Architettura con il suo commento et figure Vetruvio in volgar lingua raportato

TO THE MOST MAGNIFICENT CAPTAIN, COUNT IANO BIGAZINI OF PERUGIA: GIANBATISTA CAPORALI OF PERUGIA, WISHES HAPPINESS.

A full-length portrait of a knight in plate armor, standing and holding a poleaxe (halberd) in his right hand. He is framed by an architectural archway with decorative scrollwork and a pedestal base containing a coat of arms and the name of the subject.

Magnificent Count, of a sweet and gracious nature, one could say that he was a good man, who for the utility and benefit of every man, universally, sought to render into this vernacular language the Ten Books of Architecture of Vitruvius, truly a work left to posterity for great convenience and necessity. Similarly, after him, were Agustin Gallo, Aluigi Pirouani, and Cesaro Cesariani, from whom I recognized that the mind of Vitruvius was not everywhere explained; rather, in very many places, it had need of more light and clarity. Therefore, with great diligence and much industry, these excellent professors of this art also wished to create a commentary and, with their exposition, aboundingly complete it in such a way that there would be nothing more to desire in this regard. But then, even they did not fully satisfy the understanding in their exposition, because they spoke obscurely, and with Latin words, reasons, and authorities. Within myself, I began to think that I might perhaps not be able to perform a work which would be more useful and pleasing to these men without letters, than to supply, with this small dexterity and habit of mine in this art, the defects of the first and the second. And although many reasons moved me to have to do it (being that it is much more necessary and opportune for people of the hand than of science), the most powerful was this: that having been very often asked by many to say something about this; and being mostly abstracted in other thoughts, I sent them away little satisfied, and I doubt that because of this they may have come to believe that I, either out of ignorance or rather out of a malignity of nature, did not want to show it. Whence, to remove such an opinion of theirs—for I know that I too was born to be of service, and there could be no work more pleasing to them than this—with all that diligence of talent that such a painter may use, I have labored on the half of the ten books, primarily the text and then the exposition, to reduce them from their Latin and obscure matter into these our vernacular and most open words.