Vitruvius

Vitruvius (about 80-70 BCE to after 15 BCE) was a Roman architect and military engineer. Under Julius Caesar he built siege weapons such as the ballista, a machine that hurled bolts or stones. His De architectura, ten books dedicated to the emperor Augustus, is the only major book on architecture to survive from classical antiquity.

The books cover town planning, building materials, temples and the column orders, public buildings, houses, water supply, sundials and machines. Vitruvius wrote that a building must have firmitas, utilitas and venustas: strength, usefulness and beauty. He related the proportions of temples to those of the human body, which he said could fit inside both a circle and a square. Leonardo da Vinci drew that figure about 1490; the drawing is known as the Vitruvian Man.

The only building Vitruvius is known to have worked on is a basilica, a Roman hall for law courts and business, completed in 19 BCE at Fano on Italy's Adriatic coast. Its foundations were found in Fano's Piazza Andrea Costa in January 2026. The humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a manuscript of the treatise at the abbey of Saint Gall in 1414, and the first printed edition appeared in Rome in 1486.