VITRUVIUS - DE ARCHITECTURA -Fully illustrated, contemporary binding - 1522

(ARCHITECTURE; ILLUSTRATED, FINE BINDINGS) Marcus VITRUVIUS POLLIUS (880-70 c. BC - After 15 BC); Sextus Julius FRONTINUS (30 c.-103)
M. Vitruvii De Architectura libri decem nuper maxima diilgentia castigati atq; excusi, additis, Julij Frontini de aqueductibus libri propter materiae affinis tatem [Colophon: Impressum Florentiae, per haeredes Philippi Iuntae, 1522]
§ Two parts in one volume, 8vo (165x110); 192, 24, [20] leaves. Woodcut printer’s device on title page, richly illustrated with 140 beautiful woodcuts. Contemporary brown blind-tooled calf, a tall copy, on crisp paper very well preserved.
Organized in ten books, the De Architectura was written between 30-20 BC. As the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, it served as a comprehensive guide for building projects dedicated to Emperor Augustus. The work covers everything from military camps and aqueducts to machines and measuring devices, blending Greek and Roman knowledge with practical engineering. Its famous principles of utility, strength, and beauty influenced architects for centuries, though it predates Rome's greatest architectural innovations like domes and concrete vaulting. The De Architectura presents itself as an eclectic treatise - an attempt to create an organic synthesis of Greek and Hellenistic theoretical insights and the findings drawn from the practice of building - and at the same time as a canonical text, a comprehensive and multifaceted work, rich in countless implications and insights, and the sole surviving record of the development of architectural theories in classical antiquity. Vitruvius’s work anticipates, in a humanistic sense, the centrality of the figure of the architect and his art, and sets forth as an indispensable prerequisite the need for a harmonious synthesis of knowledge and understanding that will make him not merely an organiser and codifier of space, but its interpreter and hermeneut. From the fifteenth century onwards, the treatise became the interpretative source, the model for dialogue and the inspirational foundation of the theoretical principles of architectural art, to the extent that Vincenzo Scamozzi, a Venetian architect and treatise writer of the sixteenth century, after a careful and assiduous reading of the work, stated that Vitruvius “has discussed all, or at least the most difficult and essential aspects of architecture and the architect’s needs; were many aware of this, they would not so readily boast of being architects, knowing scarcely what is required of them.”. Second Giunta illustrated edition, in a new italic typesetting, of the 1513 edition, edited by the Dominican friar Giovanni Giocondo of Verona (1435-1515), an important figure among early Renaissance antiquaries. Vitruvius's work is followed by Julius Frontinus' De aquaeductibus urbis Romae, "ouvrage d'une grande utilité pour la connaissance de l'architecture ancienne" (Hoefer XVIII, 913).; Cicognara 699: "Questa edizione non é dissimile da quella del 1513., se non in quanto che gli errori nella prima..., sono in questa corretti";.. The first illustrated edition of Vitruvius’s work was published in Venice in 1511 by Giovanni Tacuino , the editor, Giovanni Giocondo produced 136 woodcut to illustrate the text. It was reprinted in 1513 by the Giunta brothers in Florence, in a small pocket-book size, with the original woodcuts reduced in size and with the addition of four more illustrations and of Frontinus’ De aquaeductibus urbis Romae. In 1522, after Giocondo’s death, the Giunta published another edition, where new italic font characters were used, the engraved initials were deleted and the text was revised, but the same illustrations of the previous edition were used. This new pocket-size edition resulted very innovative at that time becoming accessible both to cultivated circles who read in Latin and to a wider public who by means of images gained access to the new language of antiquity.The Franciscan Friar Fra Giovanni Giocondo (1433 c. - 1515) was an Italian humanist, architect, and engineer. Frontinus’ work is an official report written at the end of the 1st century concerning the state of the aqueducts of Rome; Frontinus had been appointed Water Commissioner by the emperor Nerva in AD 96.
 LUCIA A. CIAPPONI Fra Giocondo Da Verona and His Edition of Vitruvius. In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 47, 1984, pp. 72-90; ADAMS V-904; Berlin Kat. 1800; Camerini 172 (wrong collation); FOWLER 396; SANDER 7697