Introduction to Vitruvius, On Architecture

This seminal work on architecture is brought to Penguin Classics for the first time. In On Architecture (De architectura, c.40 BC), Vitruvius discussed in ten encyclopedic chapters aspects of Roman architecture, engineering and city planning. Vitruvius also included a section on human proportions. Because it is the only antique treatise on architecture to have survived, On Architecture has been an invaluable source of information for scholars. The rediscovery of Vitruvius during the Renaissance greatly fuelled the revival of classicism during that and subsequent periods. Numerous architectural treatises were based in part or inspired by Vitruvius, beginning with Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria (1485).