Vitruvius Pollio, Ist. cent. B.C.: Ten Books on Architecture:

The Corsini Incunabulum
with the annotations and autograph drawings
of Giovanni Battista da Sangallo

Edited, with an introductory essay, by Ingrid D. Rowland
Published in Rome under the auspices of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei
by Edizioni dell’Elefante, 2003

One bound volume
(64p., [127] leaves of plates : ill. ; 32 cm)

Facsimile reprint of the MS Corsini 50.F.1
ISBN 88-7176-097-2

Available at Euro 200.00

This outstanding work reproduces a copy of the first printed edition of the ten books on architecture by the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius which originally belonged to the Florentine architect Giovanni Battista da Sangallo (1496-1548). Vitruvius’s treatise was published for the first time in print, probably in 1486, by Giovanni Sulpizio da Veroli, professor of grammar at the University of Rome Studium Urbis. Sulpizio opted for an edition with ample margins and blank pages for the corrections and drawings which he invited readers to formulate in order to “help to create the most faithful and complete version possible” of the great an-cient Roman architect’s work. Sangallo - who more than once rebound his own copy of the text to include extra interleaves, subsequently placing the pages in the wrong order and moving one fascicule of drawings from its proper place in Book V to the end of the volume - filled the book with notes, corrections, a partial transla-tion (sometimes incorrect) of the Latin text into Tuscan vernacular and more than eighty pages of his own architectural drawings, sketches and plans. Known as the Corsini Incunabulum, MS 50.F.1, the volume is of exceptional interest in that it represents a form of dialogue between two exceptional architects, each working on the same project (Rome) but temporally separated by fifteen centuries.

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