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bequeathed an invaluable body of background information for the study of
both artists. Though disguised as spontaneous, intimate communications,
most of Aretino’s letters were composed expressly for publication and
therefore need to be carefully deconstructed. At the same time, it is
crucial to recognize the power of Aretino’s pen, for the dissemination of
ostensibly private correspondence created a potent publicity machine to
support the careers of his friends such as Titian and Sansovino.
Venice’s publishing trade also generated a substantial number of influ-
ential architectural treatises. Aldus Manutius’s Hypnerotomachia Polifili of
1499, a complex medievalizing romance infused with architectural con-
tent, brilliantly demonstrated the potential of the woodblock and movable
type to combine text and image.36 In 1511, during the troubled times of the
Wars of the League of Cambrai, the Veronese architect and engineer Fra
Giovanni Giocondo published his edition of Vitruvius’s De architectura.37
This seminal work was not only the earliest coherent version of the text
but also the first to be illustrated with woodcut plates. A particularly use-
ful edition of Vitruvius by Francesco Lutio Durantino, published in Venice
in 1524, combined Fra Giocondo’s lucid illustrations with a slightly modi-
fied version of Cesare Cesariano’s Italian translation of 1521.38 The first two
books of Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise on architecture—his Book 4 (1537)
and Book 3 (1540)—again demonstrated how the interaction between
text and plates could create a powerful medium for the propagation of
the classical orders of architecture (Fig. 20.2).39 It was Serlio who pro-
vided the Venetian public with the theoretical framework for the under-
standing of the new buildings of Sansovino—the Mint, the Library, and
letters in 1538, as well as books 4 and 3 of Serlio’s treatise on architecture in 1537 and 1540
respectively, and the Liber quinque missarum Adriani Willaert in Venice in 1536. For the
other side of Aretino’s correspondence, also issued by Marcolini in 1551, see Gonaria Floris
and Luisa Mulas, eds., Lettere scritte al signor Pietro Aretino da molti signori (Rome, 1997).
On Marcolini, see Paolo Procaccioli, Paolo Temeroli, and Vanni Tesei, eds., Un giardino
per le arti: Francesco Marcolino da Forlì, la vita, l’opera, il catalogo, Atti del Convegno
internazionale di studi, Forlì, 11–13 ottobre 2007 (Bologna, 2009).
36 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia poliphili (Venice, 1499); idem, Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (London, 1999).
37 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, ed. Fra Giovanni Giocondo (Venice, 1511).
38 This edition seems to have been well received, for it was republished in Venice in
1535.
39 John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988), pp. 263–309; Christof Thoenes, ed., Sebastiano Serlio
(Milan, 1989); Myra Nan Rosenfeld, Serlio on Domestic Architecture (New York, 1997).