@BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD: THE ARCHITECTURAL MANUAL OF SEBASTIANO SERLIO (1475-1554) BY MAX MARMOR “The principal ornament to any library will be a large collection of rare books, drawn, preferably, from the learning of the ancients." ‘Thus wrote the great fifteenth-century Italian humanist and archi- tect, Leon Battista Alberti, in the first modern treatise on architec- ture, his De re aedificatoria of 1485 By Alberti’s definition as by any other, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is “a prin- cipal ornament’ of the Yale University Library. Another measure of Beinecke’s stature is the fact that it is actually scores of libraries within a library. To cite but one instance especially pertinent to Alberti’s proposition, the Beinecke boasts a flourishing collection of early treatises on architecture, beginning with Alberti's own treatise in its editio princeps. To this rich collection Beinecke's curators have recently added the architectural treatise of Sebastiano Serlio, the most popular and influential architectural book published in early modern Europe? Sebastiano Serlio was born in Bologna in 1475, an exact contem- porary of Michelangelo; but the kinship ends there. If “Il Divino” lived and breathed in the rarefied atmosphere of Pletonic, or at least Neo-Platonic, ideas, Serlio was the great pragmatist and populist of Italian Renaissance architectural theory. His express aim as an archi- tectural writer was to furnish severely practical, graphic guidelines for architects, builders, and patrons; he sent architectural theory back to the drawing board. This aim led Serlio to write and publish in the vernacular rather than in Latin, and while ke was preceded in this by such Quattrocento architectural writers as Filarete and Fran- cesco di Giorgio, Serlio went still further, relying largely upon the lan- guage of images to convey his lessons. This pragmatic populism helps account for the fact that Serlio has not always received his due at the hands of students of the history of architectural theory.? Serlio's folios were the first coffee table architecture books.* His fundamentally visual approach to architectural theory reminds us that his own initial training was as a perspective painter in his, father's workshop in Bologna; and indeed, Serlio began his own ile University Lary Grate 15 Ari 1998career in that capacity in Pesaro in 1513. His conversion to architec- ture, and specifically to the theory of architecture, was avowedly due to his subsequent apprenticeship with Baldassare Peruzzi in Rome, a thirteen-year sojourn that ended in 1527 with the Sack of Rome, We know that Peruzzi planned to compose an architectural treatise and bequeathed his several drafts to his student, Serlio's frankness about his debt to his teacher did not forestall accusations of plagiarism, voiced by such influential if partisan contemporaries as Benvenuto Cellini, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, and Giorgio Vasari-accusations that long clouded Serlio's reputation and surely help to account for his relative neglect by modern scholars. If his apprenticeship to Peruzzi planted the seeds of Serlio's archi- tectural theories, the following thirteen years in Venice and the Veneto (1527-40) provided the fertile humanistic and artistic soil in which they flourished. The first publication with which Serlio was associated was a series of nine engravings (three sets of three) ilus- trating the columnar elements of the three orders of classical archi- tecture, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian. Serlio furnished the designs upon which these prints were based, and his copyright ap- plication of 1528 still survives When, soon thereafter, Serlio set about publishing his own ideas about architecture, they took the form of a treatise —or more accurately, an illustrated manual—which appeared in a series of installments be- ginning in 1537. In 1540 Francis | invited Serlio to assume the position of Royal Painter and Architect at Fontainebleau. Upon the king's death on 31 March 1547 Serlio was supplanted by another great writer on architectural theory, Philibert Delorme, a Frenchman more befitting the tide of nationalism then sweeping France. Serlio spent his final years in retirement ~“holed up,” as he tells us, donnirg the artful guise (of a uomo selvatco, “in the solitude of Fontainebleau, among wild beasts rather than men." Serlio died around 1554 in Lyons. Serlios illustrated compendium was to become “one of the most influential of all publications on architecture,” to cite Hanno-Walter Kruft’s magisterial history of architectural theory.” Certainly it i, in its publication history, one of the most bewildering. In his preface to Book IV- the firs installment to appear in printSerlio writes that he intends to publish a total of five such “books.” In fact he eventually produced nine, of which only six (Books LV and the so-called Libro Extraordinario) were published during the architect's lifetime. Parts of the other three (Books VI-VIII) were sold in manuscript to the anti- quarian Jacopo Strada, who only published Book VII in Frankfurt in 1161575, marking the centennial of the author's birth. Not until four cen- turies later did two surviving drafts of Book VI surface and appear in print, one a manuscript version at Avery Library, Columbia Uni- versity, the other in the Bavarian State Library in Munich.