274

The Vitruvius of Daniele Barbaro

Even so, the ambitions of the dilettantes testify to how the policy of urban renewal promoted by Gritti stimulated some members of the nobility to acquire the theoretical tools necessary for controlling such a process. The climax of this trend was undoubtedly reached in 1556, when Daniele Barbaro published the first edition of his translation of, and commentary on, Vitruvius. Barbaro, patriarch elect of Aquileia, educated in Padua and member of an influential Venetian family of pro-Roman political leanings, had begun working on architectural theory in 1547 (Barbaro 1556, 274). In 1554 he spent some time in Rome, together with Palladio (who helped with the illustration in his Vitruvius), in order to undertake scholarly research into the correspondence (or otherwise) between the Roman's text and archaeological reality.

The date that marks the beginning of Barbaro's interest in architecture coincides

Kommentar: … so ein Zufall (coincidence)…

with the publication in Venice of a programme of Vitruvian studies which had been formulated by the Accademia della Virtù, founded in Rome by Claudio Tolomei in 1540–41.

Kommentar: Woher stammt das Datum?

It is therefore possible that the patriarch elect intended collecting Tolomei's abandoned material, thus bringing into being what for the Accademia had remained at the programmatic stage (Tafuri 1987a, XIII).

Kommentar: …was voraussetzt, dass das Akademie-Projekt um 1554 (oder schon um 1547? – Der Text ist hier nicht eindeutig.) bereits aufgegeben worden sei.

But the main ambition underlying Barbaro's monumental theoretical effort can, once more, be found to be of a `political' nature. 

Kommentar: Wo kann man diese Ambition denn begründet finden? Quelle?

His translation is the first to show a full understanding of the Latin text, so much so as to be held an indispensable reference until at least the end of the eighteenth century. His commentary, apart from illustrating his thorough knowledge of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architectural treatises (from Alberti to Philandrier), reveals equal familiarity with texts on mathematics, geometry, astronomy,

[Fortsetzung auf S. 275]