Francesca Salatin. An Introduction to Fra Giocondo's Vitruvius (1511)

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Francesca Salatin
An Introduction to Fra Giocondo's Vitruvius (1511)

Fig. 1) Frontispiece of Fra Giocondo's edition of Vitruvius' De architectura (1511).
Source: http://architectura.cesr.univ-tours.fr/Traite/Images/CESR_2994Index.asp

[N.B. On Vitruvius see in this blog also: Vitruvius, On Architecture, Edited by Pierre Gros. Translation and Commentary by Antonio Corso and Elisa Romano. Essays by Maria Losito, Turin, Einaudi, 1997; Giovanni Mazzaferro, Rare Books and a Great Discovery: a Specimen of Vitruvius' De Architectura Annotated by Cosimo Bartoli; El Greco. The miracle of naturalness. The artistic thought of El Greco through the margin notes to Vitruvius and Vasari. Edited by Fernando Marías and José Riello, Rome, Castelvecchi, 2017; The Annotations by Guillaume Philandrier on Vitruvius' De Architectura. Books I to IV. Edited by Frédérique Lemerle, Paris, Piccard, 2000; Marco Vitruvio Pollione's Architecture, translated and commented by the Marquis Berardo Galiani. Foreword by Alessandro Pierattini (unabriged reprint of Naples edition, 1790), Rome, Editrice Librerie Dedalo, 2005; Claude Perrault, Les Dix Livres d’Architecture de Vitruve, Corrigez et traduitz nouvellement en françois avec des notes et des figures, Paris, Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1673; Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture. The Corsini Incunabulum with the annotations and autograph drawings of Giovanni Battista da Sangallo. Edited by Ingrid D. Rowland, Edizioni dell’Elefante, 2003; Massimo Mussini, Francesco di Giorgio e Vitruvio. Le traduzioni del 'De architectura' nei codici Zichy, Spencer 129 e Magliabechiano II.I.141, Leo S. Olschki, 2003; Francesco di Giorgio Martini, La traduzione del De Architectura di Vitruvio. A cura di Marco Biffi, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 2002; Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Il "Vitruvio Magliabechiano". A cura di Gustina Scaglia, Gonnelli editore, 1985.]


PREMISE

Francesca Salatin, a lecturer at the IUAV University of Venice, has for some time been studying the Renaissance editions of Vitruvius' De architectura. I asked her to present here the version of the work published in 1511 by Fra Giocondo (on which she wrote her degree thesis in 2009). I am extremely grateful for the text she has prepared for this blog.

Giovanni Mazzaferro 

*** 

In 1511 the Venetian publisher Giovanni Tacuino published M. Vitruvius per Iocundum solito castigatior factus cum figuris et tabula ut iam legi et intelligi possit (M. Vitruvius, made purposely more comprehensible than it is usual, thanks to figures and tables, in order it would be possible to read and understand it): it was the first illustrated edition of Vitruvius’ De architectura. Fra Giocondo (Brother Giocondo), the architect and humanist from Verona who curated the work, was animated by various interests, which urged him to seek a full understanding of the Vitruvian treaty [1]. 

The figure of Fra Giocondo must first of all be examined within the Venetian culture, architecture and politics of the early 1500s: circles with which the friar confronted himself after being named Consilii X Maximus architectus (The Principal Architect of the Council of the Ten) on his return from France. Although the arrival of Fra Giocondo was dictated by reasons of practical urgency, that is to say the worsening of the lagoon’s interment, his presence became the keystone for the translation into architecture of the project of renovation of the city (Renovatio Urbis) proper to the cultural elite close to future Doge Andrea Gritti. The architectural result of Giocondo's influence in Venice were the projects that were undertaken in the Rialto area at the beginning of the century, in particular the reconstruction of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Headquarters of the Germans), whose layout closely resembled an engraving of the Vitruvius edition [2]. 