* A part of Book VIII survives in a lone manuscript, also in Munich, and has never been published in its entirety.? This tortuous publication history invites a chronological outline of the several installments in which Serlio's manual appeared. Book IV: Regole general di architettura sopra le cinque maniere degli edifici,cioe, Thoscano, Dorico, lonico, Corinthio, et Composit, com gli essempi dellantichita, che, per la magior parte conconlano con la dottrina di Vitrucvio. Venice, Francesco Marcolini, 1537; second edition. “con nuove addition,” 1540; third edition, 1544, Book Ill 1 Terzo libro di Sebastiano Sento, bulognese, nel quale si figurano e descrivono le Antichita di Roma ¢ lealtre che sono in Italia, e fuore d'Italia, Venice, Francesco 1540; second edition, 1544. Dedicated to Francis I. Books I and Il: Il Primo libro diarchitettura ... (with) I! Secondo libro. Italian text with French translation by Jean Martin. Paris, Jean Barbé, 1545. Book V: Ul Quinto libro darchitettura ... net quale si tatta di diverse formi détempi sacri secondo il costume chris- tiano, & al modo antico. Kalian text with French translation by Jean Martin. Paris, Mich. de Vasco- san, 1547. Libro Extraordinario: Extmontinario libro di architettura nel quale si dimostrano trenta porte di opera rustica mista... Lyons, Jean de Tournes, 1551; Venice, Fratelli Sessa, 1557. Book VII: Il settimo libro darchitettura ... ne! quae si tatta di rmolti accidenti che possono occorrereallarchitetio Italian-Latin edition, Frankfurt, Andrea Wech- clus, 1575. Book VE; Sesto libro. Delle habitationi di tutti"ti gradi degli homini. MS in Staatsbibliothek, Miinchen, pub- lished 1966; MS at Avery Library, Columbia Uni- versity, published 1978, uyBook Vil: Della castrametatione di Polio ricotta in una citta- della murata, MS Staatsbibliothek, Munchen, never completely published. As indicated in this outline, Books [-II appeared simultaneously in Italian and French. Most of the several “books” of Serlio's manual were translated into French, German, and even Flemish soon after they appeared in print, unmistakable evidence of Serlids popular success north of the Alps. This wide audience for Serlio's ideas and images is equally evident from the fact that Serlio's several folio vol- umes were soon supplanted by handier cumulative editions. As carly as 1566, the Venetian printer Francesco deFranceschi published an edition of Books I-V along with the Libro Extraordinavio in a single quarto volume. Giovanni Domenico Scamozzi subsequently pub- lished the same books along with the recently published Book, Vil, an edition printed no fewer than four times in Venice between 1584 land 1619. Scamozzi mis-labeled the Libro as Book VI (which was, as we have seen, not published until relatively recently) and his fate- ful mistake introduced an abiding spectre that still haunts Serlio bibliography. The Beinecke Library has recently acquired a suite of Serlio's “books”: a single vellum-bound folio containing the second edition of Serlic’s Book IV (“with new additions," Venice, 1540) and the first editions of Books III (1545), III (1540) and V (154;).® This volume (Fig, 1) was exhibited among the Library’s more noteworthy “recent acquisitions” in 1995. Having acquired in 1973 a copy of Serlio’s Libro Extraordinari in its first Venetian edition (1557), Bemecke now owns contemporary editions of all the “books” published during the architect's lifetime. The Beinecke copy of Books I-V is remarkably clean, with no reader's marks, marginalia, or other evidence of ownership except the single discrete stamp and pencilled-in call number of a public library that formerly owned the volume. No further indications of provenance being present, we can say disappointingly little about the volume's earlier migrations. ‘The present vellum binding probably dates from the sixteenth cen- tury, to judge by the material and the rubbed and barely legible hand- written title on the spine, of which only the world “arquitectura” is easily deciphered. Even if the binding is contemporary, it cannot be original, since we know that Books I-II were only published in tandem, bound together in a single volume and continuously pagi- 87G rO)) Fig. 1. Serio, Book IV (Second edition, Venice, 540). Frontispiece nated, Book II without a title page." It is tempting—and not at all un- reasonable—to speculate that the first owner of the present Beinecke volume acquired all five books and had them bound as a complete set in 1547 or soon thereafter. Serlio's manual has been called “the first treatise on modern archi- tecture independent of the Vitruvian text” And indeed it could scarcely represent more of a departure from the tradition of Alberti and his successors, all of whom worked more or less in the shadow of Vitruvius’ great Augustan treatise, De architectuma Libri X—the sole classical treatise on art or architecture to survive into modern times. 