Vitruvius, Architecture, and the Liberal Arts

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio dedicated his ten papyrus scrolls on architecture to the emperor Augustus in the late first century B.C.E., confident that his work furnished all the information an attentive reader needed to make competent decisions about building, from choosing a site to the fine points of interior decor. In addition, the form and structure of his treatise made a second, and no less ambitious, claim: that architecture should be considered a liberal art, requiring intellectual acuity above and beyond any technical skill. This course will investigate Vitruvius both as a man of ancient Rome and as one of the most influential writers of all time, showing how his aesthetic systems are rooted in ancient rhetoric - that is, in oratory and literature -, and how his pioneering treatise, thanks to its broad philosophical framework, innovative vocabulary, and systematic reasoning, became one of the most influential books of all time, including its role in shaping the curricula of the first universities. We will also investigate the ways in which readers from different centuries and different cultures have adapted (and often distorted) interpretation of the ancient text to fit different circumstances and views of the world, aiming to read him as clearly as possible, for his own time and for ours. We will be using the illustrated translation published by Cambridge University Press. Students who want to follow the text in Latin are encouraged to do so.