M. Vitruvii Pollonis de architectura libri decem ad Caesarem Augustum omnibus omnium editionibus longe emendatiores collatis veteribus exemplis

A decorative floral ornament.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, whom I have found called by someone by the name of Viturius Rufus in testimony, is a figure whose native country I see called into doubt. Some believe he was a Roman—though I know of no argument for this—while others consider him a Veronese, because at Verona, on the arch of an ancient structure, it is read in this manner:

L. VITRUVIUS L. L. CERDO
ARCHITECT

This inscription caused the most learned man Andreas Alciatus, a jurist, to tell me at Ferrara that he calls the author of the ten books on architecture Lucius Vitruvius Pellio, and he subsequently published this, because he claimed that "Pellio" meant the same as "Cerdo." Many things move me not to adopt his opinion. First, because in all copies, except one recently written, I have read M. and not L., and Pollio in all, not Pellio. Furthermore, because "Cerdo," if I may say so with the pardon of such a great man, is not necessarily understood as "Pellio" by anyone who considers the origin of both words. For one is derived from gain, that is, ἀπὸ κέρδος from profit, whence the Latins also call a "lucrio" profit-maker; the other is derived from skins Latin: "pellibus". And even if they were the same, what does an architect have to do with skins? For "Cerdo" in that inscription is an index of a person, not of a profession. Thus, if it were fitting to believe them the same, the name "Cerdo," not "Pellio," should have been restored. Furthermore, what our Vitruvius criticizes—that architect placed dentils under the mutules (which we have seen). Therefore, retaining the common reading of the manuscripts, we judge them to be different. And it is apparent that our Vitruvius was educated in liberal disciplines from his early youth through the care of his parents, and that he completed an encyclopedia, as he himself confesses in the proem of the sixth book. That he was of short stature, he indicates in the preface of the second book. He was not unknown to Julius Caesar; after whose death, as his age was now growing heavy—or rather, affected, as we conjecture from the place in the mentioned second book—he was recommended to Augustus by Octavia. He was put in charge of the preparation of ballistae, scorpions, and other engines of war along with Marcus Aurelius, and P. Minidius—whom some Vitruvian codices call Numidicus—and Gnaeus Cornelius, with an annual income established for him as long as he lived. Stimulated by this munificence, as he indicates in the preface of the work, he wrote the entire method of building for Augustus, which he testifies to having encompassed in ten books at the end of the work, lest anyone falsely believe that the figures, which he was shaping in his individual books under the name of the final volume, were cast off into a private book, that is, some eleventh book. That he was of an ingenious and happy talent, the seventh, ninth, and tenth books can serve as proof. Raphael Volaterranus writes in the fourth book of geography that Vitruvius’s book on hexagons, heptagons, and things of that kind was found in the year 1494 in a certain monastery near the town of Bobbio. So much for what we can assert.