119Serlio's “treatise” stands out in the several respects suggested already: ‘Composed in the vernaculay, it was translated into the major Euro- pean languages as it appeared over several installments; its peda- gogical intent and method were supremely visual and pragmatic, de- pending far more upon illustration than text; and it was published as a series of independent units, each devoted to a specific topic. The parts were—and, arguably, were intended to be—more than the whole. Serlio owed his initial—and immediate—intemnational reputation to Book IV, devoted to the orders, and regarded Book IV as “more necessary than the others for understanding the different styles of buildings, and their decoration’~ pitt necessario de gi altri per la cognt- tione delle differenti maniere de gli edificij, & de loro ornamenti**—a re- mark which sheds light on his decision to publish it out of sequence and ahead of the other “books.” It opens with Serli’s austere image of the five orders as he conceived them: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corin- thian, and Composite (Fig. 2). This magnificent illustration was clearly intended to speak for itself, aided only by laconic texts iden- tifying the respective orders and the strict arithmetic relationships of columns and pedestals to one another. In layout and design, Book IV recalls earlier Renaissance treatises on architecture, offering a range of illustrations, some of which, like his introductory image of the orders, were full-page and others combined text and image on the same page. Ground plans and elevations of individual columns alternate with fagades drawn in orthogonal projection. With this book—with this image~Serlio introduced and codified his system of proportion with a rigidity absent from previous discu: sions of the orders. His own repeated bows to the freedom and “ cense" of the architect could do little to mitigate the rigidity of these rules, nor could his own unusually vivid appreciation of regional vari- ations in architectural style. The three classical orders were, of course, long familiar in Italy, thanks especially to Vitruvius and Alberti. Serlio made them a subject of compelling interest and im- portance throughout the rest of Europe. By publishing his study of the orders separately and in advance of the rest of his manual, Serlio initiated a tradition which gave rise to a seemingly endless number of volumes on the orders—especially in Northern Europe in the six- teenth century—volumes which often reduced architectural theory virtually to the theory and use of the orders. Serlio devoted each of his subsequent installments to a different topic. Book IIL, published in 1540, is dedicated to the antiquities of Rome, In what has been described as “the first coherent publication,Fig, 2 Sertio, Book IV (second edition, Venice, 1540). The Five Orders (fol. I), ‘on classical architecture/”® Serlio proposes to illustrate the most im- portant examples of Roman architecture in such a fashion that the reader “holding my book in hand’~togliendo questo mio libro in mano— will be able to visualize these ancient buildings as they originally appeared, despite their present state of ruination.'* To this end Serlio ‘employs not only the familiar ground plans, elevations, and orthog- onal exterior studies, but also drawings of interior spaces in perspec- tive as well a interior cross sections drawn in orthogonal projection,‘At times, as in his illustrations of the Pantheon, Serlio carefully places these several types of illustrations on separate folios, while in other instances he combines them on the same page. Serlio's cross sections have been called the first such sections in a printed architec- tural manual,”” and itis hard to avoid the conclusion that they reflect the architect's own initial training as a perspective painter. Indeed Serlio himself later justified his employment of the perspective view by stating that most architects of his own century had been trained, like himself, as painters."* This painterly approach to architectural illustration is nowhere more evident than in the beautiful frontis- piece to Book Ill, designed, one must assume, by the architect him- self, and which offers not merely an illustration of his method but, according to one eminent art historian, an allegorical commentary upon the fundamental theme of the book (Fig. 3)” ‘Books I and II, published in a single volume in 1545, during Serlio's sojourn in France at the court of Francis I, included parallel French translations. Devoted, respectively, to geometry and perspective, they are consistent in layout and manner of illustration with Book I With Book V, published in 1547 and dedicated to centrally planned churches, Serlio began to place scales on all his ground plans, a prac- tice he had previously eschewed. ‘The later evolution of Serlio's style of illustration cannot be further explored here, and in any case can only be recenstructed specula- tively, since Book VII (a sampler with designs for villas, palaces, ‘windows, and restorations of medieval houses) was only published posthumously in 1575, and Books VI (devoted to domestic architec- ture) and VIII (on military architecture) remained unknown until our ‘time. Rosenfeld argues on the basis of Serlio's surviving manuscripts that the architect's years in France saw a fundamental change in his style of illustration and book design. Serlio, she suggests, introduced and standardized a rigorous separation of text and illustration, antic pated already in the so-called Libro Extraordinario of 1551, a pattern book containing fifty designs for portals; she further proposes that in Book VI, Serlio envisioned a volume with text and associated image on facing pages.” Serlio's books enjoyed enormous success throughout Europe even during the architects lifetime, and this is especially true of his adopted country, France. Books I and I of his manual frst appeared in a bilingual quarto edition featuring a French translation by Jean Martin, famous for his remarkable translations of Vitruvius, Alberti, and of the famous Aldine Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499~the lastFig. 