I can get a couple of issues behind on the NYRB, but this a good recent-ish one for your Friday reading:
Because the practice of architecture requires such a store of knowledge, Vitruvius maintains that it is much more than a craft that depends on purely manual skill: it is a lofty liberal art, a pursuit that engages all the human faculties of imagination and reason no less than grammar, rhetoric, or poetry. His career included inspecting catapults for Julius Caesar and building a basilica at Colonia Julia Fanestris (modern-day Fano, on the Adriatic coast) with some radical innovations, such as gigantic two-story interior columns, that belie his popular reputation as a hidebound conservative. A man of strong, sometimes unpredictable opinions who thanks his parents in the preface to Book VI for having given him a first-rate Roman education, Vitruvius was bilingual in Greek and Latin and well read in Greek and Latin poetry, Cicero’s prose, Greek architectural pamphlets, and recent developments in natural philosophy and technology.
His proposed course of study for young architects continues Cicero’s recent efforts to create a system of Roman learning comparable to that of the Greek-speaking world (a world that notably included Alexandria as well as the eastern Mediterranean), and it participates fully in the contemporary effort, fostered by the emperor Augustus, to transform Rome into a capital of distinctively Latin culture. His ambitiously comprehensive treatise is almost certainly the first of its kind for the ancient Greco-Roman world, recasting architecture not only as a liberal art but also as a natural means to extend the reach of Rome’s expanding empire. Clear and precise, his remarks on education show how the Romans of the early Augustan era tried to define their place in a rapidly changing world—both native Romans and Romans newly absorbed into the Res Publica Romana, for Roman education followed swiftly on the legions to prepare young people in conquered territories for participation in the imperial state.
It seems likely that the connection between education, architecture, and empire inspired the creation of the earliest known manuscript of Vitruvius, copied on parchment in the ninth century, perhaps for Charlemagne, perhaps by the hand of his learned adviser Alcuin of York, almost certainly as part of the Frankish king’s project of resurrecting the glories of ancient Rome in a Christian spirit. It is through this same clever wedge, education, that Vitruvius has driven himself and his treatise into the very heart of the way the contemporary world still thinks about any number of things, from human scale to beauty to liberal education to the best methods of town planning. Whether you have read Vitruvius or not, his influence is still palpable in the fabric of modern urban life, and that is why he has been translated as recently as 2017 into Chinese.
Do not study marketing, kids.
