La Tradition Vitruvienne au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance: Eléments d’interprétation

Abstract

The reception of Vitruvius'De Architectura in the Middle Ages was essentially that of scholars and the well-read intent on handing down the only workde architectura inherited from Graeco-Latin antiquity, and also interested in the historical, anecdotal and scientific information contained in the treatise. Already, however, an “imaginary tradition” had been built up around this book, exalted before it was even known, a mythical book, which for Italian architects, notaly of the Quattrocento, was a privileged reference text, less however for its technical information as such, or the light it sheds on the architecture of ancient Rome, than as a normative guarantee, a conceptual direction or inciting line. Projecting their own concepts, dreams and ideals onto theDe Architectura, combining period aesthetics, scientific preoccupations and practical interests in a complex interference pattern bringing together Euclidand Plato and Vitruvius, the Renaissance architects and humanists in a variety of original creations literally sublimed a text difficult to get into but in which they contrived to discover the effort, beyond the historical forms, to work out ideal architectural rules, to reconcile the theoretical and the practical, humanism and science.