3. Serlo, Book IT (Venice, 1540). Frontispine of the great incunabula but the firs illustrated architectural book. ‘Through the agency of Martin’s translations, Serlio helped initiate the great French tradition of architectural writing, French architec- tural writers. were uniformly appreciative of Serlio's contribution, even Philibert Delorme—who succeeded Serlio as architect of the realm—paying generous tribute to his precursor in his own infiuen- tial writings. Serlio’s popular success endured for the better part of two hundred years. With its acquisition of a complete set of Serlios first five “books,” the Beinecke has filed a significant gap in its collection of early 133treatises on art and architecture. Students of the book arts, of the his- tory and theory of architecture, and of the contribution of the printed book to the spread of Italian Renaissance culture will find them richly rewarding. 2, Leon Batista Albert, On the At of Buitdg en Bots, tensated rm the Latin by Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 98). p. 287 (Book VI, See tn 9). 7 Por a bibliography of "Renaisance Architectural Tease and Architectural ‘Books see John Bury coda to Ls tates archer de la Revaeanc, ed Jean Ca Inume (Pass: ard 1988), pp. 485-03. Let us hope the Beinecke curators will use this handy checlst fll it the gaps that remain S, John Onians has recently wate that "Serio has never bee tested seriously” (Weare of Meng The Casi Order in Antiquity the Mle Age. and the Revatsaee [Psinceton: Princeton Univesty Press 686), p 261), Te frequently sai thatthe st ‘moder scholar fo take Serio seriously wa telateG.C. Agen ("Sebostano Sern” Love 3 [spl 185-99, an essay reprinted In a volume of the thors esnaysentiled CGlasie nicest Rincon de Bross «Brace (Mil eleinel, 1984), 'p.290-35). But Argan took hs xe fom ulus von Sehosse, who devoted several {ince pages to Serio in his classic historical and bibliographies survey ofthe Iter Sure ofa and archtectuse, Di Kinstiteratar (Vienna: Sel, 192), pp 361-6. The ‘ost upsto-date edition of Schlosser is a tecent French version, Le imbue atte {Gan Flammarion, 204), which has updated bibliographies (or Seri, ace Pp ‘fovan bute rddled with cron, see tis waters review inthe Burington Magee “55 Gee: 7884. To this day there ts no extn edition of Sei’ writings “for ths aspect of Selo aon ose most ecentiy Myra N, Rosenfeld, “Sebastiano setiss Conibution to the Creation of the Moder lutrated Architectural Marl” 2 paper delivered at» sympesivi on Serio and published In Staten Serio: sexo Somitriinerasonale storia decir (Milans Het, 98), pp 102-10 3 See Deborah Howard, "Sebastiano Serle Ventian Copyrights Burlington Maga sine us io) ue, The Metopaltan Museum of At owns copies ofall ine engra ings in theft sate ©, “trovandom di continuo n questa solitudine d Fontainebeau, dove sono pia ‘ete, che huomin (Serle, ibm Extardinai (ence, ss fo. Az). yy HAW, Kel, Wistar of Avner Theory from Wis to the Present (New ‘ork Princeton Areitecaral Pres, 1090) 7s "2: One gts sense ofthe tl of these distoveres from what i il he standard survey of "The Literary Remains of Sebastiano Serio” an ate of that tie by ‘Nii B.Dinsmoor, published inthe Art Buln a i943) 5-93, 5s. The Avery Library manuscript of Book VI was eventually published in facsimile as Ststiao Serio on Domestic Achiteture, with text by Myra N. Rosenelé (Boston Architectural History Foundation, r7e. The Munich manuscript wae published as Sea fo dale stations gro dag Iuomin edited by Mt Rose2 vos. (Milan: TTEC, 198) The Munich MS of Book Vill (Staatsbiblsnek Cod. Team. 90) ls the subject ct’ dissertation by June Janson, Setutons Serio Tree m Aiitary Archteure eva sos 10, Purchased onthe Edwin J Beinecke Fund and briefly noted ine Unversity Lubary Gate yo (October 1995) 92: "1A copy noteworthy for fe plows confemporay (sevntenth-century?)anno- tions whit incude captions to Seri lustabons and independent skehes, pe Suiably the work of an architect or student of achtetare. ‘a, There ie some evidence that he fist eon of Book TI and the second edition of Book TV, published respectively in March and February sso, were also usually {Ssued in thi fashion, See ohn Bury “Serko: Some Biographical Notes i Set oo Seri: st seminar, pp. 020 "3. Dora Wisbengon, welling in Arcistral Theory and Price from Albert Le 124dows, and ed, (New York: Architectural Publications, 198), p. 2, This fs the exelent Catalogue of an exhibition the itinerary of which included Sterling Memorial Library (Ue March-3: May 1983) 14. Book IV (Second edition, Venice, 1540), fol 11% 15, Kru, History, . 26. 26, Book Ml (Venice, 1540), fli 17. Rosenfeld, "Contebution,”p. sos 28, “consideremo un poco git architeti del secolo nostri (Book [Venice, 154] fo. 3) 19. Christof Thoenes, “Prolusione: Serlo la trattatistica” in Seastian Selo: esto sominari, pp. af 20. Rosenfeld, “Contribution,” pp. 105-08, 135