It is difficult to trace any impact of Vitruvius’ De architectura on his contemporaries; in fact Pliny the Elder is the first to mention and quote Vitruvius. Both authors enjoyed immense popularity in the Renaissance, but not for their Latin language as such. Only in recent years has Vitruvius, like Pliny, been found worthy of investigation into the literary qualities of his work. In 2017 M.F. Nichols's monograph entitled Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De architectura was published. Nichols focuses on the text as a literary construction and the author's strategies of self-fashioning, and she dedicates a chapter to a comparison between the careers of Horatius and Vitruvius as presented by the two authors themselves. This is one of the themes O. develops further in Vitruvian Man. What was the rank and status of the author Vitruvius? We only have the information given by the author-persona in the text. Can we trust him, or is this an example of strategic self-fashioning? O. has severe doubts about the veracity of Vitruvius’ presentation and warns us about taking the text, despite its technical nature, too literally. O. suggests that we make a number of important conceptual distinctions: the historical figure vs the authorial persona; real architects vs the ideal architectus formed by the text; and architectura as it was actually practised vs architectura as presented in the text.
O. concentrates his efforts on Vitruvius’ prefaces addressed to the dedicatee Augustus. In response to the ongoing debate of the appliance of Vitruvius’ precepts and instructions O. states that the work's value does not lie in its ability to provide comprehensive instruction for designing and building. Rather than an invitation to practise, we are presented with a rhetorical performance of expertise and a didactic agenda of opening up architecture's principles for Augustus and the learned elite. The ideal architectus as presented by Vitruvius in Book 1 and developed in prefaces to the following books takes centre stage. The architectus’ wide-ranging training, the resulting good judgement (iudicium) and high moral integrity (auctoritas) are thrown into relief when opposed to ignorant and self-serving impostors personified by the Greek architects Dinocrates and Callias, who are introduced in Books 2 and 10.
After a concise introduction, O. develops his arguments mainly through close readings of selected passages by Vitruvius and related authors. The main aim is to emphasise the textuality of Vitruvius’ agenda, and each chapter adopts a different angle: (1) ‘Vitruvius, man?’; (2) ‘History from the ground up: Vitruvius's “textual” monuments’; (3) ‘The body in brief: De architectura and the limits of somatic synopsis’; (4) ‘Introducing the architectus’; (5) ‘Bodies as behavior: Corpus architectorum’.
Only a few of the conclusions of O.'s readings can be given here: he sees Vitruvius’ inclusion of historical training in the curriculum of the architect as connected to Augustus’ building policy that extends to renovating and repurposing buildings, thereby ‘building’ history. O. offers a solution to the problem of the Vitruvian tale about the Caryatids and the Persian Portico in Book 1, arguing that Vitruvius has simply transposed the event from the fourth to the fifth century bc and placed it in a Greek–Persian context. In this way it was repurposed, and in a Roman context it reflected the conflict between East and West, between Antony and Augustus. According to O., this example of rhetorical invention suggests that Vitruvius envisions architecture as a kind of ornamental persuasion, with a scope that rivals that of historiography.
O. wants to throw new light on Vitruvius as a littéraire, rescuing him, as he puts it, ‘from the shipwreck of marginal Latinity to which the adoption of Ciceronian classicism had consigned him’ (p. vii). Cicero is presented as a key to a deeper understanding of the rhetoric and ethics of Vitruvius. Through many examples O. illuminates Vitruvius’ relation to Cicero's rhetorica. Vitruvius sees a striking parallel between the (ideal) architectus and the (ideal) orator. While Cicero promotes the role of the performing orator, as the titles of his books indicate (De oratore, Orator), O. states that architectura was already of high standing in Rome and in no similar need for defence. Rather, the function of Vitruvius’ authorial persona was to domesticate the Greek science of architecture for Augustan Rome, and Vitruvius’ ideal architect embodies an imperial civic ethos that contrasted with Cicero's republican model for the ideal orator. O. creates a powerful vision of this ethos by several detailed and convincing analyses. The (im)moral story of the meeting of Alexander and the architect Dinocrates becomes the example par excellence of how to distinguish good architects from bad – and how to distinguish an ideal autocrat–architect relationship from an unhealthy one. In a close analysis that also includes Livy's tale about Lucumo/Tarquinius Priscus, O. shows how Vitruvius makes this clear: Dinocrates compromises the ideal architect–autocrat relationship as Alexander is seduced by Dinocrates’ bodily attraction and loses his iudicium. In this way the story becomes a warning to Augustus as well. Vitruvius concludes that Dinocrates got his position because of his beautiful body, whereas that of Vitruvius is aged and ugly. The latter, by implication, testifies to Vitruvius’ professional excellence as well as Augustus’ sound judgement. Vitruvius returns to this hierarchy of values in several prefaces: wisdom overrules bodily strength and beauty. O. refers to Cicero and rhetorical handbooks about arguments concerning bodily state. In this context athletes and gladiators typically serve as negative examples, which is effectively demonstrated by Cicero in his speeches against Catiline and Antony. O. finds no other examples of the rhetorical use of a weak and aged body, but Vitruvius’ point is clear: his own lack of physical powers is counterbalanced by his work, the corpus architecturae.
The discussion of the use of bodily metaphors in Vitruvius owes much to I.K. McEwen's Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (2003). O. uses a substantial part of his book to develop McEwen's ideas and takes ‘the Vitruvian man’ as a starting point, i.e. the corpus hominis bene figurati as a model for proportions in buildings that will last. We learn how the virtue of durability is transferred by Vitruvius to his work by the metaphor corpus architecturae, a body of single parts not only in harmonious order, but as a ‘synoptic unity characterized by brevity’, as O. coins it with yet another cross-reference to the art of rhetoric. After examining the earlier Greek and Roman tradition for using the corpus/soma metaphor, O. concludes that it is closely connected with the challenge of synthesising disparate material into one body, a problem known to writers of universal history. Among others, Polybius is mentioned as an author who strives for brevity and a unifying principle. Cicero uses ‘body’ to designate this principle too. That McEwen saw no precedent in Cicero for Vitruvius’ use was, according to O., a hasty dismission. Cicero uses the term when wishing for – unified, harmonious – writings about his consulship and develops the notion in his letter to Lucceius (Cic. Fam. 5.12). In turn, Vitruvius seems to echo Cicero when expressing his ambition to write a unified, synoptic corpus, marked by its brevity and therefore memorable for posterity. As O. states, a ‘less is more’ distinguishes Vitruvius from contemporaries such as Livy, Strabo and Diodorus Siculus.
This review has confined itself to only a few discussions of O.'s many often rather long and well documented interpretations. Sometimes his own rhetoric as a writer feels a little overwhelming and repetitive, but as a keen reader of Vitruvius he has delivered a substantial contribution in weeding out old prejudices against Vitruvius and building up a worthy position for him as a qualified literary writer well versed in the literary traditions.
