CHAPTER VIII — Critical Commentary & Notes

Where Columns Most Duly Made by the Ancients and Moderns Are Found Today in Italy, Critique of Leon Battista Alberti, and the Most Perfect Column in Venice at the Ca’ Grande (Frari).

Historical & Mathematical Commentary

  • Pacioli Living with Leon Battista Alberti in Rome under Pope Paul II (1470–1471): This chapter contains the sole primary testimony that the young Luca Pacioli (born c. 1447), upon arriving in Rome around 1470–1471 during the pontificate of the Venetian Pope Paul II (Pietro Barbo, r. 1464–1471), lived for many months as a guest in the Roman house of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) right up to the eve of Alberti's death!

  • Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Model for Poggio Reale in Naples: Pacioli also gives an eyewitness report from his stay in Naples (c. 1489) that Lorenzo the Magnificent personally crafted an architectural model and sent it to Giuliano da Maiano (1432–1490) for King Ferrante and Duke Alfonso of Calabria’s celebrated Villa of Poggio Reale (Dogliuolo).

  • Brunelleschi’s Architecture in Florence and the Column at the Frari in Venice: Pacioli singles out Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce, Santo Spirito, and San Lorenzo as the supreme modern realizations of Vitruvian symmetry, and directs his pupils to measure the ancient column resting on an inverted capital in the second cloister of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (*la Ca’ Grande*) in Venice.

Constantin Winterberg’s Commentary (1889 Edition)

  • Winterberg Footnote 1 (Arch. Cap. VIII, p. 313): Namely, the monolithic twisted columns (scil. Säulen) in St. Peter’s in Rome, said to have been brought from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. (Winterberg Fussnote 1 (Arch. Cap. VIII, S. 313): scil. Säulen.)

Philological and Folio Apparatus

  • 1509 Paganini Witness Folios: 0074, 0075 (f. 29v–f. 30r)

  • Winterberg 1889 Italian Source: winterberg/02_architectura_italian/008_cap_VILI.txt

  • Winterberg 1889 German Source: winterberg/04_architectura_german/008_cap_VIII.txt

  • Marginal Woodcut Diagrams: 0 figure(s) extracted from the 1509 Venice witness.