux. Their sheer beauty has long outlived, and transcended, their original purpose. Grandeur somehow compels us to dream of a Golden Age, however fictitious, as the only plausible setting for its birth. And we, in its presence, walk with a greater gravity, to become more beautifully immortal ourselves.