Foundations of a modern discipline 17fi fteenth century onwards assumed this role too. It is diffi cult
to measure, from our present-day perspective, how important
Vitruvius’ observations or his sometimes heavy-handed rhet-
oric were in his own time. It seems clear that, from the fall
of the Roman Empire until the early phases of what we now
call the Renaissance, his treatise was not an important source
of instruction about building. When medieval scholars read
De architectura it was as a classical text, alongside Livy or
Plotinus, or for its insights into Roman views on astronomy,
astrology and atmospherics. As an architectural history, it
offered a model to writers from the fi fteenth century onwards.
It conveyed knowledge of the past and of the technique of
building that made a narrative out of mythical sources and
monuments already, in some cases, several centuries old
when Vitruvius wrote of them. Vitruvius explained the
sources for the art and science of architecture and on their
basis described a set of principles and preferences for archi-
tecture in the present. Put simply, Vitruvius sought to distil
the knowledge of the ancients and transmit this to architects
of his own time and of the future.
Leon Battista Alberti’s own ten-book treatise on architec-
ture, De re aedifi catoria, was completed around 1452 during
the pontifi cate of Nicholas V (1447–55). It pursued many of
the implications for architecture of its important precursor,
Alberti’s De pictura (1435), a founding theory of painting.
In writing on perspective and drawing, Alberti distinguished
between the world of bricks and mortar and the intellectual
domain of the artistic project, conceived (and executed) on
paper by approximating the world through mathematical
relationships and drawing. For Alberti, as Rykwert has noted,
Vitruvius was less a model for style than for content.^7 As a
humanist adept in poetry, philosophy, diplomacy and the
law, Alberti addressed the rules of classical architecture as he
imagined Cicero might have done had he possessed Vitruvius’
technical knowledge. Alberti writes for a contemporary fi f-
teenth-century audience, and although he counts architects
among his readers they are not the extent of his public. As
an architect himself, Alberti had a secure grasp of architec-
tural technology, which he conveys. The second and fourth
books of Vitruvius’ treatise assign architecture’s origins and
development to a socio-cultural process of forming language