Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (review)

A corpse is what's left, after all is said and done, of a person. A corpus is what's left of a person's creative work, whether writer, artist, architect, composer, or philosopher. The largest and most unfathomable corpus is the universe. Because human thought is constructed in body-image, the universe itself must be for us a body. But whose work is the universal corpus and with what materials was it made? Creation established the conditions for creativity (Empedocles held that earth, air, fire, and water, like colors on an artist's palette, could be mixed to make all things). But for the world to achieve order, it took humans to create architecture, cities, empires. The Romans apparently saw matters this way. Cato took agriculture out of the gods' hands and turned it over to farmers. Vitruvius made man the measure of all things: De architectura associates architecture with the human body—building as corpus, city as corpus, and the empire as the corpus of Augustus. Vitruvian Man, as we know him from the most famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, is humanity with outstretched arms, legs spread, forming at the extremities a balanced secular square that fits ideally within the perfect cosmic circle.

No one to my knowledge has more thoroughly explored the meaning of Vitruvian Man than Indra McEwen. With exceptional analytic skill monitoring a dauntless imagination, she contends that Vitruvius's purpose in writing what he called "the whole body of architecture" was to show that the new order of Augustan world domination was essentially a building program. The body image of Augustus was to radiate outward to the dimensions of the universal empire and shape an ordererd, secular world ideally fitted to the cosmic circle. McEwen's book is unprecedented in classical studies, constructing Vitruvius's relevance for his time and well into the eighteenth century.