Cultivating different fields of study and developing a multiplicity of skills, the friar managed to unify in his work the two strands of research where he had achieved most distinguished results until then: on the one hand the antiquarian-philological exploration and on the other the practical-operative execution. Indeed, Fra Giocondo accomplished a more correct Latin text than in previous editions, accompanied by a rich xylographic apparatus - 136 incisions distributed in all ten books - and with the addition of an index that facilitated its understanding, as stated since title. It was a real turning point in Vitruvian studies. On the one hand, thanks to the completion of the text’s gaps, the work was addressed to the world of humanists. On the other hand, through the straightforwardness and immediacy of the engravings, it also aimed at an audience with the most genuinely operational needs.

For Venice, a city which had barred ancient architecture so far, this was the first act of a transformation that would lead, in a short span of years, to be an international Vitruvian pole, a centre of attraction for amateurs and architects, competitive also compared to Rome.

In the history of the fortune of De architectura, Fra Giocondo's text represented an indispensable turning point, revolutionary for the new type of cognitive and unitary practical interest with which the friar approached Vitruvius: the need to provide a text that would be widely comprehensible and usable brought him to make philologically unorthodox interventions that, however, produced exegeses accepted by later critics.

If the sophisticated method of philological amendment followed by Giocondo was brought to light and carefully analysed by Ciapponi [1], rare and disorganized contributions have instead been dedicated so far to the xylographs, a true graphic commentary to the text. A two-fold analysis of the edition of Giovanni Tacuino, which therefore reserves equal dignity and space to the philological and illustrative and didactic aspects, assigns to Giocondo’s illustrative apparatus a decisive role for his editorial fortune of the work, as reiterated by the reissues of 1513, 1522 and 1523.

The 1511 version of Vitruvius should also be appreciated as an editorial operation, taking into consideration the typographical activity of the publisher Giovanni Tacuino in the field of Venetian culture and publishing activity at the turn of the sixteenth century. This Trino-born printer accomplished a variegated production: alongside the mainly Latin classics, he also prepared works on religious and moral themes. Most probably, the production in the vernacular language, directed at the larger public and without any particular pretensions as to the layout, eventually guaranteed him the economic basis necessary to carry out elaborate productions of classical texts.

The cultural itinerary undertaken by Giocondo in choosing the publisher is in line with an analysis of the political climate that overwhelmed the publishing industry in the years around 1511, with particular reference to Aldo Manutius's activity.

Aldo and Giocondo had a close relationship: in November 1508 Manuzio published the Epistulae (Letters) of Pliny the Younger together with Giulio Ossequente. They were the results of a discovery in the Parisian years of the friar and a collation of texts to which Jiano Lascaris certainly participated, but which could also have involved the French writer Guillaume Budé. This was followed in April 1509 by De Conjuratione Catilinae (The Catiline Conspiracy), for which Aldo used two Parisian codes transmitted by Giocondo and Lascaris, and in 1517 the posthumous edition of the Epigrammata (Epigrams) by Martial, also published «Venetijs in aedibus Aldi et Andreae Soceri» (in the Venetian publishing house of Aldo and Andrea Manuzio). Manutius also secured the friar's help after the latter had already left for Rome: to testify it is the letter of 2 August 1514, addressed by Giocondo to Aldo, and discussing with a French Nonius Marcellus the De re rustica (On agriculture) and the Cornucopiae (Abundance), both published in 1513. In the same year, the Commentaries of Caesar, dedicated to Giuliano de' Medici and accompanied by various xylographs, were also brought out. One of them, the Pictura totius Galliae was probably inspired by an ancient manuscript, perhaps the same one that Poggio Bracciolini had seen in Paris.

