Vitruvian Studies

The interpretations that I offer in the following pages are very tentative, though not, I hope, obscure; and I feel myself wide open to further persuasion on any of them. But unless someone worries some of Vitruvius' more difficult passages and reaches conclusions that are fairly clear, however provisional, we shall make little progress at this stage. His actual text is now surprisingly well known, and Soubiran and Fensterbusch are pushing their labours on it as far as is humanly possible. It is his architecture that now needs discussion. I begin, however, with a small textual question.I. Vitruvius v. xi. 2‘In palaestra peristylia, quemadmodum supra scripturm est, ita debent esse perfecte distributa’ (Rose's text). ‘Perfecte’ edd., ‘Perfecta’ GH.C. Ruffel and J. Soubiran, on p. 29 of their ‘Recherches sur la tradition manuscrite de Vitruve’ in Pallas ix (Toulouse, 1960), suggested that ‘perfecta distributa’ could be a tautology, one word glossing the other.It does not seem a very obvious gloss to me, and I wonder if the right reading could be ‘perpetua’, in the common Vitruvian sense of ‘continuous’. For this see, e.g., v. i. 10—‘ipsae vero columnae in altitudine perpetua sub trabes’, or ‘the carrying of the columns themselves in unbroken height directly up to the beams’, as Morgan translates it. Or take the Greeks with their ‘emplecton’ wall in II. viii. 7: ‘e suis frontibus perpetuam et unam crassitudinem parietum consolidant. Praeterea interponunt singulos crassitudine perpetua utraque parte frontatos, quos diatonous appellant’, etc.