This book offers a new assessment of the Roman architect Vitruvius and his treatise, On Architecture. Once reviled by scholars as a half-witted proletarian, Vitruvius emerges as well read and politically able when read alongside literary coevals through an intertextual lens. No building of Vitruvius’s name survives from antiquity, but his treatise remains a formidable literary construction that partakes of Rome’s vibrant textual culture. The book explores Vitruvius’s portrait of the ideal architect as an imposing “Vitruvian man” at the dawn of Augustus’s empire. In direct dialogue with his republican model, Cicero’s ideal orator, the architect embodies a distinctly imperial civic ethos in which technically skilled partisans supersede old elites as guarantors of Augustan authority. Vitruvius promises to shape not only the emperor’s legacy with architecture, but also the notion of a Roman citizen through the figure of the ideal architect.
Vitruvius’s suggestion that De architectura will allow Augustus to comprehend buildings already built almost certainly points to the Augustan program of renovating buildings. But it also introduces the notion that buildings “already built” could represent the Augustan present for the future. History can be “built” just as it can be written, and its monuments can also be repurposed, whether through spoliation in the concrete sense or by recharacterizing what celebrated architectural signifiers mean, or both. Vitruvius’s phraseology in the preface (memorias posteris tradere) reflects a well-known Augustan concern for posterity’s reception in a general sense, but it also recalls historiography, especially Livy and (later) Tacitus. Vitruvius returns to this same language in his discussion of historia—one of the disciplines in which the architectus is supposed to be trained—in his aetiology of caryatids. Just as Augustus co-opted the forms of the Erechtheum korai for his forum, so does Vitruvius invent (here in the rhetorical sense) a new “history” of the caryatids that is useful for the Romans. The key to understanding Vitruvius’s approach here is textuality: his description of caryatids and their meaning is couched entirely in the language of rhetorical narratio, which suggests again that Vitruvius envisions architecture as a kind of ornamental persuasion, with a scope that rivals historiography in its ability not only to tell future generations about the present, but also to recharacterize the past in terms that suit the present’s needs.
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