The Ten Books on Architecture

Written by a Roman architect and engineer and dedicated to the emperor Augustus, these ten books cover everything a builder of the ancient world needed to know: the education of architects, materials, temples and the classical orders, theatres, houses, water supply, sundials and machines of war. A building, Vitruvius says, must be solid, useful and beautiful.

It is the only complete work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and when it was rediscovered in the Renaissance it shaped buildings across Europe. Its description of the proportions of the human body inspired Leonardo's famous drawing of the Vitruvian Man; see The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (c. 80–15 BC) was a Roman architect and military engineer who built siege machines for Julius Caesar's armies. In later life, with a pension from the emperor Augustus, he wrote a treatise on everything he knew about building, the only complete work on architecture to survive from antiquity.

The Ten Books on Architecture cover materials, temples, houses, water, machines and city planning, and teach that good buildings must be strong, useful and beautiful. Rediscovered in the fifteenth century, the book shaped Renaissance architecture and inspired Leonardo da Vinci.