L'Idea della Architettura

Vincenzo Scamozzi

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most important of Palladio's immediate followers, Vincenzo Scamozzi not only published an influential architectural treatise but also designed some outstanding villas. One of these, Rocco Pisani near Lonigo (1576), was meant to improve upon the Villa Rotonda, which Scamozzi completed after Palladio's death. Much involved with the codification of architectural principles and academic-theoretical detail, Scamozzi published here his version of the diagram of the "Vitruvian Man," which had such a strong appeal for the Renaissance architect and is familiar to us in the image drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. The diagram, showing a man with extended hands and feet fitting exactly within the circle and the square, was meant to demonstrate the ideal proportion of the human figure as it relates to the two most perfect geometric forms and, ultimately, to the universe. Demonstrating the reason why all architects should pattern their work accordingly, this concept of ideal human proportion, or divina proportione, was indeed applied in Renaissance villa design.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art