In the years immediately preceding and following the Vitruvius prints (1509-1512), Manuzio's flourishing company found itself at the mercy of political events which weakened the Serenissima substantially. The battle of Agnadello decided the fate of the war and brought about the ruin of the Venetian mainland state, and the defeat of Bartolomeo d'Alviano, patron of Aldo. The enture printing industry remained entangled in a convulsive regression mechanism: Aldo abandoned Venice, leaving his company in the hands of Andrea Torresani, while about twenty other establishments still in business were producing only about fifty editions a year. On the one hand, this explains why Giocondo did not use the establishment of his friend and collaborator Aldo for the printing of his Vitruvius, on the other hand these events clarify the importance which a publishing event of this kind could have, for its author, for the publisher and for the entire city. The printing of the first Vitruvius and its illustration by the person who could be defined as the State architect might in fact be read - with the due proportions - as another sign of Venice’s recovery after the War of the League of Cambrai; in the architectural field, indeed, the same could be said about the contemporaneous interventions in the buildings of the Procuratie vecchie in St Mark’s Square. The Republic had already identified itself in Giocondo, who "could be called the second edificator of Venice" (Scipione Maffei) given his commitment to counteract the interment of the lagoon. In a period of obvious difficulties, thanks to him Venice could now claim the primacy in the edition of a work which obtained an international consensus, as the subsequent editions did show, also because it attempted to reach a vast public without excessive typographic refinements. This may also explain the dedication of the work to Julius II, although devoid of political references: Giocondo, who had shown his political orientation by alerting from France the Venetian Republic about the papacy's conspiracies against the Republic, in 1511 dedicated his Vitruvius to the "blessed Julius II Pontifex Maximus". This may have either been an act of gratitude from a religious to the Pope or the sign of the resumption of cordial relations between Venice and the pontifical seat, after the establishment, in that same year, of the Holy League.

When the Vitruvius’s edition of 1511 was printed, Giocondo was almost eighty years old. His work mirrored the interests and skills he had matured over a lifetime. Despite the optimism shown by Brenzoni in tracing a biographical profile of the friar [4], about his life we do know nothing for the first fifty years. This gap on his most formative years represents one of the greatest difficulties in approaching a man who, as already mentioned, displayed over the years an intense activity both in the philological-epigraphic and in the technical-artistic fields. Even if the documents became quite frequent starting from the Neapolitan stay, the five years between November 1493, when the friar was in Naples, and 1498, the year in which his presence was documented in France at the service of Charles VIII, have remained a temporal arc that lies in the shadows. These were crucial years because the idea of ​​publishing Vitruvius must have taken shape here: the comparison between the code V. 318 of the National Library of France, - probably annotated by Guillaume Budé during the Vitruvian lessons held in Paris - and the Vatican equivalent (Inc. II. 556) with notes by hand from Jano Lascaris, testifies to a work already largely outlined [5]. The incunabula represent an exceptional proof of the team work which helped the 1511 edition come to life.

It was the prologue of a story that would be eventually fulfilled in Venice, where Giocondo carried out - again - the purpose of sharing and transmitting knowledge. That purpose characterized him throughout his life and was reaffirmed in the plea to the Council of the Ten: «I am offering to teach all what I know to three, four, or how many people this most illustrious Lordship may wish.»

NOTES

[1] About Fra Giocondo, I would like to recommend at least: P.N. Pagliara, Vitruvio da testo a canone, in Memoria dell'antico nell'arte, iii, Dalla tradizione all'archeologia, edited by S. Settis, Turin, Einaudi, 1984, pp. 32-38 and Giovanni Giocondo umanista, architetto e antiquario, edited by P. Gros, P. N. Pagliara, Venice, Marsilio, 2014.

[2] M. Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento, Turin, Einaudi, 1985, pp. 24-78; D. Calabi, P. Morachiello, Rialto : le fabbriche e il ponte 1514-1591, Turin, Einaudi, 1987; E. Concina, Fondaci : architettura, arte e mercatura tra Levante, Venezia e Alemagna, Venice, Marsilio, 1997, pp. 152-180; D. Calabi, Il Fondaco degli Alemanni, la chiesa di San Bartolomeo e il contesto mercantile, in La chiesa di San Bartolomeo, cit., pp. 113-127; La chiesa di San Salvador, storia arte teologia, edited by G. Guidarelli, Saonara, Il Prato, 2009, in part. pp. 5-27.

[3] L.A. Ciapponi, Fra Giocondo da Verona and His Edition of Vitruvius, «Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes», XLVII, 1984, pp. 72-90.

[4] R. Brenzoni, Fra Giovanni Giocondo veronese, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 1960.

[5] F. Salatin, Tra Francia e Venezia. Fra’ Giocondo, Giano Lascaris e Il Vitruvio del 1511, in «Studi Veneziani», LXXII (2015), pp.247-511.