rule was so violent and corrupt that he
was assassinated in 1412. The last Visconti
duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, died in 1447,
after which Milan came under the rule of
his son-in-law, Francesco Sforza.
SEEALSO: Petrarch; Sforza dynasty
Vitruvius ........................................
(ca. 80B.C.–ca. 25B.C.)
Roman architect, engineer, and author
whose treatiseOn Architecture—written as
a guidebook for Roman builders—was
widely influential during the Renaissance.
Vitruvius was born in the town of Formiae
as Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. He may have
served in the Roman army of Julius Cae-
sar, working to design fortifications and
siege engines in Spain and Gaul (modern
France). He flourished during the time of
the emperor Augustus, his patron, and to
whom he dedicated his work. Historians
know of only one building designed by
him: a basilica in the town of Fano, which
has disappeared completely.
On Architecturewas one of the classi-
cal works to survive the Middle Ages
through the manuscript copying carried
out in isolated monasteries, where the an-
cient works were preserved from the vio-
lence and chaos of the time. One of these
manuscript copies was discovered in 1414
by the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini at
the abbey of Saint Gallen in Switzerland.
The new technology of printing allowed
the book to find a wider audience in
southern Europe. The first printed edition
was brought out in Rome by Fra Giovanni
Sulpitius in 1486; an illustrated edition
appeared in 1511, and translations in Ital-
ian were first published in 1521. Vitruvius
was translated into German, French, En-
glish, and Spanish by the end of the six-
teenth century.
Vitruvius admired the classical archi-
tecture of Greece and saw his own time as
adecadentperiodinwhicharchitectswere
forgetting the Greek tradition of harmony
and proportion. Written in about 40B.C.,
On Architectureis divided into ten books
and covers the design of buildings and
landscapes, engineering, town planning,
and the proportions of the human body.
Vitruvius held the qualities of strength,
utility, and beauty to be necessary in all
structures, which took their ideal propor-
tions from that of the body. As the only
architectural book to survive the fall of
the Roman Empire,On Architecturebe-
came the most important source of infor-
mation for Renaissance architects looking
to revive classical forms in their churches,
palaces, public buildings, monuments, and
design of public spaces. Leon Battista Al-
berti based his important work on archi-
tecture,De Re Aedificatoria, largely on the
work of Vitruvius.SEEALSO: Alberti, Leon Battista; architec-
ture; Bracciolini, PoggioVitruvius