F. P. Di Teodoro – Abstract

Preparatory research for an edition of Fabio Calvo’s Vitruvio made for Raphael (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, mss. It. 37 and It. 37a) has reveales Calvo’s use of a plurality of printed, and above all manuscript, sources. However, in currently available critical editions of De architectura, no reference is made to many of the variants attested indirectly by this translation – indeed in the best cases the critical editions use (and record in the apparatus) barely one seventh of the approximately 140 known manuscripts of the work, thus consigning the remaining six sevenths to oblivion. In the Mediaeval and Renaissance periods, no-oneknew the text of Vitruvius as we known it today, namely, one close to (if not identical to) that licensed by the author, given that the diffusion of text seems to have occurred exclusively via corrupt and significantly altered manuscripts. Thus the modern critical text may well be the perfect tool for historians of ancient art and Greco-Roman architecture and for scholars of Vitruvius as a treatise writer and architect; it is not, however, much use for historians of the modern period, since for them it is the errors in the tradition, especially those errors which influenced the architecture and architectural theory of their of their period, which are of primary interest. Only a comparative edition of all the surviving witnesses to the Vitruvian text can provide a tool able to help explain some key moments in the architectural history of a period which placed the De architectura at the centre of its thoughts, thus making the Roman’s text a medium for change and innovation.