Vincenzo Scamozzi - Popular 2-volume Book On Architecture

Popular 2-volume Book On Architecture

Scamozzi's influence spread far beyond his Italian commissions through his treatise, L’Idea dell’Architettura Universale ("The Idea of Universal Architecture"), which is the last of the Renaissance works on the theory of architecture. It was published with woodcut illustrations at Venice in 1615. Scamozzi depended for sections of his treatment of Vitruvius on Daniele Barbaro's commentary, published in 1556 with illustrations by Palladio; he also discussed issues of building practice. Such treatises were becoming a vehicle for self-promotion. Scamozzi knew the value of publicity distributed through the established channels of the book trade and he included many of his own plans and elevations, as built, as they should have been built, and as idealized projects.

Previously, his first book had been a quickly cobbled together illustrated commentary on the ruins of Rome, assembled in "the space of a few of days," according to his preface, and the woodcut images were stock productions that already existed. Over half were copied from a volume by Hieronymus Cock that appeared in the 1550s.

His major book came out too late to influence his own success; he died the following year. Scamozzi's practice is as much the source of the neo-Palladian architecture that was introduced by Inigo Jones as Andrea Palladio's own example. Rudolf Wittkower called him "the intellectural father of neo-classicism".